Hold your nose and vote for Kevin.

How hard can it be ? (As the awful Jeremy Clarkson would say.) The Labor party has been  in poll free-fall since they dumped Kevin Rudd and every twist and turn that the conspirators have tried since has just accelerated the decline.
They had a leader who was relatively popular (with the voters that is, remeber them?) He managed despite some personal eccentricities to deliver a long overdue apology to the Aboriginal people and to shepherd our economy through the GFC leaving us in the strongest possible position with an economy and living standard that is well ahead of just about everywhere else on the planet. Norway may be doing better but who wants to live there?
So Rudd had some leadership faults, was a bit of a control freak and lost the plot and listened to bad advice when the climate change summit turned out to be a waste of time. The peope who gave him the bad advice had their own agendas. He's no doubt learned from it. Maybe he'll be a better leader the second time around. Menzies and Howard most certainly were. He could hardly be worse than what we have now.
They should bring him back and bring him back now. He'll have a few scores to settle. Good. There needs to be some major blood letting. It will be like Octavian dealing with Brutus and Cassius et al. Not pretty but all good fun.
After the bloodshed and with the budget in surplus there will be an election. He might or might not win but he won't lose like Julia is going to lose. If they stick with their present game plan they will probably not see the Speakers right profile again for a very long time.

Queensland election

Yes he is a short person. It's a cliche but sometimes, as they say, a good cliche really hits the nail on the head. So Queensland now has a complete dickhead for a Premier. It won't be all that unfamiliar will it? When he was mayor of Brisbane one of his more startling achievements was to take the lovely green and shady town hall square and turn it into a hot box of dazzling white paving with not a tree in sight. This is the sort of development we can presumably see for the rest of Queensland with can-do campbell. No capitals intended. The size of his majority means that until the next election he's going to think that he can do ANYTHING and he's unfortunately probably correct.
I think the size of his win also reflects an unprecedented volatility in the electorate, particularly among the old  Labor vote. They see an ALP without true believers and why would anyone vote for that. The trade union base disappearing is only a part of it and it isn't to do with the end of the cold war either. Labor was never about what we were against, it was about what we were for. Now it appears that we have neither.
Oh for a leader with convictions and opinions (of their own, not as derived from focus groups).

Bob Carr for PM

No I don't think it's going to happen. But doesn't the Fairfax press want it to! Last weekend the papers were as good as they will ever get. Full of praise for a political leader who can actually speak in complete sentences and in fact can string together several at a time. More than several in fact. I hear Bob talking to that inner city trendoid Richard Glover last week and he went on at such length and with such erudition that he put me in mind of the great Gough.
The Spectator had a good cartoon showing Bob in yankee civil war uniform taking careful aim and shoting himself through the foot. A reference to the misjudged comment about political instability in New Guinea. Bob's response to that was to say "yes, that was a mistake". Now why didn't some genius suggest that turn of phrase to Gillard or Abbott?
He's very fit, more qualified for the job than anyone in the caucus and demonstrably electable over Abbott but the haters in the caucus won't let it happen. Nothing is going to stop little Bill.

I'm back

Hi folks,
Or to be more accurate is anybody out there?
I'm back to blogging after a long absence due to having better things to do. I have been reabilitated after my illness and am back trying to be a school Principal again, now at Terrigal Public School. In the great game of educarion snakes and ladders I have finally landed on the BIG LADDER and in very timely fashion too.
Terrigal is a beautiful spot and everyone in the school from the smallest child to the grumpiest old bloke on the staff  (guess who) know it and feel good to be here every day. So far I've only missed about two morning coffees at the surf club and this morning I even got a second one for free.

A Solution to Branch Stacking???

In his excellent BLOG Bob Carr has floated the idea of US style Primaries as part of a reform package for the ALP in NSW. I think it is a great idea. Read Simon Schama's excellent and optimistic book "The American Future". His description of the Iowa Caucuses is inspiring. Of course every US state does not have primaries and those that do conduct them in a variety of ways and the rules governng delegates to conventions also vary widely. But the concept of all voters in an electorate voting in a preselection ballot for a party's candidate to go forward to the general election is an attractive one.
In the NSW ALP what is meant to happen is that every branch member in an electorate who has been financial for at least two years and has attended three branch meeting in the last 12 months gets a vote in the preselection. fine in theory. But sometimes head office decides to not have a preselection if it is going to produce the "wrong" result. Of course it's much neater if you have a well funded machine like the Terrigals who can "join up" a few hundred new members. It's not new, it used to be that you got everyone from your local union or church group to join up. They tried to address that by making membership expensive but I believe that it just drove good people away.
I worked as a scrutineer in some funny preselections. One included an entire branch where every member eligible to vote had the same surname and there were HEAPS of them. There were about three addresses between a fifteen or more of them.
They were also all completely genuine and eligible to vote but the scrutineers for the Left candidate examined them closely. No harm mentioning their name, the Goulds of Croydon and a more decent bunch you could not hope to meet. No relation to Bobby Gould the Newtown bookseller, a sincere socialist leftie in those days but another good bloke though.
In one preselection (for a seat  that we won in Wran's '76) the Left were particularly scrutinising the credentials of everyone in the Concord-West/Rhodes branch assuming (we reckoned wrongly) that they would all vote for the branch President who eventually won the seat. Is that their signature in the attendance book? ,have they signed the pledge book with the correct date? etc. etc. I argued over every on but conceeded them three and let them knock those ones out. Those were the three that we reckoned were going to vote for the Lefts candidate. If only all the opponents had been that dumb.
Happy days but as Peter Fitz will tell you, it was a simpler time.

Curse the minor parties

This mornings Sydney Morning Herald frontpage has the last word on the minor parties. There is a picture of the new shooters party MP (NSW Legislative Council) kneeling nextto the elephant that he has just (legally no doubt) shot. What a man. There's also an extract from an letter that he sent to Eddie Obeid and Nathan Rees expressing (in the language of a dopey agro Year 5 boy) how pissed off he is that Labor have failed to eliver on all his demands. Like writing off the $2million that the "Game Council" owe the state treasury and then giving them another $3million a yearon top of that. like letting these mrorns loose with guns in every national park including Kosciusko and Barrington Tops where the most abundant specied of game would be bush walkers.
The facts now are that in Macquarie Street for the next four years if Barry O'Farrell wants to get anyhing through that Labor and the Greens oppose he is going to have to deal with these people. Here's an opportunity for NSW Labor to redeem itself. They could say to Barry O'Farrell that he does not have to deal with the shooters and the christian democrate and their like. They could undertake to pass his legislationafter appropriate scrutiny. They could take the moral high ground. What have they got to lose.
They won't of course. As Bill Clinton famously said of Arafat "the Palestinians never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity."

After the Debacle

I have not posted anything for a while, totally depressed about the future of NSW Labor. I have just a faint hope that maybe perhaps the Libs will restore the independence of the public service (remember that, we have not had it since Barrie Unsworth was the Premier). But it is faint hope indeed. Why would they do that when Bob Carr didn't do it.
In brief the stoush going on now between Paul Keating and Frank Sartor and Eddie Obeid is quite illuminating. Sartor really hit the nail on the head (sorry to use a cliche but a good cliche really hits the nail on the head) when he asked what the Terrigals faction was all about. Keating made a similar observation. I'll tell you what it was about because I was around at the time. It was about Eddie and his friends the Whelans and the Morrises keeping a seat at the table when they did not deserve to keep one. Other people with limited talent climbed aboard because it was a machine devoted entirely to patronage. As just one tiny example take the Transport Infrastructure Corporation. Heard of it? Any idea what it does? It's a spin factory and that's about it. One of Paul Whelan's sons is in there in a senior position and has taken a few mates along for the ride. They are in jobs with salaries far in excess of what their talents would otherwise command. That's just one that I know about.
If the Liberals are smart enought to look into the procurement policies of the Dept. of Education and Training they might find some interesting stuff that would keep the scandals coming for years.
This faction got control of a weakened right in NSW and then turned the entire government into a patronage machine that believed in nothing except the gravy train.
However. We actually need the NSW ALP to be reborn. The Libs are not going to deliver and in a very short time we'll bbe looking for an alternative. The Greens? Oh please.
While there is breath left in the senior former leaders. Fellows like Wran, Unsworth, Carr, and above all Keating. They need to get out there and tell the truth to people and we need an intervention into the NSW brnch to weed out Bitar, Arbib and every single other time serving leech that have attched themselves to NSW politics.