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.

John Robertson

I've been trying to ignore talk of Robbo for opposition leader after the election. It's pathetic. The architect of the power privatisatiion debacle. Underminer of three Labor Premiers. In any other era a true labor rat.
Looks like the only hope of stopping it is to hold one's nose and vote for the Greens (early and often). If they could outpoll Labor the leader of the Opposition could be one of them. No pun intended.

CATTLE GRIDS RETRAINED

The story below may or may not be true, but it's typical.

Last year, Kevin Rudd received and was reading a report that there were over 10,000 cattle guards in NSW & Queensland. Graziers had protested his proposed changes in grazing policies, so he ordered the Minister to fire half of the cattle guards immediately!!
Before the Minister could respond and presumably try to straighten him out, Minister for Employment Julia Gillard, intervened with a request that before any cattle guards were fired, they be given six months of retraining.

Will O'Farrell Follow the Egyptian Model?

One of the first acts of the interim government on Cairo was to give public sector workers a 15% pay rise. I wonder if Barry O'Farrell will do that when the Labor Government in NSW meets its inevitable end next month.
Probably not.

Carr hits out at Comm wing of the Greens

Bob Carr has a terrific BLOG which I have referred to here before. Apart from being very well written and covering a wide range of subjects all of which I am ionterested in he is usually RIGHT. Which means that I agree with him.
I've long been concerned about the old comms who are running the Greens in NSW. Inner city fanatics who still actually believe in the necessity of a dictatorship of the proletariat. It's amazing that in 2011 there are still people who believe in this sort of stuff. The strange situation in NSW where Labor is about to "slip back through their arsehole and disappear from sight" has led to these people having power way beyond their normal influence and they are predicatble in their misuse of it. I'll quote Bob in full, he won't momnd it isn't as if anyone reads this!

"The arch- conservative faction of the New South Wales Liberal Party must have their eyes swiveling with glee as they contemplate the opportunities opened up for them by the Green Party. The hardliners around Lee Riahhon have won the argument that the

Green Party will not direct preferences to Labor anywhere in the March State elections. This means the Coalition and their allies will control the State Upper House if they win government.
And that will have rolling consequences over the next four years. As Labor MLC Luke Foley puts it, that decisions delivers the Legislative Council to "the book burners and the elephant shooters - people who are on a crusade to overturn environmental protection, let hunters rampage through national parks, bring back duck hunting, close the safe injecting room and end ethics classes in schools.
The Green Party decisions means there will be no check on what an O'Farrell-led Coalition government - remember that includes the National Party - will be able to do. On anything. That includes privatisations and industrial relations, a prospect that will have the hyper-conservatives very excited.
It was the comm wing of the Green Party that made this decision, not the environmental wing - the Marxist types who believe the worse things are the better they are. Give a Coaltion government full rein, we will all be radicalized by the result and the world revolution will be expedited. Bugger the environment in the meantime."