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A curate's egg, but far from rotten

By Roy Williams - posted Tuesday, 22 March 2011


The defeat of the Labor Government in New South Wales at this Saturday's election will be, on balance, a good thing. Liberal leader Barry O'Farrell appears a decent and reasonable man, with scarcely an ideological bone in his body. The electorate will anoint him as premier with a gargantuan majority.

Why will O'Farrell's majority be so big? Shouldit be so big? These are two different questions.

The answer to the first is simple enough. Sheer longevity is a factor in play, of course, though long-standing governments – even incompetent ones – have survived before in Australia, or have been defeated by only modest margins. Billy McMahon's Liberal-Country Party government of 1971-2 is regularly ranked among the worst in the nation's history, and it presided at the tail-end of 23 years of Coalition rule. Yet Labor's winning margin on 2 December 1972 was a slim 9 seats (67 to 58), in a parliament of 125 members.

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By contrast, it would not surprise on Saturday if NSW Labor were left with as few as 10 seats in a parliament of 93. A figure of around 20 seats appears more likely, but, even so, that would be a massacre in anyone's language.

Coalition partisans will object that Kristina Keneally's Government (2009 to date), and those of Nathan Rees (2008-9), Morris Iemma (2005-8) and Bob Carr (1995-2005) before it, have been "disastrous" or the "worst in memory" – hopelessly incompetent, criminally short-sighted, deep-seatedly corrupt etc., etc. But that sort of glib cant will not suffice either.

True, a good many voters now assert those things to be so. Some must believe them to be so. But, self-evidently, far fewer voters held such beliefs at the elections of 1999, 2003 and 2007. On each occasion, Labor was re-elected by a crushing margin.

The people were not fools then, and they are not fools now. What – genuinely – has changed?

For a start, there's the O'Farrell factor. The Opposition Leader is tough and presentable. At each of the previous three NSW elections the Liberal Party had saddled itself with an unconvincing leader, less electable each time – Kerry Chikarovski in 1999, John Brogden in 2003 and Peter Debnam in 2007. (The dour but credible Peter Collins, dumped for Chikarovski in 1998, would surely have fared better than any of them.)

Since Carr's retirement in mid-2006, Labor has played musical chairs with its leadership. In March 2007 the people of New South Wales endorsed the premiership of Morris Iemma, a safe pair of hands in the O'Farrell mould. Regrettably, Iemma resigned in September 2008 after being rebuffed over his proposal to sell electricity assets and his choice of ministry. Iemma's successors, Nathan Rees and Kristina Kenneally, did not enjoy the aura of legitimacy which only an election win can bring, and neither possessed sufficient gravitas to succeed without it.

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Both Rees and Keneally are talented and hard-working politicians. It's to be hoped that both have long public careers ahead of them; neither, to any significant degree, is personally to blame for Labor's current predicament in NSW. Keneally was thrown a hospital pass. But if plain truth be told, neither was ready to be premier.

Leadership issues aside, Labor's internal discipline since Carr's departure has been abysmal. A string of ministers and MPs have been sacked or forced to quit. The nature of their misdeeds has ranged from despicable (Milton Orkopolous – child sex crimes) to trivial (Matt Brown – drunken carousing at a party). One or two were unlucky victims of media prurience. But the overall impression has been ghastly.

And what of the elephant in the room: the dominant Right faction of the NSW Labor Party, with its sick and cynical culture of insularity, bullying and poll-driven survival? In recent years the Fairfax press (The Sydney Morning Herald) has hammered these themes relentlessly. But little has changed. It's a shame that neither Carr nor Iemma tried harder to initiate reform. Both had clout and respect. Rees was ousted after his brave but futile efforts to stir things up.

The key point as regards Saturday is this. The spectre of "Sussex Street" is now much more than an internal problem. It will cost Labor hundreds of thousands of votes, some directly to the Coalition but many more, I suspect, to the Greens, minor parties and independents. The deliberate informal vote could also be higher.

Primary votes lost by Labor on Saturday to the Left will not come back reliably in the form of second preferences. This will be due partly to the optional preferential voting system in NSW, but mainly to the fact that large numbers of "progressive" voters feel increasingly fed up. They no longer have much loyalty to Labor; they believe Labor has treated them disdainfully for too long.

This is not solely a NSW problem. It is a nationwide problem, as Julia Gillard discovered at last year's federal election. The Rudd Government's backdown on climate change was the tipping point, but there are pervasive cultural issues at play too. And pandering to apathetic "swinging" voters in the apolitical centre only makes the problem worse.

(Labor's current dilemma is similar, though not identical, to the one that beset the Coalition in the 1990s and early 2000s, when many of its rusted-on supporters suddenly defected to One Nation. It took Tampaand 9/11 and crafty politicking by John Howard to win most of them back.)

Those, then, are the core reasons why Labor will lose big on Saturday: O'Farrell's solidity; shambolic conduct by far too many NSW Labor parliamentarians; and the splintering across Australia of Labor's left-wing base.

What about the curlier question – does NSW Labor deserve to lose big?

It's tempting to shout "Yes!" Heavy defeat will ensure that there is soul-searching and rebuilding of the sort Labor desperately needs.

But caution is in order. O'Farrell's Government will be inexperienced, to put it mildly, and may not be held properly to account if Labor is reduced to a rump.

Things could be even more volatile if the Coalition gains control (actual or effective) of the Upper House. If that happens, O'Farrell's leadership might soon come under pressure. Voices from the Right, in and outside the Liberal Party, will begin insisting that O'Farrell has no excuse not to be radical on a raft of issues, starting with jobs in the public sector.

It's time to dispel certain prevalent myths about Labor's 16 years of government in NSW. For the most part, it has governed reasonably well. Certainly, it was not appreciably worse than other state and federal governments of the same period, both Labor and conservative.

Indeed, I would argue that except in one vital area of public policy – environmental protection – the record and style of Bob Carr's government in Macquarie Street from 1995-2006 was similar to John Howard's in Canberra from 1996-2007. (Carr's policies on the environment were much more "green" than Howard's.)

Labor has done itself no favours in this 2011 campaign by failing to talk up its own perfectly sound record in a number of areas. Likewise, in the 2007 campaign, it was unwise to undersell Carr's legacy. Such pusillanimous tactics may succeed in the short term, but they are poisonous in the longer term.

Inexplicably, the "strategists" running Labor's 2011 campaign in NSW have failed to learn from federal Labor's grievous mistakes last year.

Does no-one recall the tragic failure of Kim Beazley's meek if well-meaning "small target strategy" – his inability or unwillingness, in two stints as federal Opposition Leader (1996-2001 and 2005-06), proudly to defend the nation-changing policies of Bob Hawke and Paul Keating?

The moral is this: There is no point in electing a Labor Government, state or federal, if its principal ambition is gaining or retaining office for its own sake.

The Coalition exists to preserve the status quo; occasionally, it may attempt further to entrench, or advance, the vested interests of its supporters. It's thus logical and understandable that, in the ordinary course, the Coalition will seek to keep itself in office by whatever means necessary. (That's why, until recently, the Liberal Party axed its unpopular or underperforming leaders more ruthlessly than Labor.)

For Labor, it's far smarter to go down honourably – like Gough Whitlam in 1975, or Keating in '96, even Barrie Unsworth in NSW in '88. That way, the faith is kept with the party's most committed supporters. And the next time progressive reform is needed, the people will turn to Labor.

In the days remaining until March 26, I'd like to hear Kristina Keneally stressing the following points.

Myth Number 1: NSW Labor has been economically inept

To the contrary, just as Peter Costello's stewardship of the federal budget was the best thing about Howard's government, fiscal prudence was Carr's trademark, especially when the redoubtable Michael Egan was Treasurer. It would be hard to imagine a more austere and responsible pair than Carr and Egan. From 1995-2005, net government debt in NSW was reduced from 7.4 per cent of gross state product to zero. In FY2010 the figure was only 2.2%.

Myth Number 2: NSW Labor has neglected infrastructure

In fact, its record is quite decent, especially in respect of the period before 2005. In Carr's ten budgets, over $60 billion was allocated to new infrastructure: hospitals; rail (including the Epping to Chatswood link); roads (the M5 extension, Eastern Distributor, M7 Westlink, Lane Cove Tunnel, Cross City Tunnel, bus transit lanes); and other worthy projects completed or underway (including Barangaroo). The 2000 Olympics were a triumph.

Of course, NSW – Sydney especially – has major infrastructure problems. But many of these are endemic, the result of lack of urban planning in decades past and a burgeoning population.

Myth Number 3: NSW Labor has mismanaged the state's public school and public hospital systems

This sort of complaint rings hollow coming from the conservative side of politics. In any event, in this instance, it is largely false.

As regards education, the Government has a good record (especially in the areas of student-testing and literacy, causes which were close to Carr's heart).

Of course, myriad problems do exist. But the root cause of many of them is lack of adequate funding, and that – for the most part – is Canberra's responsibility. Our federal system is unwieldy and unbalanced: although the Commonwealth has most of the key taxing powers, the States and/or local councils bear the lion's share of responsibility for service delivery.

Myth Number 4: NSW Labor has been soft on "law and order"

The opposite is true. The NSW Police Force is cleaner and more efficient than it was when Labor took office. Crime rates are mostly lower and jail populations bigger. Some civil liberties have been curtailed. Carr's legislation in 1999 revamping the (civil) tort system was bold and far-reaching. Indeed, some of those measures have been criticised, justifiably, as too draconian.

Myth Number 5: NSW has been eclipsed by other States and/or has "let down" the rest of Australia

This may be the most baseless myth of all. NSW has always been the engine-room of the Australian economy. It still is, despite the fact that other States have benefited from the resources boom (Queensland, WA) and/or routinely receive a greater share of Commonwealth revenue per capita (South Australia, Tasmania).

To deride NSW is to deride Australia. Does anyone seriously suggest that Australia has floundered since 1995, relative to the world? No, Australia has flourished – at least by economic measures.

If the NSW Labor Government has been an economic failure since 1995, then so was the Howard-Costello Government of 1996-2007. So too was Kevin Rudd's, despite it having kept Australia out of recession during the Global Financial Crisis in 2008-9, an achievement unique in the OECD. That would have been impossible without a solid contribution by NSW.

So there it is. The voters of NSW have legitimate reasons to turf out Labor on Saturday. But let's not allow history to be rewritten in the process.

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About the Author

Roy Williams won the Sydney University Medal in law in 1986. He practised as a litigation solicitor in Sydney for 20 years, before becoming a full-time writer. He is the author of God, Actually, an award-winning and best-selling defence of Christianity published in Australasia by ABC Books and in Britain and North America by Monarch Books.

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