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A curate's egg, but far from rotten

By Roy Williams - posted Tuesday, 22 March 2011


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.

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(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.

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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.

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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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