Cross benches key to real change in NSW

In this, the metropolitan media in NSW has focused narrowly on the two-dog fight between Labor Green coalition leader Kristina Kenneally and Liberal National coalition leader Barry O'Farrell.

The result has been a spectacular array of newspaper photographs and television grabs of both leaders setting up permanent kennels in the western suburbs.

The other part of the problem, sadly, is that NSW is imagined as an initialism for Newcastle Sydney Wollongong.

While there is a real need to focus on the social and economic problems that have historically beset the western suburbs there are equally urgent matters across the rest of the state that have been mostly ignored by the large media companies and the main party candidates throughout the life of the campaign.

Media distillation of the campaign into a two-dog fight between Mr O'Farrell and Ms Kenneally removed any obligation to report the issues, candidates and processes that are of particular interest and importance to voters.

In defence of the media however, candidate information is not all that freely available.

Candidates do not fall all over each other in competition to provide details about themselves, their policies or their ideas for the future.

They come up with boringly ordinary slogans and grabs, photoshopped images of themselves and their loving families – tactics designed to create a false sense of belief so they don't need to reveal their true aims.

What qualifies a candidate to run for office?

Parliament is stuffed full of lawyers, developers, unionists and environmentalists.

There are now very few farmers or agriculturalists though the National Party - the Country Party as it was then known - once strongly represented their interests.

There are few industrialists or manufacturers, fewer still corporate business types – women or men – keen to represent the main sectors of investment in the state.