It ain't over until it's over

An American baseball coach once famously said, "It ain't over until it's over." You could say that of another frontline sport – politics. But even before the bell sounds on the New South Wales election on March 26, the result is as sure a thing as elections were in the old Soviet Union. Barry O'Farrell will be sworn in as Premier, Labor's parliamentary representation decimated, and its party machine will descend into the bitter civil warfare so characteristic in Australian politics of losing parties used to the comforts and privileges of power.

After sixteen years of Labor, what will this mean? I'll start with Barry O'Farrell.

I first met Barry O'Farrell when I was a Liberal MP and he was a young staffer in John Howard's office in the old Parliament House. Working with Howard in the strain, confusion, lows and highs of opposition and then tracking Howard's long political career, O'Farrell would have been struck as I and others were by the quality which more than any other got John Howard to the Prime Ministership : his endurance.

This is the Howard message to aspirant political leaders: no matter how bad things are, how personally wounding the political cycle, the derision of the media and your opponents, and the betrayals of your own political colleagues, if you really, really want office, stay with the game.

Barry O'Farrell was elected to the New South Wales Legislative Assembly in 1995, after a stint as State Director of the Liberal Party. In his time as State Director and then as an opposition member he had seen Liberal leaders come and go. His own ascent to the leadership of the Coalition parties in April 2007, was greeted with a mix of scepticism, derision and indifference. The Coalition seemed to have made of itself the permanent opposition, its performance woeful, its rotating leaderships a cartoonist's delight. O'Farrell, lacking the "charisma" so favoured by the electorate and lauded by the media, would just be another suit on the wrong side of the Speaker's chair.

It then seemed as if nothing would change. But things did change, and he endured, and events played into his hands.

Longevity in government can breed the fatal flaws of complacency, arrogance and recklessness. Incumbents come to believe in their own invincibility and non-accountability for personal conduct or public acts. Discipline erodes. Internal political rivalries and infighting become public. The façade of political unity, individual probity and good government cracks, and the political machine rots from the top down for all to see.

This is what has happened in New south Wales, laced with cronyism, corruption, and incompetence on a scale such that even our public, inured as we are to bad government, turned against Labor.

And so, Barry O'Farrell gets a dream political ride : the Opposition has had to do nothing but be there. But having won, then what?

Our state governments are in the business of raising money, spending it, and management. Think of a giant corporate conglomerate, the owner, manager or supervisor of last resort of a witches' brew of disparate, complex and changing investments and activities which compete among themselves for resources and power. Each is a fiefdom.

Road and rail systems. Courts, police, prisons, and emergency services. The supply and if necessary the rationing of gas, water and electricity to homes and businesses. Sewerage. Dams and desalination plants. Hospitals. City and urban planning. Docks, mines and museums. The environment, parks, sports grounds and nature reserves.

Safety rules for mines, building works, manufacturing businesses, road, rail and ferry systems,, domestic and public swimming pools. Licensing and licensing fees – for pubs, restaurants, cars, drivers, taxis, entertainment. Think about it: is there anything for which you don't need a licence these days?

Each of these activities has its own department or sub-department or grouping of bureaucrats. Each jealously guards its own turf. Many of the senior bureaucrats in these organisations were chosen by the outgoing government for their political loyalties, or parachuted into one of the many boards within the government's patronage as a pay-off for old mates. They will not be happy with the changing of the guard.

Into this treacherous swamp step O'Farrell and his merry men and women: well-intentioned, eager to clean up the mess left to them by the outgoing government and to make names for themselves in public life.

Eager they may be, but how well suited they are for the tasks ahead is another matter. It's one thing to have good ideas about government, public finances, transport, infrastructure, hospitals – whatever. It's quite another thing to produce good workable well-budgeted outcomes.

Coalition front benchers are unfamiliar with the actual workings of government. They will come to their departments as neophytes. Their hands -on experience in actually running big organisations is minimal. They have – with the exception of Mike Baird – little experience in the higher levels of the business and financial worlds. O'Farrell himself has never worked outside of politics.

In short, if you were looking for the ideal team to run New South Wales Inc, you'd look elsewhere. But in this – in the not insignificant tasks of running Australia's states and the country as a whole – voters are stuck with what the political machines give them.

But you can never tell: government can be the making of people who have never before held power. Unexpected strengths - as well as weaknesses – can emerge. We won't know until, say, six months from now. By then we will have a reading of who is doing well and who isn't, who are running the departments within their portfolio, and who have been taken prisoners by their departments.

Everyone will be offering advice to the new government. Here is my two cents worth.

Get rid of all young, bright-eyed, politically motivated staffers. They know nothing of the real and brutal world of running things and will get you into trouble. (Perhaps keep one – useful for photocopying and getting coffee.) Find instead two kinds of talents. The first must be rat cunning, cynical, long experienced in politics, quite unimpressed by you – in fact, barely civil, and knowledgeable about where the dead bodies and the political traps are to be found. The other, skilled and experienced in running things and assessing who is good at a job of work and who isn't, and is pitiless, decisive and effective when it comes to replacing people. You are in the business of running things, and need tough and canny people around you..

Weed out all Labor appointments from the range of boards, commissions etc within your portfolio. Replace them with good and skilled people, regardless of their political stripes.

The public service is there to serve the people; some, disappointingly, are interested only in serving themselves. Beware of the senior men and women who smile readily at you, laugh at your most pitiful jokes, and seek in other ways to ingratiate themselves with you. Put them on a list of people to be disposed of or sidelined. Flatterers, in particular, should be put on a death watch.

An old public service stratagem with new bosses is to bury them under paper. Make it clear at the start that you won't play this game and anyone who tries it out on you will be at risk. Otherwise, you won't find the time and energy you need to focus on the really important work: changing New South Wales for the better.

As a Minister you will acquire many new friends: men and women who badly wanted to get to know you before your new found eminence but somehow didn't get manage to make the call. It is possible that one in a hundred of these people will be sincere, but don't bet on it. There's an old saying, trust but verify. I'd turn it around: with your new found friends verify and only then trust, and very sparingly.

You have four years before the next election. This seems like a long time. It isn't. And you may think the New South Wales Labor Party is ready for burial. It isn't. Like the creature in the Greek myth, cut off one head and others grow in its place. That's the nature of politics.

A final word. I've been asked how a crushing defeat of Labor will play out on the Federal scene. There will be a short burst of euphoria and triumphalism, but in the medium term it won't greatly matter. Politicians may think voters are dumb, but they're smart enough to distinguish between state and federal politics.

The next federal election is – in political terms – a long time off. Maybe Labor's coalition with the Greens and the independents will break up and an election forced. But why should this happen? The independents and Bob Brown are doing very nicely out of their arrangements with Labor, and have nowhere else to go.

And so, barring an unexpected bye-election, the Federal contest is a good way off, and will be fought on issues quite different from State issues.