The best idea I ever heard is that our politicans should be just the ordinary person picked off the street.

The vast majority of our politicians are so out of touch with being an ordinary australian, that it is totally impossible for them to actually be able to represent the average voter.

James, since when did politicians represent the average voter? In which country did this occur? Please enlighten me!

http://dangerouscreation.com

Here's the typical labor stooge/spinmiester in action once again.

This is what people are sick of:

'... the people of NSW and Australia have almost no indication about what the policies of their new Government will be or how they will govern.'

'...there is, in fact, a substantial amount of policy material on the NSW Liberal Party website. The problem is - almost no-one seems to have read it. And if the media has read it, then they have decided that it isn't newsworthy...'

All in the same paragraph.

And obviously the writer is one of those people who hasn't read the Liberal Party policy material and yet he goes on to extol what he sees as the future ineptitude of the liberals and how that will benefit the Labor Federally. It is also disappointing that this writer continues the usual Labor spin of lauding the losing premier yet pours obrium and inuendo on the NSW peoples choice of Premier ... Bazza O'Fazza.

Mate it's your type of Labor centric spin that people everywhere are sick to death of.

It's caused Labor to be where it now finds itself.

Listen to what Keating said about Robertson. I despised Keating but he was fairly astute in his measurement of Labor Politic's and personalities (especially 'Jellyback') and he'd now agree Labor is terminal.

Take a look at the political geographic map if Gillard hasn't members in New England and Port Macquarrie. And count Queensland as Campbells.

Good I am looking forward to having 31% of my GST money wasted in Sydney.

I wish Barry O'Farrell much luck in reforming rail corp.

keith,

Would this be the letter to which you refer in your post of Monday, 28 March 2011 at 5:49:14 PM? This is a link to an item on the ABC site, 'The Drum', titled '"Dear John"... Paul Keating's explosive letter to John Robertson', consisting largely of a purported facimile of that actual letter. See: http://bit.ly/gR14hT .

If it is, and that facsimile is genuine, then we have been afforded an insight as to at least one source of what David Donovan refers to as the ALP's 'NSW disease'. The letter reveals that ultimately we have Keating to thank for the shambolic attempted asset stripping and 'privatisation' of the heretofore publicly owned NSW power generation and distribution system. Some of Keating's specific words from that letter:

"You have replaced a man, who .....
sought to deal with the great and
unfinished problem of New South Wales
electricity and the provision of capital
for new base load power.

... When I met you and went through
the history of the establishment of the
east coast electricity market by the
government that I led in the 1990s, and
why the privatisation of the New South
Wales power stations was consistent with
the benefits of that market, you never
offerred one serious point in rebuttal.
..."

Why should Robertson have had to rebut Keating's arguments? Both the overwhelming majority of the rank and file membership of the ALP in NSW, and more importantly of the public that owned the assets, simply didn't want them sold off!

It is revealing to see Keating's claim that 'the great and unfinished problem of NSW electricity' involved finding capital for NEW BASE LOAD power generation. With the passage of time it seems that the problem, such as it may have ever been, was one of provision of PEAKING LOAD generation capacity, not of base load capacity. Why was the public misled?

The July 2008 OLO article 'Fencing wire and mirrors: the world of the National Energy System' shines some interesting light on this question. See: http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=7585&page=0

Forrest it's all irrelevant now that Labor is finished.

You might think Labor is Lazarus and that you can breathe life into the cadaver by gibbering on about Labor history but the electorate won't take the slightest bit of notice of that sort of rubbish any longer.

They'll judge on actions ... not spin ... for the next 3 or 4 generations.

What a pity userID 'keith' has missed the point of my post.

Whether or not Labor is now finished, the issue of the sale of NSW electricity assets and the suppression of testimony as to the wisdom of the most recently aborted attempt at sale, by the device of the recent prorogation of the NSW Parliament, is not.

David Donovan, in the 11th paragraph of his article, uses the words "As Queensland Premier Anna Bligh said, NSW Labor is a disease." to seemingly assert that the underlying problem is quarantined to NSW. Yet possibly similar infrastructure investment avoidance tactics in relation to SE Queensland water supply, as were a feature, over a comparable period, of the establishment of the National Electricity Market, avoidances that have had the effect of permitting the ensconcement of privatised utility providers, has contributed significantly to an otherwise avoidable flood disaster that may yet be followed, if electors connect the dots about Wivenhoe dam managment, by a comparable Labor electoral disaster in Queensland.




What both the article author and Anna Bligh refer to as 'the NSW disease' may in fact be 'the Australian Labor disease'.




What still requires to be explained to the public is the precise nature of what Keating describes, in his letter castigating John Robertson, the now leader of the NSW Opposition, as "... the great and unfinished problem of NSW electricity ...".

This is a problem that Keating seems to differentiate from that of infrastructure investment per se no matter by which entity, government or private, undertaken. Surely the public has the right to know the extent to which there was any prospective benefit to IT of what, to use Keating's highly nuanced words already quoted, was "the privatisation of the New South Wales power stations [being] consistent with the benefits of [the national electricity] market". The two interests, those of the NSW public, and those of the players in the national electricity market, may not necessarily coincide.

It may be that Sussex Street Labor has not so much cauterized itself, as highlighted an Australia-wide Labor elitism the public now rejects.