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.