While I will continue to debate if the thread continues I want to re state a fact.
My thoughts and actions are not ever anti ALP ,I fought to return my party to its rank and file.
No false wet cheeks at the grave side for me, I rejoice at events and truly think we are better for it.
No looking for the good in some of the victims, unless it is Those 700 plus who I stood with at conference.
today once again I am proud to be ALP.

If the caucus hadn't done it, sooner or later the Governor would have had to do it.

I don't know enough about the dynamics of the NSW ALP to know whether John Watkins, had he not just quit politics the day before, would have been an acceptable replacement for Morris Iemma in the eyes of his parliamentary colleagues. As a member of the public, I can only think Watkins' departure is NSW' loss.

Likewise, I don't know enough about Nathan Rees to know whether he will make a good Premier. One thing that does disquiet me a little is that as Minister for Water, he was really heavying the Wyong Shire Council on the NSW Central Coast to agree to transfer its water reticulation infrastructure to a yet-to-be-formed Water Corporation intended to take over that Shire's water infrastructure together with that of Gosford City. A Water Corporation, even if government owned, is the first step toward the privatisation of water supply, and the hiking of prices.

This selling-off of existing public owned infrastructure in the form of electricity generation and distribution assets, and the overwhelming public opposition to it, has been at the heart of this dispute. I just hope it is to a genuine change away from such sell-off policies that Nathan Rees is committed, not just to a different pathway to achieving those privatisations.

With an ALP Federal government, surely now is the time to address the sleeper in this debate, the chronic inequity in the distribution of Federally collected revenues to NSW. Nobody has seemingly been game to raise this matter, for understandable reasons. It is ,after all, the basis of Canberra's pork-barrelling ability under either major party's rule. Together with this, the last thing the NSW public wanted was a fresh injection of cash, no strings attached, for the Iemma government to continue to squander.

Keeping the COMPLETE electricity business, redressing inequitable tax distributions, and achieving economies in the cost of the NSW public service, are what the Rees government will be measured against.

This was posted to the "Winning the War In Iraq" discussion at
http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?discussion=2052&page=0#44663

The issue may seem remote to some, but the basic principles of democracy, accountability and ownership rights aren't fundamentally different:

100 DAYS TO STOP BUSH AND CHENEY PRIVATISING IRAQ'S OIL WEALTH

Friday, 29 August 2008

http://www.handsoffiraqioil.org/2008/08/100-days-to-stop-bush-and-cheney-sat-11.html

George W Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney are putting immense pressure on the Iraqi government to pass a controversial oil law before they leave office. Iraqi trade unionists are fighting the law, which would effectively hand over Iraq’s oil to foreign companies such as BP and Shell for a generation.

Join the Hands Off Iraqi Oil (http://www.handsoffiraqioil.org/) procession through London on Saturday 11 October to launch 100 days of action to stop Bush and Cheney. Come and help a team of Oil Law resisters lasso a giant Dick Cheney and keep him away from a barrel of Iraq’s oil. There will be a samba band banging (oil) drums and corporate pirates too!

Date: Saturday 11 October 2008 Time: 12 noon

Assemble: Shell House, SE1 7NA (Opposite Waterloo train station. Nearest tube: Waterloo)
Route: Through central London: Shell House - BP HQ - Grosvenor Sq. Photo opps @ every stop of the tour

Belly,So Rees has advised the irrelevant Refshauge, the incompetent Knowles, the criminal pervert Orkopoulos, the inept ex Iemma And is the harbinger of a rosy future? Maybe, but don't expect anyone to believe that he has suddenly left the Socialist Left faction to become non aligned.

$10 says the retail arm of NSW power gets sold off/leased?

Yeah, the Iraqi representatives have the same simple choice our NSW parliamentarians have: cave to the pressures (whatever form they take) or simply stand their ground.

What's the big threat that the US oil interests have over the Iraqis? 'If you don't pass the oil law we'll withdraw all the troops and leave you to your own devices!'? If that threat holds any terror of substance so far as Iraqi representatives are concerned, it would appear to be a self-defeating one for Bush and Cheney so far as the securing of continuity of supply to the US is concerned. Maybe there has ultimately got to get to be a Chinese policeman on every street-corner from the Pamir Knot to the Mediterranean and Red seas before everyone comes to their senses in that region.

All the more reason to focus on looking after our own energy security here in NSW, and regaining the sort of focus of people like Essington Lewis and the others that were behind the industrial defensibility of Australia achieved by the time of WW2.

Given the seeming need to both expand generation capacity at the same time as reducing emissions and confronting peak oil, we urgently need to stop wasting OLO electronic page space advertising street demos and start using it to throw up the innovative solutions that seemingly are beyond our elected representatives to recognise and develop.

South Africa has been producing something like 40% of its liquid petroleum fuel requirements by conversion of very inferior high ash coal via the Fischer-Tropsch process for decades at a price competitive with that originating from oil wells. Why are we not developing such processes in a co-generation context for the expanded generation of base load power our governments now belatedly tell us has not been invested in? There would be effectively NIL carbon dioxide emissions from the electricity component of the co-generation. The emissions from the vehicle fuels component can't be practically sequestered anyway, and in any case simply substitute for those presently coming from oil well petroleum.

Forrest Gump,

I agree with most of your post and I am glad to see that you are familiar with the material covered in Andrew Ross's "Armed and Ready - The Industrial Development and Defence of Australia 1900-1945", as your mention of Essington Lewis, Director General of Munitions in the 1930's indicates (http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=7859&page=0#122487).

However, I have one point of contention. You wrote "... we urgently need to stop wasting OLO electronic page space advertising street demos ...".

Do you think the sell-off would have been prevented without 'street demos'? Granted the Liberals and Nationals (who, themselves, are more often than not the targets of 'street demos') to their enormous credit, blocked it in Parliament, but do you really believe that they would have made that stand usually unexpected of right wing political parties, if not for the efforts of dozens of ordinary giving up their time to argue their case on street corners, shopping malls, in letters to the editors, on talk-back radios and in online forums such as this, and by attending 'street demos'?

By all means, we need to seek innovative technological solutions to our predicaments which are sustainable, but if our destiny remains (had remained) in the hands of the likes of Costa, Iemma or their interstate and Federal counterparts, then the most most optimistic possible technological innovations still won't save us.

As far as I am concerned, anyone who wants to organise 'street demos' or whatever to help turn our society back from the brink is more than welcome to advertise those demos on our web page at http://candobetter.org The reason more demos aren't advertised there is that we don't have time, so anyone who would like to help, please get in touch.