Column - We’re drowning in Sydney Harbor 48 Comments | 0 Trackbacks | Permalink Andrew Bolt Blog
Andrew Bolt Friday, November 14, 2008 at 07:05am
NICE bridge. Shame about the city. In fact, Sydney is sliding from a joke to a disaster, and it’s taking the rest of us with it. Not since Joan Kirner in Victoria have we seen a state led as catastrophically as is NSW, and Sydney is just the tawdry measure of its astonishing decline. Correction: NSW Labor makes Kirner’s lot look a model of propriety. At least her ministers, numbers men, hacks and faction heavies, were honest - and fully clothed - as they drove Victoria into the ground. They weren’t murdering each other, dancing half-naked in Parliament, molesting boys, sleeping with developers bearing gifts or walking over the bodies of men shot just 90 minutes earlier. Sure, we in Melbourne may gloat, now that Sydney’s refugees will help us to become the country’s biggest city by 2054, at least according to the Bureau of Statistics. But what should wipe the smirk off our faces is the fact that NSW now threatens to drag the whole country into a recession. So mismanaged has the state been for so long that the new Premier, Nathan Rees, this week confessed his state would run a deficit this financial year of almost $1 billion. And that’s only after his mini-Budget slashed spending by $3.3 billion over the next four years, and hiked taxes by $3.6 billion. How does this hurt us? Here’s how: our flagging economy so needs extra spending that the Rudd Government has just announced a $10.4 billion cash-for-Christmas stimulus package, hoping to stop us from slumping into recession. The Federal Government lifts spending to save the country; the NSW Government slashes spending to save itself. And you and I will pay, brother. Already, federal Treasury Secretary Ken Henry has hinted that the feds may have to spend even more of our money to make up for the cash these NSW clowns have pulled out. Nor does the damage stop there. NSW, responsible for a third of the national economy, is predicted to grow this financial year by an anaemic 1.25 per cent - well under Treasury’s forecast for the national economy of 2 per cent. NSW is the sick man of Australia, and the only consolation is the rest of us don’t have to live there. We don’t have to put up with electricity supplies so precarious that the state is predicted to run out of power in just six years. We don’t (quite) have to live with water supplies so run-down that Rees now admits Sydney last summer came close to “drinking mud”. We don’t have to live in a state whose leaders are so frightened of unions that public transport is still run by the Government - at crippling losses. We don’t have to put up with trains so bad that one in four carriages breaks down every month, with the Auditor-General warning that not enough new ones are being bought to meet demand. We don’t have to put up with one public hospital scandal after another, or a Department of Community Services so dysfunctional that 156 children it knew were at risk died last year before its eyes - up from 114 the year before. We don’t have to put up with such clogged roads, such green-inspired land shortages and such expensive housing. We don’t have to live in a city of race riots, ethnic enclaves and beaches ruled by surfer gangs. Oh, excuses are being made, of course. The latest is that the financial crisis came along and suddenly spoiled a perfectly good set of books. But this is a collapse that was years in the making. Rome wasn’t destroyed in a day. You can trace Sydney’s fall back to the decade-long reign of Bob Carr, the Labor premier and media pet who decided the best solution to a city bursting at the seams was simply to shut its doors. “Sydney is full,” this global warming worshipper declared. Heaven forbid it should grow. Just think of all the gases! Those hideous McMansions. And he went to sleep, along with his ministers. No dams were built. No transport reformed. No electricity system privatised or made efficient. Indeed, the then minister in charge of the iconic Snowy River scheme even boasted that this great damming of the waters for irrigation and power was exactly the kind of thing the Government would now “not necessarily pursue because we live in a more environmentally conscious age”. Want another symbol of the decline? Not one of the five rail projects Carr promised Sydney, Newcastle and Wollongong a decade ago has yet been built. The only one to even be started is already two years behind schedule and millions over budget. If all this failure had at least been achieved with a Kirner-style ideological purity or a Steve Bracks-style amiability, you might even forgive it. If you were a dope. But to be delivered such a national tragedy by such a bunch of sleazebags and bunglers is unforgivable. Yes, there are also many decent politicians in this Government, but count the scandals of this past year alone. We’ve seen former Aboriginal affairs minister Milton Orkopoulos jailed for sexually assaulting boys and handing out heroin, and his chief of staff, Sergeant Nathan “I know nnnnnothing” Rees, made premier. We’ve seen Education Minister John Della Bosca stood down while police checked what threats he and his wife, federal Labor MP Belinda Neal, might have made to staff at a bar who merely asked them to moved tables. We’ve seen the police minister sacked for dancing in just his underpants at a party in his Parliament House office, and allegedly rubbing himself against a female colleague while telling her daughter: “I’m titty-f...ing your mother.” This week we saw the small business minister sacked after an independent inquiry ruled he’d lied when denying he’d verbally abused a woman on his staff, and grabbed her to make sure she stayed for his spray. We’ve had the same minister now accused of threatening to attack a senior policeman in Parliament if he didn’t stop investigating a close associate. (The allegation is denied.) And last month the Independent Commission Against Corruption recommended the prosecution of 11 people, four of them former Labor councillors of Wollongong City, after an investigation into a planning officer who had slept with, and taken bribes from, developers needing her help. You’d think that was enough to fill the slop bucket. Enough already. Tip the stinking lot over the side. But wait, there’s even more. A judicial inquiry into the murder of Labor MP John Newman this week heard Reba Meagher, another dumped minister, explain how she first became a Labor politician, the NSW way. She said she was just 26 when she was called into the office of Della Bosca, then the state Labor general secretary, to be offered a seat in the NSW Parliament - as a reward for not standing for the Senate position he wanted for his wife. Small problem. Both seats were already held by Labor politicians, one of them John Newman. But, bang. Problem no longer. Not six hours later Newman was shot dead in his driveway, a crime for which a Labor councillor and numbers man, Phuong Ngo has been jailed. And just 90 minutes later Della Bosca rang Meagher - or so she told the inquiry - again asking if she’d like Newman’s Cabramatta seat. (Della Bosca told the murder trial in 2000 he could not recall meeting Meagher that afternoon and offering her any seat. Nor is anyone suggesting he had any prior knowledge of any threat to Newman’s life.) What is astonishing is that it’s only a year since this Government was returned to power. How did the voters come to make such a ghastly mistake? They are sure repenting it. Labor last month lost a by-election for Ryde after a swing against it of 22.9 per cent. Labor’s support in Newspoll has plummeted from 59 per cent at the start of last year to 44 per cent now. And the media support that propped up Labor for so long has dropped with it. The Sydney Morning Herald this week branded Rees “the demolition man”. The rival Daily Telegraph shouted, “Premier, sack yourself . . . and your wretched Government”, and was flooded with thousands of emails from readers clamoring for a new election. But that’s the catch . . . and warning. NSW, stupidly, has fixed, four-year terms. This shiftless, shifty gang will be in power for three more years. This is not just a threat to the economy of NSW. It’s a threat to all Australians. And it’s a threat to the trust voters put in their democracy to give them a government that truly represents them. For God’s sake, call an election. Even Melbourne cannot afford the rabble that now rules Sydney.
