Claims on an empty victory

FORMER NSW premier Bob Carr has taken due credit for the return of the Labor Government, now led by his successor, Morris Iemma.Though Carr was kept under wraps by the Iemma team throughout the election, he told The Australian newspaper of his deep personal satisfaction as successful Labor candidates referred to the millions his government had committed to infrastructure in every seat in their western Sydney electorates.

The sharp divide in the electoral map between Labor's south-western seats and the Coalition's north-western seats validates his argument. Carr's take on the election result adds another claimant to the growing list of those who believe they were responsible for the Carr-Iemma Government's fourth success. In his victory speech, Iemma said the voters recognised his is a good government and that to think otherwise is "rubbish". That was an insult to voters, who know a bad government when they have the misfortune to experience one. He also said that the result gave Labor a mandate to "get the services going in the right direction". That, too, is an insult to all those who have suffered and endured the past dozen years of infrastructure failure. His third theme was that voters were voting against the Federal Work Choices legislation, and that doesn't seem to add up. Firstly, if the Labor government was a good government, why were the voters so adamant in every survey taken that it has failed them in the delivery of public services? If it was such a powerhouse, why is he going to dump a number of ministers? The question of whether WorkChoices was really an issue has not been satisfactorily answered. Certainly, it does not appear to have been a major factor, despite the millions spent by the trade union movement promoting it. WorkChoices came into effect one year ago and the nation shows no sign of suffering. Skilled labour is in demand, unemployment is at a record 30-year low, more than 250,000 new jobs have been created, industrial disputes are at a minimum, and workers are enjoying historic wage levels in states other than NSW. Iemma, your claims don't stack up. Workers aren't suffering because of WorkChoices, but they are feeling the brunt of your savage tax regime and they are faced with demands to pay an unprecedented range of unjust fees and levies to maintain the bloated salaries of an inefficient public service. What is clear is that Iemma, the star protege of Graham "whatever-it-takes" Richardson's school of politics, is going to repay Sussex St and the unions for his victory and continue to attempt to make IR reform the bogeyman responsible for all the state's problems. Reality is that the people most affected by WorkChoices are the union bosses who call the shots for the ALP. That's why they were prepared to throw millions into Iemma's campaign chest. But it would appear that even Labor voters are beginning to see through the spin, as a look behind Saturday night's numbers shows. Though the state-wide swing was insufficient to dislodge the unpopular Labor Government, a closer examination of some of the seats Labor was crowing about suggests that the ALP has in fact lost a lot of ground. Penrith is a good case in point. With the departure of Labor's popular minister Fay Lo Po' in 2003, the then Liberal candidate Jim Aitken (a well known local councillor) managed a huge 10.7 per cent swing against Labor – the largest swing in any two-party contest in the state. On Saturday, Labor's Karyn Paluzzano held Penrith with a 2.4 per cent swing to the ALP, and new Liberal candidate Tricia Hitchen had a swing of 3.1 per cent against her, but when the 2003 result is taken into account, she actually held on to a whopping 7.6 per cent of the huge 2003 swing, an extraordinary achievement. In the neighbouring seat of Mulgoa, counting yesterday indicated that Liberal candidate Karen Chijoff (a member of Federal MP Jackie Kelly's staff) scored a healthy swing of 7.3 per cent which is largely consistent with the extrapolation of the Penrith swing (above), suggesting that the outlook is not that bleak for either the Howard Government or Jackie Kelly. Further, a scrutineer in one Mulgoa booth on Saturday night said the Liberal primary vote was up from 27.5 per cent in 2003 to 42 per cent in 2007 (the ALP vote was down from 59.5 per cent to 48 per cent), which, on a two-party preferred basis gave a swing of about 13 per cent to the Liberals. Far from signalling a Howard departure from office, as his detractors are ever quick to read from murky omens, it may well be that Labor's NSW victory is the first step in John Howard's comeback. Labor's constant drum beating for its union mates, many of them tainted through association with sleazy developers and greedy big business figures, will only reinforce the anti-union sentiment of younger votes and small business as the federal election nears. Those opposing WorkChoices look more and more like a clique of well-heeled detractors from middle-class electorates indulging their adolescent militant fantasies as they experience overdue mid-life crises. And union fats cats hoping to grab safe seats before the union movement splutters to a timely end.