I'm Jan, I'm here to help ... militants

OPPOSITION Leader Kevin Rudd, when not endorsing Coalition policies, has opted for a small target strategy.

Some of the candidates the Labor Party has endorsed don't have the same luxury. The paper trails they've left in their wakes look as if a cyclone hit the Tempe tip. One of these litter lines leads to militant feminist Janelle Saffin, the endorsed ALP candidate for Page on the NSW North Coast, a seat which was held by National Ian Causley, a former State Minister, who hopes to be succeeded by National candidate Chris Gulaptis, a former local mayor. Page and the neighbouring electorate of Cowper have been targeted by Labor as winnable seats. Saffin, who spent eight unremarked years in the NSW Upper House before walking away with a taxpayer funded package of goodies including a free digital camera, laptop and mobile phone, not to mention a pension, won pre-selection in July for a chance to take another grab at the public purse. The pre-selected candidate in Cowper, John Fitzroy, was not so lucky. He was recently given the shove to make way for a more favoured ALP candidate, Paul Sekfy, who was installed by the ALP Federal Executive to challenge popular sitting National Luke Hartsuyker after 59-year-old Fitzroy said he was told by party bosses he was "too old". Labor's NSW assistant general secretary Luke Foley said at the time: "John's obviously disappointed, but our responsibility is to give voters a real choice given their desire for change." The ALP must see more in Sekfy than the electorate has yet perceived. He has stood three times at the Federal level and lost each time. He also stood once for the state seat of Oxley, losing then, too. Saffin's 2003 bag of hand-outs was not the last gift given her by the taxpayers, though. In May last year, taxpayer-funded NGO Australian Legal Resources International (ALRI) went into administration leaving taxpayers tens of thousands of dollars out of pocket. ALRI was headed by the disgraced former federal court judge Marcus Einfeld, but while he may have been in the driver's seat on this occasion, Saffin was one of the directors, and the collapse left taxpayers $120,000 in the red. According to reports in The Sydney Morning Herald and The Australian, Einfeld was one of a number of voters at a creditors' meeting in May 2006, who backed a plan to destroy the company's records. In essence, ALRI was an appallingly run company which was constantly in need of federal funds to keep it afloat. The Australian's report claimed that it received more than $1.2 million in grants to meet its shortfalls, some of which were no doubt generated by the globe-trotting Einfeld who took numerous trips to the Middle East, Indonesia, the Caribbean and other places on its behalf. Politically, it was well to the Left, it was supported by Labor lawyers, and was chosen by the late and unlamented terrorist leader Yasser Arafat to work with his corrupt Palestinian Authority in 1997. It also assisted a Sharia law institute in the Maldives. As a director, Saffin would have had to sign off on the organisation's accounts and spending, including presumably, Einfeld's stays in the Caribbean, supposedly to "clear the backlog" of legal cases there. As the George Gershwin song goes, "Nice work if you can get it", to which needs to be added the line, "And you can if Saffin is on the board". Saffin's penchant for helping Left-wing causes is no flash-in-the-pan whim. When she was in the Upper House, she provided a part-time position for civil rights activist Cameron Murphy, now with the NSW Council for Civil Liberties, and busily complaining to the UN about the fact that prisoners in NSW's Supermax high security prison have trouble getting paintbrushs, are given ill-fitting underwear, asked to eat brown bread against their wishes, and are even told to say please and thank you. When he was in Saffin's office, he was the driving force behind a website designed to let drug users know where police sniffer dogs might be assisting police drive down drug crime and save lives. Saffin's candidacy underscores the hypocrisy that surrounds Rudd and Labor at the start of this election campaign. Saffin's involvement with Einfeld in the woeful operation of the collapsed ALRI highlights Labor's inability to manage money, and her Left-wing agenda destroys any notion that a Rudd government would be as socially conservative as the current Coalition. Australian taxpayers don't want to be milked to pay for more trips by Einfeld, whether he is behind the wheel or not, and they don't want more of their tax dollars to be sent to regimes run by people like the late Arafat, the sponsor of decades of global terrorism. If Saffin is the sort of candidate the ALP believes will appeal to voters in marginal seats it has targeted as winnable, it has severely - perhaps fatally - underestimated the commonsense of the Australian people. With this sort of choice, Rudd is looking more and more like Mark (Latham) II. Footnote: Sekfy's name was misspelt Sefky when published and Gulaptis is a former mayor, not mayor, as originally published.