Rees is on the same old track to nowhere

NEW Premier Nathan Rees, whose performance in his two former portfolios _ water utilities and emergency services _ never suggested he was anything other than a plodder, seems determined not to deviate from the dismal performances of his failed predecessors, Bob Carr and Morris Iemma.

But at least he has admitted that the people of NSW were right not to believe the State Government when it promised big rail projects. Given Labor's history of failure to deliver almost all of its major projects, except the brilliantly successful Olympics (and the bid was run by the former Fahey Liberal government), the real wonder is why NSW still has a Labor government after 13 years. The answer, perhaps, is that Labor is better at reading the polls and delivering populist messages. (Remember the scare campaign about the number of public servants a Liberal government would axe, should it win office, which the ALP ran before last year's election?) Yesterday, The Daily Telegraph's State political reporter Joe Hildebrand revealed that a decade after outlining a huge transport initiative for Sydney, the Labor Government had failed to build a single rail project. Further, four of the five projects promised by then Premier Carr _ fast trains to Newcastle and Wollongong, the Bondi Beach extension, the northwest rail link and the Chatswood to Parramatta line _ have yet to begin. The only evidence of any element of the grand $14 billion plan unveiled four months before the 1999 state election that now exists is part of the Chatswood to Parramatta line, the part that stops at Epping, the part that is two years behind schedule, millions over budget and remains plagued with problems. Others were mere mirages. Newcastle and Wollongong commuters still suffer on over-crowded trains subject to frequent delays, those in the northwest have nothing to look forward to in easing their lengthy and expensive commute, and the Bondi train doesn't make it to Bondi. Just one train connects the Western suburbs of Sydney with a beach _ the Cronulla line. On the basis of the anti-social beach behaviour of some of that line's users, it is unlikely that many Bondi Beach residents will welcome the promised extension any time soon. Rees said on Sunday that he understood why people were ``sceptical'' about government promises, adding, ``they have a right to be''. He is a master of the understatement. Being sceptical is to tend not to believe, to question. The people of NSW don't just tend not to believe their government. They do not believe it, and nor should they. History may show that there have been other governments with as poor a record as the Carr-Iemma-Rees outfit, but it is hard to find one in living memory. Rees, as water minister, was responsible for the contract for the Kurnell desalination plant, a white elephant of the first order. The Premier's legacy as emergency services minister is one of continuing disharmony and growing threats of unionisation to the volunteer services. His predecessor, Iemma, presided over the trashing of the state's hospitals and the running down of their professional staff under a disgracefully politicised area health service management. (The standard of health care is now to get even worse as the Rudd federal Labor government initiates a scheme of secondary care providers supposedly to relieve doctors of some of their workload. A better plan would have been to reduce the amount of paper work doctors are now required to submit). Almost every state department has its scandals, from the staggering increase in numbers of children who died though known to the Department of Community Services, to the lack of improvement in children's numeracy and literacy revealed in the recent Auditor General's report, but the State Government under Rees shows little sign of departing from the practices established under his predecessors. One of the latest of this succession of Labor premiers' first acts was to ensure that his sponsors in the trade union movement retained control of the state's ailing railway department. That was not the act of a man determined to provide hope to an embattled commuting public. Rees has said: ``I won't make a promise I can't keep.'' That statement, if it was a promise, is likely to be as elusive when the next election is held in 2011, as the railway projects unveiled by Carr 10 years ago. However, as most of State Labor's spin meisters have now fled to Canberra to assist Rudd, will NSW voters be as easy to fool in 2011 as they have shown to be in the past four elections?