Never forget the rotten NSW Labor government

IT’S worth remembering the dark days of the NSW Labor government as Bill Shorten tries to take one of its remnants, Kristina Keneally, to Canberra, writes Miranda Devine.

BILL Shorten loves having photogenic blondes by his side, gushing over him.

But he doesn’t have a clue about NSW, since his latest “girl”, as he charmingly describes Kristina Keneally, his candidate for the Bennelong by-election, carries political baggage none of us can forget.

The former NSW premier has the hide to condemn the Turnbull government as “awful”, when the Labor government whose clapped-out rear she brought up was a corrupted, rotten joke, thrown out of office in 2011 in the worst political defeat in Australia’s post-war history.

The state by that time had endured 16 downhill years of Labor — more than most people get for murder. We had the highest unemployment rate and lowest economic growth of any state, and rated worst on everything from urban congestion to governance.

You really had to live through those years to understand how bad the NSW government was: a parade of venal misfits and perverts masquerading as ministers of the Crown, an uninterrupted stream of scandals, expensive policy reversals and leadership crises.

Keneally didn’t oversee it all, of course, just the final 15 months, but she volunteered to be the last puppet premier of Eddie Obeid, the former Labor powerbroker now serving three years in jail for misconduct in public office. Obeid and sidekick Joe Tripodi previously had ousted the popularly-elected Premier Morris Iemma and installed former garbo Nathan Rees in his place.

But they quickly tired of Rees and replaced him with Keneally.

In his last angry press conference in December, 2009, Rees declared: “Should I not be premier by the end of this day, let there be no doubt… that any challenger will be a puppet of Eddie Obeid and Joe Tripodi.”

Keneally was premier within hours and, in classic Freudian denial, declared: “I’m nobody’s puppet, I’m nobody’s protege, I’m nobody’s girl.”

Nobody bought it.

Former NSW State Labor minister Eddie Obeid stands outside during a tea break in his trial at the NSW Supreme Court in Sydney last year. (Pic: David Moir/AAP)

Days later she brought back into cabinet Obeid crony Ian Macdonald and gave him responsibility for state and regional development. He’s currently serving 10 years in jail for misconduct in public office.

Keneally has since reinvented herself as a likeable media performer, hosting shows on Sky News and writing columns for The Guardian blasting the Turnbull government and demanding they “bring the refugees to Australia”.

The Las Vegas-born self-­described “Catholic feminist” is quick to condemn others but is notoriously thin-skinned.

She has used legal threats against Sky News colleagues who have mentioned her political past. I also copped legal letters over a column pointing out inconsistencies in her attacks on Cardinal George Pell.

She had lauded as “brilliant” Tim Minchin’s song abusing Pell as “scum”, and expressed scepticism about Pell’s testimony to the child sex abuse royal commission that as a junior priest in Ballarat he was unaware of the activities of paedophile priest Gerald Ridsdale.

Yet when I made the comparison between Pell’s expressed ignorance of wrongdoing in Ballarat and Keneally’s ignorance of the activities of her paedophile fellow Labor MP Milton Orkopoulos, she headed for the lawyers.

Orkopoulos, a predatory Aboriginal affairs minister, was jailed for 13 years in 2008 for child sexual abuse, almost a year before Keneally became premier, and I made clear she had no involvement in his activities or knowledge of them before his arrest, while noting she did not offer Pell the same benefit of the doubt.

Within days of Keneally becoming premier in 2009, Gillian Sneddon, Orkopoulos’ former electorate officer, who dobbed him into police, and another staffer, Linda Michalak, wrote to her pleading for help.

Kristina Keneally and Bill Shorten in Bennelong. (Pic: Dylan Robinson)

Sneddon, a single mother, had lost her job the day she testified against Orkopoulos. She was ostracised by the Labor Party, and years later would be awarded $400,000 after suing the NSW government for bullying and harassment.

In her letter, dated December 16, 2009, Michalak spelled out to Keneally’s office how Sneddon had been victimised since she had blown the whistle on Orkopoulos.

“Gillian and I … thought that as a strong woman and a mother (Keneally) could not ignore a plea for justice for a person in such a dreadful situation which had come about simply because she did what the (royal) commission has been complaining that no one in the Catholic Church did — passed on the complaints of victims and probative evidence to the police.

“The letter is quite detailed, so there would be no confusion about exactly what we were talking about.”

What did Keneally do? “Absolutely nothing,” said Linda.

Today Keneally, flanked by Shorten at media events in Bennelong, dismisses questions about her past as sexism or Turnbull’s “obsession”.

But there’s a Pandora’s box of memories in NSW that can’t be erased as easily as a Twitter history.

The night he installed Keneally as premier, Obeid had a party in his office and his guest of honour was Shorten, coming from his home state of Victoria to pay homage to the “NSW disease”.

Shorten learned well. A little more than a decade later he would drive the same amoral, poll-driven, marketing-obsessed Labor machine to kill off the democratically elected prime minister Kevin Rudd and install Julia Gillard.

Both Rudd and John Howard this week identified that moment as the start of the “cancer” still infecting Canberra and damaging our ­country.

But its prototype was Obeid’s installation of Keneally, and all Shorten has done in Bennelong is to remind us that he’s been in the thick of it all along.