Despite talk of renewal, unions maintain stranglehold on NSW Labor

NEWCOMERS to Sydney find it difficult to put their finger on the problem. They cruise the harbour, enjoy the beaches and join the crowds in galleries, bars and restaurants. Yet with all the city has to offer, enough apparently, to enchant Oprah, visitors find it passing strange the locals are so down in the mouth.

Sydneysiders just a decade on from their Olympic glory are frustrated, embarrassed, even ashamed about aspects of their metropolis. The root cause of this malaise is no mystery; NSW is sick of its state government. The eagerness to dispense with the administration is palpable.

Mention the state's beautiful, energetic young premier, Kristina Keneally, and locals roll their eyes. According to the polls, almost 80 per cent of voters are about to cast their votes against her.

Sydneysiders are mad as hell. Their anger borders on the irrational at times, with every late bus, wayward taxi or under-cooked steak blamed on the state government.

Residents of Victoria and South Australia will know something of this feeling; it is redolent of the backlash against the Cain and Bannon governments in the early 1990s when those states were almost bankrupted. Yet the disenchantment of NSW this year is, in many ways, worse.

NSW Labor's financial mismanagement does not compare with those state bank disasters, although, to be sure, there has been much money wasted. Rather, in Sydney there is a sense that since the Olympics little has happened, opportunities have been squandered.

It is overlaid with resentment at various instances of incompetence, such as a city metro plan floated and axed at substantial cost, or a privatisation botched, again at heavy cost. There is also fury about poor transport infrastructure and services in a vast and growing suburbia. Much has been promised but little delivered.

Yet still this does not capture the public mood. People are antagonised further by the sense, as confessed by the Premier herself, that Labor has wielded power for its own ends rather than for the state.

And then there is the long list of shameful personal indiscretions and corruption scandals, a list that would test a novelist's imagination. Whether it's been rorted allowances, visits to brothels, dabbling in drugs or partying with mistresses, the shenanigans can no longer surprise the public. The evening news political reports are full of sleaze and drama.

The rest of Australia needs to understand all this lest they become confused by the election campaign that, after Opposition Leader Barry O'Farrell's official launch yesterday, is now in full swing. People in Perth or Melbourne may wonder why the plucky Premier who keeps talking about renewal is so unpopular. In NSW most people consider her the pretty face of an ugly, fetid political machine.

The aura is so bad in Sydney that it feels cruel dragging Prime Minister Julia Gillard into the fray; she does, after all, have sufficient problems of her own. A spokesman for Gillard says she "supports the re-election of the Keneally government".

That is a not an inspiring statement from a politician who needs to win the trust of voters. Most people in Sydney would view such a recommendation as a condemnation of the speaker's sanity. Better to attribute it to blind party loyalty.

"The Keneally government has been upfront with the voters of NSW," the statement continues, "and outlined a positive plan for NSW families that addresses issues confronting mums and dads, such as cost of living pressures." The spokesman says that although there are no details yet, the Prime Minister is looking forward to being involved in the campaign. I bet she is.

Even many traditional Labor voters seem eager to have the election defeat over and done with so they can rebuild their proud party. And that is where the Premier is failing in perhaps the only task where she could have left a mark.

With no chance of winning the election, Labor loyalists rightly expected her to try to prepare the party for renewal. The Premier must know this because she is talking the talk. "I was able to demand and deliver a wholesale clean out of parliamentary ranks," she told the National Press Club this month, "fresh faces, new ideas and a new team."

The facts don't back up this claim, however. Keneally and her factional backers have been successful in convincing more than 20 Labor MPs to exit the scene but the problem is that control of the party will remain in the same hands, the unions and the factions.

The union hard man who led the charge against electricity privatisation in 2008, bringing down premier Morris Iemma, is John Robertson. Recently, as an upper house MP and Transport Minister he's been party to a shambolic semi-privatisation of electricity. At this election, far from moving on, he is switching to the lower house where he is expected to replace Keneally as Labor leader. (The ballot shouldn't take long because there could be fewer than 20 Labor MPs in a parliament of 93.)

The other Right faction heavyweight, Treasurer Eric Roozendaal, who botched the electricity process, is No 1 on the upper house ticket. Also likely to take an upper house seat is former Construction Forestry Mining and Energy Union boss Andrew Ferguson, part of a family dynasty that includes federal MPs Martin and Laurie. Ferguson is a Left powerbroker who has been forced to deny serious allegations in court about alleged union kickbacks.

Former staffer Ryan Park is the candidate for the safe seat of Keira, replacing his former boss David Campbell; and the Premier's chief of staff Walt Secord is tipped to replace Eddie Obeid in the upper house as part of a factional deal.

So, on March 27, the day after what promises to be a historic election drubbing, the people left to rebuild Labor will be largely the same people who destroyed it.

All this is a gift for O'Farrell, the Liberal premier-in-waiting. The disdain for the government has given him a simple and effective battle cry (Make NSW No 1 again) and ensured his election victory.

At yesterday's launch he kept to that theme, unveiling the slogan "Real Change for NSW". Certainly a change of government is bound to lift the mood of despondency from Sydney, at least initially. The Coalition's challenge will be to capture that goodwill early to deliver some lasting achievements.

But if, as seems clear, NSW Labor in opposition is left in the same union and factional hands, the party will have a glum decade ahead in the nation's largest state. And Keneally's premiership will have amounted to nothing except a visit from Oprah.