Beware the faceless men of NSW

IF ever you needed proof that use of the word "community" is more often than not a political con, it came on Friday when NSW Corrective Services Minister, John Robertson, informed us that the NSW Labor Government had killed its proposal to privatise Cessnock Jail.

Robertson said the decision was taken "because of approaches from the community". Then he elaborated some more and we discovered that "community" was code for "approaches from local ALP members".

Spin has successfully replaced substance for so long in NSW that you can hardly blame Robertson for trying it on one more time. But by now there can no longer be a sliver of doubt that NSW is governed - not by the elected NSW Labor Government - but by forces behind the scenes. Here is yet another instance of the Labor government doing what Labor's union-dominated administrative committee told it to do.

And it does not end there, of course. As Alex Mitchell lamented in the Australian Financial Review a few weeks ago, "NSW is no longer administered by a traditional state government - it is ruled by a party political machine, the NSW branch of the ALP. In the past there was a discreet separation between the party organisation and the parliamentary party, but this is no longer the case." In short, Mitchell concluded, "the pernicious culture of Sussex Street has advanced on Macquarie Street, the seat of government and taken charge".

As Robertson revealed on Friday when he dumped plans to privatise Cessnock Prison, the NSW Labor Government is but a pawn, a cipher in the hands of the unelected people who really run the state. Images came flooding back of the legendary photographs of Arthur Calwell and Gough Whitlam when they waited outside a meeting of the "36 faceless men" from the ALP national executive for their riding instructions to be delivered to them by the powers that be.

This anti-democratic surrender to the modern version of a dictatorship of the proletariat would perhaps be more palatable if Sussex Street - and the unions - paid even the slightest lip service to good policy, to the old-fashioned idea of governing in the interests of all of us. Even former MSW Premier Bob Carr has now publicly revealed that unions have long stood in the way of good policy in NSW.

As reported in Saturday's Sydney Morning Herald, Carr admitted that the failure to privatise the electricity industry in 1997 when he was Premier was a disaster for the state. The sale of the electricity industry would, according to Carr, have realised $25 billion or more and would have "resulted in the retirement of all the state's debt". That would have meant "the creation of a huge pool for investment in infrastructure". However, the vested interests of unions trumped sound policy in 1997 - and again in 2008 - when the privatisation was duly knocked on the head by more faceless men at the state Labor conference. Building new and better railways, roads, schools and hospitals for the benefit of all of us in the community took second place to the ALP's desire to keep its union paymasters happy. An elected Premier and Treasurer were told who ran the show - and for whose benefit - and they obliged.

As heartening as it is to hear from Carr now, it would have been better for NSW if the former Premier blown the whistle many years ago. Had that happened, NSW might not now be the sick man of the Australian states.

Over to you ...