Tool Of The Week and economic whiz kid, Michael Costa, culminated a long career of nutjob politics with a masterpiece this week - a privatisation proposal that reads like a suicide note.
The Privatisation of power in NSW is obviously Michael Costa’s cry for help.
Here is an incredibly disturbed man, wandering freely through corridors of power, bent only on self-destruction - and this time he’s taking us all with him.
The Privatisation of NSW Power assets - going by the guide of, say, every other jurisdiction in Australia or the known world - will be an unmitigated pain-in-the-sit-down-apparatus, if not regional scale disaster, for most, if not all, sentient beings. It will torpedo any chance of New South Wales maintaining a first world electricity system.
This act of public policy self-immolation crowns the public life of a man who has been obviously mad since he was sprouting Socialist Workers Party gibberish back in High School.
Of course, the Privatisation is just a ruse, a kind of brandishing of the weapon in the public space - it throws many into fear, if not panic, but he hasn’t started shooting yet.
The problem with Michael Costa is that he needs a hug.
But this hard-arsed Cypriot ever had time for hugs; he was too busy being a ‘tough bloke’.
He was a tough bloke when he dropped out of his scary-bourgeoisie university life and entered his homo-erotic fantasy world at Garden Island, working as a rigger and helping the logs over at the Federated Ironworkers Association talk themselves into irrelevance or the Australian Workers Union (which is pretty much the same thing).
He carried that tough bloke persona right through his days in the eighties as a trainee Train Driver - when he never did quite get to understand how to drive a train, or living in Emu Plains - but managed to nobble the militant leadership of the train drivers union in his ‘spare time’.
From the train driver’s union to his rise to be secretary of the Worker’s Parliament, the Labor Council, his record is an outstanding one. One of qualification, fixing, nobbling, deal making, haranguing of rank-and-file, and sausage fingered diplomacy.
If his job was to marginalise and prostitute organised labour in NSW he succeeded beyond his wildest dreams.
He appointed such star performers as Michael Gadiel (who marries for a living) and contracting out ‘communications’ to that unctuous, wannabe lad carpetbagger, Peter Lewis.
John Robertson changed more about the union movement in NSW than the name when he picked up the pieces afterwards.
While Unions NSW goes from strength to strength, our Tool of the Week prides himself on posturing his small minded, dumb-as-a-box-of-hammers, try-hard red-neckery as a type of anti-politician. Unfortunately it delivers the sort of policy outcomes that leave the very people purports to speak for bent over the bonnet with their pants around their ankles.
His ‘elevation’ to the NSW Ministry is a fine example of the Peter Principle in full flight.
This incompetent log enjoyed election day baiting a female greens booth worker with former NRL Player Mark Sargent as muscle.
Real brave, pal.
But the man who put ‘maniac’ into ‘megalomaniac’ left no doubt where his political sympathies lay come the recent Federal Election, bragging that:
“I struck up a reasonable relationship with people from [Liberal MP] Bob Baldwin's office; we got on very well. We were offering each other water and other benefits but I will not tell members what they were.”
Here is a trot who has gone on a political trajectory in life that started in the hard left, moved through the labour movement and is now off having a pipe with right-wing nutters like the Liberal MHR for Paterson, Bob Baldwin. The only problem being that Curly got stuck in the NSW Cabinet on his way through, and decided he liked the Living Away From Home Allowance. You’ll need a crowbar to shift this log now.
The thing about Costa is that he’s stuck in an eighties tribal siege mindset of those members of the NSW Right that were never too bright to begin with anyway.
While he likes to spin the smart spiv smartarse persona, the reality is he’s an insecure little joker, way out of his depth, that thinks that he has to keep being a bastard to have any sense of meaning in his life.
After all, he’s a big fan of cars, and we all know about men who like fast cars.
The outshot is that, unless he gets a size nine in the sit-down apparatus from some more decently minded people around the labour movement - and soon, then our creaking power infrastructure is going to unravel remarkable quickly and inconveniently in the midterm. The good news is it's not too late.
The bad news is that all Fatty O’Barrell has to do to be the next Premier of NSW is put his pants on right way round each morning for the next two and a half years
And as for our Tool Of The Week, well, I hear they’re still looking for train drivers in NSW.
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