Tool Of The Week: There Is No I In Iemma

Tool Of The Week Maurice Iemma is now making Barry Unsworth look like David Beckham.

Unsworth, of course, was the laughable log swept away by the Greiner landslide in 1988, when the ALP received swings against it of up to 25%.

On a positive note, Iemma is doing a spectacular job in filling the void left by the hopeless incompetence of the late Howard administration.

Just when we were thinking we’d miss the bumbling keystone cops performance of Julie Bishop, Kevin Andrews, Philip Ruddock and Tony Abbott, along comes the star team of Joe Tripodi, Reba Meagher, John Hurtzhisgoats and Michael “Doctor Evil” Costa.

And, as the Omo commercial says, just look at the results!

People dropping foetuses in hospital toilets, ships getting the OK to park on beaches, cops with a vague understanding of the rule of law and the state’s electricity network put on eBay for the highest bidder to snap up.

Which doesn’t even cover the sterling state of transport in a city gridlocked by pay-as-you-go freeways; trains that are dangerous, filthy and unreliable; buses that are overcrowded and even more unreliable and a ferry service that is about to be flogged off to the Pirates of Penzance.

The problem with Iemma is that he has too many number one priorities.

He inherited Job Creation as the “number one priority” of the Carr Government - itself a wilfully useless administration run by an egomaniacal weirdo who was half nerd, half spin-doctor android that left the mess we have inherited today.

Actually, you wouldn’t have thought that Iemma could have done any worse than Carr at first glance, but it’s a tribute to his incompetence that he has managed to wreak further damage and continue to lower public administration standards even further.

Of course the man who replaced public accountability with spin and schmoozing while the state went to hell in a handbasket had already run through education, police numbers and crime as various number one priorities in his time.

After the state election Morris Iemma was to make public transport a number one priority - the result being that public transport got infinitely worse, with a part of that number one priority - ferries - to be sold off.

Certainly selling something is a unique take on making it a priority - and extraordinary evidence of a complete absence of responsibility to not only the people who he is responsible to, the citizens of NSW, but even to his job, his legacy and himself.

By December 2007 he had narrowed down his number one priority to commuters. No doubt preparing to sell them somewhere - down the river no doubt - before too long.

The New Year dawned with a new number one priority - health. With Morris playing a straight man to the Jerry Lewis performance of the Turrumurra girl who doesn’t even like the area she represents, Reba Meagher the member for Cabramatta - who believes that politics is about getting power and, ahh, getting power and, ummm, power apparently.

The reality is that Maurice Iemma has taken public administration to a low not seen for a century.

We have to go back about a hundred years ago, to the days of Paddy Crick to find someone as willfully and incompetently corrupt as Iemma - and at least Paddy Crick got thrown out of parliament after urinating in the corner of the parliamentary chamber.

The reality is that Iemma’s real number one priority is the same it has been since the days in the eighties when he joined Young Labor. His number one priority has been his own personal self-aggrandizement, regardless of how far his abilities fall short of his responsibilities

Like his mates Reba Meagher and Joe Tripodi, little Maurice believed in nothing then, and he believes in nothing now.

He put on his furious face when Stephen Chaytor, the state member for Macquarie Fields, was accused of domestic violence, throwing Chaytor out of the party and saying he had a zero tolerance to domestic violence.

Curiously though when similar allegations were aimed at Blue Mountains MP Phil Koperberg all Iemma could do was mumble a press release. Some are obviously more equal than others.

Another shining example of the competence, consistency and intellectual gymnastics of the man who stands for nothing, does nothing and still manages to screw things up monumentally.

His latest brain explosion surrounds the rather novel idea that we will be better off if we lease off our power assets to people motivated purely by profit. It’s an extraordinarily feeble argument that we will expect people to do good when they are motivated by the most loathsome of motives. That a privatized power generator will somehow do all sorts of wonderful things despite the fact that it has been a screaming disaster in every single jurisdiction where power privatization has been implemented.

The cleverest and most decent thing that Iemma could do is resign and get a job driving a courier van, which he may be ideally suited for - given that he appears to be motivated primarily by what the last journalist told him.

Then we can hand executive power over to the person who really runs NSW, the former front man for Adelaide band Cerveza Y Putas (Spanish for Beer And Wh*res), Daily Telegraph Editor David Pemberthy.