The Honourable Member's position becomes untenable

The Hon. Karen Paluzanno, Member for Penrith is gone.

She was installed into the state seat of Penrith by the NUW's mad NSW secretary Derek Belan in 2001, replacing Fay Lupo of the Ross Free do-nothing generation of suburban right wingers in NSW.

Belan's range wars in the NSW ALP are part of his ambitious strategy to take over the TWU members in the logistics industry (what used to be known as the trucking industry, but now includes warehousing and some rail).  They did it at the Pura Milk factory in Penrith, and god knows, the Transport Industry sure is disorganised outside of Concrete, Armoured Vans and private bus companies.

Belan's other good mate is The Hon. Paul Gibson, MLA for Blacktown. The tip is that Gibbo will give way for John Robertson MLC, Mr Your Rights At Work. Robbo then descends from the skies in 2013 and saves us from the unravelling mess that is the Baird government, or so the story goes.

A byelection in Penrith now would make Bass look like a mild murmur (all you psephologists out there can Google "1975 Bass Byelection", it will keep you amused for hours).

My tip? She gets kicked out of the ALP [In breaking news since this was written, that's precisely what Walt Secor...err, Kristina Keneally has done.] and sits as an Independent before quietly shuffling off to be a radiologist, as she has claimed before. 

Paluzanno actually used to be a teacher of children with difficulties, something that is well needed in this community. She was a Member of the Teachers Federation when she attended the 2004 ALP National Conference. She won preselection for Penrith in a deal that saw the intellectual colossus that is the Hon Dianne Beamer, Member for Mulgoa, selected for the adjacent seat.

Two stories about Paluzanno:

My mate Lee, a blackfella from Penrith, texts me in the weeks before the March 2007 Iemma state election, the last one. Paluzanno not keen 4 my vote. Lee had walked past her outside Penrith train station three times trying to get the flyer she is handing out to commuters. She ignored him each time.

Later in 2007 Iemma and Costa are trying to force electricity privatisation through at the behest of the NSW Treasury and ratings agency Standard and Poors (the ones that rated CDOs as AAA). Campaigners are encouraging people opposed to the privatisation to make an appointment with their local MP to press the issue. Paluzanno told a lovely old couple from Leonay that she "would have to check with the union" before she could say how she would vote on the matter.

She meant the NUW, but either way it's not a good look.

I wouldn't want to be the bloke who tipped the bucket, Tim Horan. He certainly isn't inside the tent pissing out. I wouldn't be surprised if he shows up again. He has admitted that revenge was at least "in the back of mind" - as pure as the driven snow. The office juniors caught up in this are desperately trying to lump it all on "Honest Tim" Horan.

What a useless situation.

It's bloody sad that an area that is so desperately in need of good representation because of the many problems that afflict it will probably end up with Stuart Ayres, Liberal candidate for Penrith

Barry O breathed out when he got onto 2UE. "My office was audited last year and the good news is we got a clean bill of health," he said. Which sounds alarmingly like "they didn't catch us this time".

Certainly, Paluzanno is unloved and won't be missed (read comments).  but there is one way out for the ALP in Penrith: Greg Alexander. lA good Catholic boy from St Dominic's Kingswood (Before he was poached from the Christian Brothers). He grew up in Cranebrook when it was still bush. At least then Penrith's next do-nothing MP will be well known.

Kristina should get onto Georgie Boy Pell and put the squeeze on Bucky Alexander's eternal testicles.

The Micks are good at that sort of thing. I know. I used to be one.

Julia Gillard is to the left…of Attila the Hun

m blcahb vlkbak v

Great piece at En Passant

Spot on this stuff. Gillard, like her factional soul mate Mar'n Ferguson, act solely in the interests of the big end of town and devil take the hindmost. They would do the H.R. Nicholls Society proud. Ferguson was in the Sydney Morning Herald saying we needed more immigration or, shock horror, wages might go up! Can't have that old chap, think of what it would do with dividends! Send a bad signal to the market and all that.

The structural problem is the luvvies in the union movement share Gillard's understanding the reality for most Australians, i.e. none. Most union officials and Julia have never had a real job in their lives (and no, being a lawyer is not a real job). Gillard's laws slash take home pay for aged care and hospitality staff (real jobs) - the ACTU's response? They run a campaign against Tony Abbott. Cde Burrow is about to swan off to Brussels and is so star struck by Gillard that the union movement has reverted to type: acting like a beaten dog that keeps coming back for more treatment from its "master", in this case the ALP. 

Meanwhile the rest of us that live in the real world are left to our own devices in order to survive.

Electoral politics is a joke. We live in a corporate and technocratic totalitarianism that is so seamless that most people cannot even think outside it. Orwell would marvel at how cleverly it all works to enrich so few.

And it will continue to be such, especially when most media commentary is such a craven repetition of the status quo see Kohler, Grattan, Oakes, et al - useless, the lot of them). 

My advice? Take to strong drink.

Lousy value for money

Dean Mighell was in the news. The Victorian Secretary of the Electrical Trades Union upstaged no lesser personage than Kevin Rudd, on talkback radio in Melbourne.

Those that care about such things will no doubt know the story. For those that came in late, a woman caller to (I think) the Neil Mitchell show was in tears with fear about what could happen to her.

She had insulation installed in her roof and was worried the whole place could go up in flames.

Rudd proffered an emergency response number. She said she’d tried that and it was unhelpful (fancy that, an unhelpful call centre. Who could have thought there’d be such a thing). In fact, they were more concerned about whether she owed them money.

Rudd is promising everything except going around there himself, when it emerges that the good Mister Mighell, a licensed electrician, had arranged to check to see if her insulation was safe. Militant unionist 1. Technocrat hack 0.

Mighell popped up in the Fairfax papers around the same time with an op-ed piece about whether the union movement should keep its links to the ALP. It’s an interesting point, but first some clarification.

One; the ALP was founded by the union movement around 120 years ago after a period of rapid growth in unionism hit a brick wall in the early 1890s when the Victorian land price bubble burst and the floor price of labour collapsed.

Two, not all unions thought tying themselves to a political party was a good idea, and even today most unions aren’t affiliated to the ALP.

Three, from the get-go the parliamentary ALP has tended to pretty much ignore the agenda of the organised labour movement. The primary relationship has been one of personnel. The union movement has employed most ALP politicians at some stage.

This is not to say that those politicians have ever been particularly attached to the principles of the union movement, it’s just that there is a strong history of partiality around unions when it comes to their employment selection practices.

That said, the links between the ALP and trade unions are pretty strong, in a networking rather than policy sense.

Which is why most of the leadership of the ACTU have been largely silent while Julia Gillard is, in reality, cutting wages for hospitality and care workers (amongst others) under the banner of Award Simplification.

Gillard, as she is good at, plays the clever lawyer and argues that it is possible for employees to negotiate their way out of a pay cut. But wasn’t that the whole point about why WorkChoices was bad? That people were expected to have to negotiate a solution rather than having the protection of an Industrial Award?

But the ACTU wants to be seen as a ‘team player’ in the eyes of their ‘friends’ in Canberra. The wooden Jeff Lawrence had a minor whine about it, Sharon Burrow doesn’t want to criticise her buddy Julia. So the whole situation has been largely ignored.

The problem is probably a lot bigger than the few news articles that have covered it would suggest. After all, these are people at the bottom of the labour market, so who really gives a shit?

I am meeting people caught up in it. Anecdotally, the vast majority are un-unionised casuals, so they just suck it up and wonder why Kevin Rudd is doing what John Howard did.

Unions that aren’t affected by it seem to be rather indifferent to the plight of these workers. The ‘I’m all right Jack’ principle is ascendant in the modern labour movement.

But most union officials must be, at the very least, slightly uneasy about how things have panned out. Wasn’t the Your Rights At Work campaign supposed to do away with the assault on working conditions at the perennially soft bottom end of the labour market?

A few things have improved, but there are also a large number of people who are still missing out. This is especially true of the unskilled, the casual and young people – the people who were at the pointy end of WorkChoices. The same people who got screwed under the Keating/Hawke reforms.

After the disaster of the Latham campaign, the Union movement knew it needed to get rid of Howard. So they brought in a PR firm, Essential Media Communications, to advise on creating a grass roots campaign. It’s called astroturfing, and it worked a treat.

Your Rights At Work got rid of John Howard, so after November 2007 it was allowed to fizzle, splutter and die.

Sure, there were a few half-arsed campaigns with little or no follow through at the local level and the odd mass email just to keep up appearances, but the union movement was never really serious about creating an ongoing community campaign.

The reality is that the union movement couldn’t organise its way to the shops, which is why they brought in the consultants.

How do I know this? I worked on the Your Rights At Work campaign.

This pattern is continuing with some unions now getting a contractor to do core union work – signing up new members.

In terms of creating a solid protection for working conditions the Your Rights At Work campaign failed. All it did was elect Rudd. Forget all the dribble about Kevin 07 and climate change, the only game in town in November 2007 was Your Rights At Work – it shifted tens of thousands of votes to the ALP where it mattered.

But it didn’t protect Award conditions – Julia Gillard’s Award ‘simplification’ is taking working conditions away. People that were screwed under WorkChoices will be screwed under Fair Work Australia.

Mighell is right; the union movement would be better off if it wasn’t just a work-experience factory for ALP staffers and would-be politicians.

The Liberal Party likes to foam at the mouth about the amount of money the union movement gives to the ALP, but they miss the point.

Most of this money is simply club membership to keep the union movement inside the tent pissing out. The politicians always end up playing the ACTU and their affiliates like a violin.

Club-busters like Mighell will go nowhere in the union movement, which is built on a scared rabbit inward, defensive, almost paranoid, consensus that totally misunderstands the nature of modern society.

In the meantime the money the union movement gives to the ALP, so that the Rudd government can keep kicking working stiffs like you and I, is pretty obviously lousy value. That is if the union movement’s core mission is to protect working rights, as opposed to getting on in politics.

Don’t get me wrong; this is far from an endorsement of the Liberals – especially under Abbott. It is merely pointing out that neither of the major parties are seriously interested in the lot of working stiffs as anything more than ballot fodder, and as consuming machines to keep the big mortgage holding banks and retailers happy.

Outside of that the government, whoever is in power, is hell bent on crunching down the price of labour. In a service-based economy where you don’t need anyone with too many brains or skills it spells bad news for future living standards for the majority of us.

Now, if we had a union movement that was prepared to oppose this economic ‘consensus’ - as Mighell suggests - the prospects for my friends working bar, waiting table and wiping old folks arses would be brighter.

As it stands, they are screwed whoever wins this election.

Rupert Loves Kristina

A funny thing is happening in NSW. The News Limited stable is having a love affair with the latest ALP Premier Kristina Keneally.

Witness this

Simultaneously, over at the thinking right wing lunatic’s newspaper, the Australian, Liberal opposition leader, Barry O’Farrell is getting beaten about the head and neck for being, well, Barry.

A Canberra media source has suggested that Rupert likes to back winners, and perhaps News see Kristina as a winner.

An alternative reading may suggest that there’s a contra deal going on here. If so, what is News Limited getting for their gushing coverage? It’s a scary thought. Time to bury the silverware.

There is a genuine liking out in the community for Keneally. Her ‘li’l ole me’ routine is working a treat; as is the super-mum thing. The less said about the MILF factor (although it has to be acknowledged) the better. All of it is bullshit of course, but the public enemy number one running Kristina, Premier’s Department head Walt Secord (who did the same job for that equally talentless fluff, Bob Carr), at least has something to work with this time.

It’s not just News either. The Parrott was in on the act, reminding his listeners on Monday January 18 what an intellect Miss Ohio was, and how she bikes to work, performs miracles, etc. etc.

If News Limited think Kristina can survive it’s also assuming the ALP is going to survive, which is not beyond the realm of possibility, just beyond the realms of sanity. Maybe they’re just happy that Hamlet of Macquarie Street, Nathan Rees, is gone? Whatever it is, it sure is weird.

The psephologist’s psephologist, Antony Green pointed out that Rees received a similar (though marginally less impressive) bounce [link] when he ascended to the right hand of Joe Tripodi. None of that bounce flowed through to improving the ALP’s vote though and in the end he was bumped, along with his minder, Graeme Wedderburn, who was proving to be a looming problem come the ALP senate preselection.

So News, and Alan, may want to be careful. Preferred leader polls are always a beauty contest and have little to do with voting intention. Keating was preferred Prime Minister right up to election day in ’96 – and that ended up with the ALP wandering the streets crying “bring out your dead”.

Likewise, the primary vote numbers in the poll that prompted the WE LOVE KRISTINA headlines still has the ALP lying in a ditch with flies buzzing around its eyes.

She is also stuck with a team that is the end result of three generations of nepotistic inbreeding. None of those jokers have had an original idea since the Golden Palace in Sussex Street last changed it’s menu back in 1984.

What will be of greater concern for the Tyke Keneally will be the release of the attempted papicide, Mehmet Ali Agca.

Kristina is a good Catholic Girl – Quiet up the back! – and must be terrified at the thought of the guy who tried to kill the pope, who has God’s mobile number on speed-dial, being welcomed back into society, a la Denis Ferguson.

Ole Memsy is loose on the streets of Ankara, offering to kill Osama Bin Laden and declaring himself Messiah.

Such delusional antics prompt an idea that Mehmet is fine material to be the next Premier of NSW. Bob Carr is living proof that Mehmet wouldn’t be the first character the major parties have thrown up who came with his very own Messiah complex.

(Methuselah would like to declare that he is a former altar boy, and as such will have three Bloody Mary’s and a How’s Your Father as penance.)

John Della-Bosca's Election Adventure

Mr John Della-Bosca, the St George boy who made the seachange to Woy Woy Bay, has been in the news lately - which prompts me to republish a piece from ten years ago that features a bit of history regarding Della and his partner Ms Neal, and a bit of nostalgia for old times that some may find interesting.

JOHN DELLA-BOSCA’S ELECTION ADVENTURE

October 1998.

When Kim Beazley gave his address to the party faithful on election night he went out of his way to single out for praise the General Secretary of the New South Wales Branch of the ALP, Mr John Della-Bosca. This was the first clue that Mr. Della-Bosca himself was already at the forefront of discussion within the ALP.

The praise itself was extraordinary. The ALP had performed remarkably well in Queensland and Western Australia, and had achieved a clean sweep in Tasmania, yet if there was ever an area where they stumbled it was in the marginal seats in the big eastern states. Della-Bosca, whose branch picked up a mere two seats, is elevated above the more successful party structures of the smaller states. What is going on?

The divisions within the ALP that coalesced around John Della-Bosca have an interesting history. Their public manifestation reveals the increasing stresses, external and internal, that face the dominant right wing faction in NSW.

The internal pressures publicly appeared in the once all powerful faction a few years ago with the formation of the so-called ‘Terrigals’ - a faction within the right that likes to see itself as more sophisticated than the more traditional right-wing supporters in NSW, known as the Trogs. It’s greatest success was gaining the defection of the prominent left-winger Peter Knight, now the NSW Olympics Minister [and what a success he was!].

That in itself was an indirect result of another problem that the faction faces - attracting bright young talent. There is a school of thought that Della-Bosca, and his deputy - Assistant Secretary Eric Rozendal, are not a patch on recent predecessors such as Stephen Loosely and Graeme Richardson, even in purely administrative terms. While there are many in both the faction and the broader party that are relieved that the right no longer relies on individuals like Tom Domican and institutions like the Balmain Welding Company, there hasn’t been the convincing replacement of these traditional methods with a more forceful intellectual competence.

Graeme Richardson himself, along with former Keating staffer, Peter Barron, are also understood to be offside with Della-Bosca. This is primarily over the New South Wales Branch’s decision to dump their long term advertiser, John Singleton. But this conflict all gravitates back to Singleton’s mate Kerry Packer. So any moves by Richardson or Barron would receive little support from within the ALP.

Along with this has been a number of preselection battles among competing right wingers. These have primarily been at a state level but it also popped up in the federal seat of Lindsay.

The whole situation hasn’t been helped by loose cannons within the right. the obvious example is Mark Latham. An intellectually vain man, it begs the question of political intelligence for an individual to publicly attack a Federal Leader who has achieved arguably the parties greatest result short of winning government. In doing so he was trying to go into bat for Della-Bosca who was under criticism immediately after the election from outside of NSW as well.

The Left was able to harness Right Wing trade union support on the floor of the NSW ALP state conference in 1997 - thereby rolling the NSW governments electricity privatisation proposals. This was probably the most significant achievement of the Left in NSW since the introduction of Proportional Representation in internal ALP ballots in NSW in the early seventies. The position of Della-Bosca’s Sussex Street machine went down with that of the Premier, Bob Carr.

The unthinkable had happened. The NSW Right had been rolled.

The Left in NSW, through Damian O’Connor, the Assistant State Secretary in NSW, were able to use industrial links that had strengthened during the waterfront dispute. The industrial wing of the Labor movement in NSW noted the absence of Sussex Street apparatchiks in important areas of that dispute. It seemed strange politics for the Right that at a time when the political and industrial wings of the faction were splitting that the titular head of the Sussex Street machine, Della-Bosca, should alienate important sections of their own base. The influence of the Sussex Street machine has also been assailed from interstate in a dispute that has been described as the ‘Rugby League’ states versus the so called ‘Southern’ states. The primary focus of this opposition is the Victorian Right. But Robert Ray and his pals have little to crow about after their own branch’s dismal performance on October 3.

Which brings us back to the recent federal election. Della-Bosca had criticisms of his own, especially about the ALP’s capital gains tax policy. Sources within the ALP revealed that Della-Bosca voiced such criticisms at NSW Branch Administrative Committee meetings immediately prior to the election. He has also described subsequent criticisms of himself as cowardly and challenged his detractors to come out publicly.

Della-Bosca has identified a whispering campaign against him that goes right to the top of the ALP. There are allegations that Kim Beazley made off the record comments about Della-Bosca while briefing journalists late in the campaign. A lot of the whispers surround Della-Bosca’s role in the campaign of his wife, the former senator for NSW Belinda Neal, in the marginal NSW seat of Robertson.

Robertson, which was held by former Hawke government minister Barry Cohen and NSW left-winger Frank Walker, covers the NSW Central Coast. Based on Gosford it is an area that in the last 10 years become the outer northern suburbs of Sydney.,

Della-Bosca and his wife, Neal, live in the seat. He was attracted to the area after working on the Peats By-election in the 80’s. Peats being a state seat wholly within the boundaries of Robertson based on the area around Woy Woy.

Neal’s pre-selection raised some interesting developments. The right propped up it’s support within the electorate by establishing the Peninsula Branch of the ALP, a daytime branch based on the Woy Woy/Ettalong/Umina area. The branch itself has been suspected of irregularities since it’s formation. The branch also appears to be remarkably close to the Catholic Parish of Woy Woy - raising the spectre of sectarian tensions that still linger beneath the surface of ALP, especially in areas like the Central Coast with a significant population of elderly retirees.

The NSW Branch Secretary was publicly accused by the Liberal State member for Gosford, Chris Hartcher, of focussing on Robertson in the latter part of the campaign to the detriment of the ALP’s broader NSW campaign. Hartcher slated Della-Bosca for ‘taking his eyes off the ball’, and said that the ALP had spent $75 000 on radio advertising alone during the final weeks of the campaign. Other local branch sources pointed to the highly personalised nature of the Neal campaign that focussed on the candidate with any mention of the ALP’s name being largely invisible. This also served to alienate the local party rank and file.

Other whispers emerged that the resources thrown into Robertson were greater than that thrown at other NSW marginal seats. Hughes and Lindsay, two of the other seats implied by these whispers, certainly faced the problem of unpopular or inadequate candidates, but Macquarie, Parramatta and Eden-Monaro are seats where extra resources may have changed outcomes, and where disaffection with Sussex Street may be harder to ameliorate.

Certainly Della-Bosca retains some powerful friends in senior ALP ranks, including Michael Lee and Laurie Brereton who will most certainly be in Beazley’s shadow cabinet, but the impact of all this tension may be harder for John Della-Bosca to deal with as a whole.

In all of it it’s hard to escape the fact that the once pivotal NSW Right is, through a combination of factors, on the slippery slope of internal division. The full extent of this may not be fully revealed until after the NSW state election, especially if the Carr government performs poorly,.

All in all it will make internal ALP politics less predictable in the months ahead. Even so, Della-Bosca’s position should be secure for now. Besides, Kim Beazley singled him out for praise on election night. I guess that this means he enjoys the opposition leaders total support.

Doesn’t it?

Of Course Beazley (and Latham) are long gone, and we now have a Federal ALP Government, and ten years have passed before we got to that. But the seeds of the devolution that is the Iemma Government can be seen here (cronyism, a lack of talent, hubris). The Iguanas incident is just fluff and nonsense, and Della Bosca may be one of the more capable members of Iemma's cabinet - but that isn't saying much. The greater issue is the sustainability of the ALP. Decades of self serving 'look at me' types rising like effluent to the surface of a very shallow gene pool have exposed something that may yet be terminal for Labor. As a party it attracts and promotes some of the worst types imaginable, with the populace as a whole suffering as a result. This is not the sole domain of the ALP. The Liberals have an equally dire problem on the talent front, especially at a state level. It's the logical end game of zero sum Machiavellian machine politics that dominate our major parties. This society faces some big problems, and fixers with their eye on the election cycle ain't gonna solve them. Exhibit A in this regard is Mr John Della Bosca. Thanks mate.

WorkChoices Is Dead; Long Live WorkChoices

In what is looming to be a tactical victory for the Rudd Government, with accidental benefits for working Australians, Kevin Rudd has made dismantling WorkChoices a "priority". The announcement came out of Yesterday's (December 18) Cabinet meeting, where the reality of the Your Rights At Work campaign must have been laid bare for even the technocrats to understand. The Liberals are, of course, all over the place on the issue. Wets like Chris Pyne are glad to see the back of it, while Joe Hockey has declared it "dead" -meanwhile The Dead Rev, Kevin Andrews, has sprung out of his coffin to declare that it's all the way with WorkChoices still. "[Is] what we believed was for the good of Australia is no longer the case," was The Dead Kevs rhetorical question, to which this blogger poses the rhetorical answer "was WorkChoices good for any country?". The answer, of course, being no. The wrong Kevin will discover that the people have spoken if he only refers to a copy of any newspaper dated on or after November 25. It's a brilliant bit of work by Rudd & Coy. The Libs will either be wedged and forever known as the party that backs paying 16 year olds $3 an hour, or they roll over and let his, admittedly limited, roll-back go through the senate. The Libs best bet is to refer it to a senate committee in the hope that some sections of the union movement use that as an opportunity to embarrass Rudd and Coy. and expose just how many problems for working people they are leaving on the statute books. The crux of the issue is that there is a great deal of WorkChoices that will remain - the prohibition on union right of entry being the most glaring one - while many other areas; such as unfair dismissal laws, prohibited award content and the Gestapo-like Building and Construction Commission; will receive a partial, limited and delayed roll-back, if at all. We won't be going back to the lifestyle our parents enjoyed. So the inexorable trudge towards a third world lifestyle continues apace. In twenty five years of employment I've had one paid vacation, and this will become the norm for my generation and those that come after. It's pretty obvious we're going backwards. While the Liberal Party wanted to kill organised labour it appears the modern ALP is happy to watch us die by the death of a thousand prohibitive sub-clauses. Wouldn't it be great if the unions got together and formed a party to act in the interests of working people? Oh, I see we've already tried that. Well, plan B anyone?

Tool Of The Week: Costa The Crazy Trot

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.

ALP Boss: It Was WorkChoices What Won It

ALP National campaign director Tim Gartrell's rather illuminating address to the National Press Club this week was remarkable for both what he said and what was illustrated by what he omitted. It wasn't a searingly frank assessment of the ALP campaign and I doubt anyone expected such from this 'disciplined' electoral machine. But he did mention, and go on to re-mention nine times, the WorkChoices laws. It was obviously central to the defeat of the Howard government, ranking above any other policy area he mentioned. It was the only distinct area of policy he identified apart from Interest Rates. The general thrust of his analysis is best summed up when he said "WorkChoices were attracting very large numbers of voters in the 45-65 age band who had previously voted for the Coalition", and "Labor’s messages about WorkChoices and industrial relations and ending the blame game in health crossed all demographic boundaries", or "Labor won seats with a high proportions of labourers - seats like Blair, Braddon, Flynn, Page and Wakefield but also in seats with high proportions of blue collar workers, including technicians and trades people, machinery operators and drivers". And why?

They were under financial pressure. They were worried about WorkChoices. They were worried about their kids’ future.

He also explodes another myth that can best be described as "what economic boom?"

What the Government didn’t understand was what Kevin Rudd knew – that people are doing it tough; particularly in outer-metropolitan and regional areas where our feedback was that family finances were tightening significantly.

This is where Gartrell's analysis gets interesting. Was it the ALP that led the community opposition to WorkChoices? Did the ALP run a two-year marginal seat campaign highlighting the impact of workchoices? Did the ALP create the groundswell of unease out there in the community that shifted votes? Of course not. That role was played by the community driven Your Rights At Work campaign, which Tim forgot to mention. He did mention that the ALP committed to getting rid of WorkChoices - except for unfair dismissal laws, prohibited content, comprehensive awards, union right of entry, etc. etc. I don't think Tim is an ostrich in the sense that so many of the media from another planet are. I think he knows damn well where and how that election was won, and it certainly wasn't from Centenary House. As he mentions in his concluding statements, this election was won because the ALP stood on the shoulders of others. Those 'others' where the thousands of people in the community who organised around the Your Rights At Work Campaign. Tim did a good job of explaining the trees to us - he just couldn't see the forest.