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.

Core Business

More foaming at the mouth from our Tool Of The Week Michael Costa, who has suggested that unions should get out of the way of his plan to sell us all down the river regarding power privatisation. In a unique take on logic and consistency Costa has suggested that unions should concentrate on their 'core business', which he describes as looking after wages and conditions. Well, if protecting the livelihoods and working standards of everyone who uses 240 volts in their day-to-day lives isn't core union business then I give up. And this advice is a bit rich coming from the bloke who decided that, when he ran the union movement, it's core businesses should include property development, financial management, think tanks, hiring useless spin-doctors like the North Shore carpetbagger Peter Lewis* or selling out public sector workers and even the public transport industry itself. Costa is worse than a clown, he's an incompetent clown, whose legacy to this state is abysmal. And if Curly thinks that putting everyone in the state's sensitive nether regions in a G Clamp is either smart or of economic use to anyone then the man is more deranged than we first thought. When will the state of New South Wales stop having to pay for the fact that poor little Michaerl Coista was picked on in the playground in Newcastle all those years ago. * - Another stunning contribution from that impotent carpetbagger, Peter Lewis, who has managed to shake down working people across NSW through his McCampoign vehicle Essential Research, who have found out what visually impaired Freddy could have told them for free - people think electricity privatisation stinks like five day old fish. Nice one Pete. What's your next trick? You gonna find out what direction the sun comes up in morning?

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.