NSW Goes To The Polls And The Incumbent Wins

Less Polemical, More Brouhaha

Oh well. You know how it goes, you get up early in the morning after a rough night and trudge down to the booth to cast your vote. The Lower House is a short ballot with like 6 names on it while the Upper House is like a beach towel. The good thing about the NSW electoral process is you just have to put in a 1 for  1 box forth your voting. Given that this is an era of micro-parties trading preferences, the Upper House places demands upon you to either go through the whole damn ballot or pick a rough guesstimate and just vote '1' there.

Anyway... this being NSW politics, nobody was sending Tony Abbott any messages that I could tell. Stark was the contrast where most people just didn't talk about policy - not even the privatisation infer - and simply obliged to their electoral duty of simply voting. No polemical voices, no argy-bargy in the waiting lines like the 2005 Federal election when Mark Latham was running with actual policies. No, this was a snoozer despite the dramatic termination of the one-term coalition governments in Victoria and Queensland.

The local booths at the infants school had 10 people handing out leaflets for our local incumbent MP John Sidoti, with just 1 ALP dude sheepishly handing out his how-to-vote leaflet. The Greens weren't even there. It's tough in NSW where we are still reeling from the days of Eddie's "Morbid Obeidity". It's hard to go back and vote for the ALP as you wonder, have they really reformed enough to not let that crap happen again? Well, the ballot was too awful contemplate reading so I simply put my number 1 on both ballots and shoved them in the boxes as quickly as I could.

Even though Mike Baird is as clean as cleanskins come, the Liberals are still this bunch of conservative prats. He's going to win and he will proceed with the electricity privatisation. Then he'll hand over the proceeds from the sale to a bunch of Nick Greiner cronies to build WasteCONnex.

In the absence of a fundamental difference in what they will do with the WasteCONnex proposal, you have to surmise that the ALP would be doing this by going into debt some more while WasteCONnex is the central reason for privatising electricity in NSW for the Coalition. You sort of wonder if you could have any hope with either major party of junking WasteCONnex and building a metro instead, but no. In this light, it seems incredibly futile to claim democracies solve anything. It's certainly screwing things up in NSW, and it's not even polarised like American politics.

The true shame of this election is that there is no real, pragmatic way to oppose the building of this monster tollway. Even the ALP says it will build the thing (to appease the construction workers and their union) but it won't put the interchange under St Peters - which is like saying he'll put a different shades lipstick on the same pig. But there's really no wiggle room for the ALP. I feel a little for Luke Foley who is now cleaning up the mess left behind John Robertson who mostly exacerbated the mess left behind Kristina Keneally. If you were in his shoes, getting out of the doghouse with the electorate is about as good as you can wing it.