Was it all a Ruse (endaal)?

Well this was predictable.

Many of you will remember the kerfuffle before the last state election about the future of Eric Roozendaal. Many believed that he would retire as soon as he qualified for his life-time pension (mid-2011 - only a few months after the election).

There was even a suggestion that the shambolic sale of the power assets was motivated (at least in part) by Roozendaal's desire to set up a cushy job post-election.

Naturally enough, Keneally faced a lot of questions about whether Roozendaal was going to disappear early. That all lead to this, from Keneally during the leaders debate:

Both those promises have now been broken.

Does anyone care? Probably not. I had a look at the Google News Searches for Roozendaal today - the SMH, The Age and SBS made no mention whatsoever of the promise to stay.

The Australian had this to say, right down the bottom of their piece:

Believe it or now, only the Yahoo7 article gave the issue any prominence at all:

Conclusion? Clearly no one cares. Or, at least, no one in the media.

For my money, it's deeply disappointing that iron-clad guarantees like this are so readily ignored post election. Yes, Roozendaal leaving doesn't really affect any citizen's life directly - but at the election I (and, I suspect, most observers) suspected he intended to leave early.

To give him (and the Labor party) a pass on that promise just encourages similar deception in the future.

I can't sit here at my desk and say Roozendaal lied in 2011. It sure looks like it, but no one except him knows what his true intention was back then. And I don't have the access that would allow me to ask him (or, indeed, John Robertson) for an explanation.

And you can rest assured that, come 2015, no one is going to care, no one is going to write about it, and we will be graced with 1000 new promises that will be eagerly lapped up by both the media and the electorate.

You know what? When we don't care about politicians breaking promises, we send the message that we don't care when they do. It's not good enough.

The internet assures me that HL Mencken said this: "People deserve the government they get, and they deserve to get it good and hard"

Do they ever.