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.

A Promise he won't Forget

Politicians break promises all the time.

Big ones, small ones, implied ones, core and non-core promises - they all get broken.

Some get broken because circumstances change. Some get broken because they are no longer feasible. Still others are broken because the person or party who made them knows that no one really cares whether it is kept or not.

Some broken promises have little or no consequence, and certainly no negative result for a government.

Core and non-core promises. Photo from here

Others can have such long-reaching consequences that the very sanity of the person breaking it has to be questioned.

Sometimes this is undeserved. Perhaps the original promise has been mischaracterised, or the perhaps media's narrative makes the promise into a defining characteristic of a politician when it had no business being any such thing.

The obvious example is Gillard and the Carbon Tax. No matter what she achieves for the rest of her time as Prime Minister, whether that be for another 18 months or 18 years, it seems likely that the title of her biographies will involve a none-too-subtle pun on the Carbon Tax. It was a single, stupid sentence on a breakfast TV show at the end of a gruelling campaign, but it has coloured the entire country's perception of her.

O'Farrell has broken a heap promises in his time, and Labor has tried to convince the public that he has broken a whole lot more.

Many of those promises are so inconsequential that he would be almost crazy not to break them.

Others are big, but don't seem to have gained much traction to date.

This most recent effort, however, is a true whopper.  And, worst of all (at least for him) there is going to be an ever present reminder of what a dumb decision he has made.

He may want to be the infrastructure premier, but if he goes about it like this then all the pain of finding money to build this network is going to be for naught.

O'Farrell campaigned hard on the North West Rail Link (NWRL) during the election. And he was right to do so - the present arrangements (tollways, large numbers of buses, constantly shifting bus-lanes, seemingly ever-present road work) is, and always was, at best a stop-gap. Heavy rail to the North-West was the only solution that was going to satisfy the new residents pouring into the area.

Just one of the hundreds of articles on the topic. Original story here

As late as yesterday, the promise that there would be direct services to the city was still on the a NSW government website promoting the line. Unsurprisingly, Penny Sharpe, Shadow Minister for Transport, had one of her minions quickly grab a screenshot before it disappeared

Today, the offending paragraph is missing

This new plan is going to make no one happy. And while it is being built, and every day it exists until the new harbour crossing is built in about 2089 (or so) it will remind the population about a promise broken.

The map at present

The original plan was for the NWRL to join up with the network at Epping (top middle), head down the new line to Chatswood (top right), and then into the city. That was the only way it could work financially - I don't think anyone was seriously suggesting that the line should connect any nearer to the city - the price-tag was already eye watering, and connecting closer to the city would increase the cost several times over.

The obvious problem that raises is that the North Shore line is a crowded one - and one where capacity cannot be increased much more. For safety reasons, there is a limit on how many trains can head across the Harbour Bridge in an hour - and we are pretty much already at that limit.

In other words, for every NWRL heading across the bridge during peak hour, a North Shore service would need to be cancelled.

Now, that problem can be partially alleviated by the fact that many people who would usually get a North Shore Service from a station south of Chatswood could hop on a NWRL service.

But, as I type this blogpost sitting on a North Shore train, I can assure you that many, many people get on North Shore trains well north of Chatswood.

Moreover, under current population planning for Sydney, councils have had to find space for new residents.  At least on the North Shore, they have been finding that space by cramming apartments blocks in and around the train line. As those block are completed, even more people are going to be heading to the station to get to work.

This is not a new problem. It has been plainly obvious ever since the line was announced.

Presumably the O'Farrell government decided that it was all too hard. We haven't yet heard accusations of O'Farrell favouring the residents of his seat (a seat which covers just about every North Shore Line station north of Chatswood, but it surely won't be long.

So what is the government's new plan? The NWRL will simply be a shuttle running between Rouse Hill and Epping.

It's an awful plan. First of all, this may deal with the problem of having to squeeze the NWRL services over the bridge - but how does O'Farrell think these people are going to get to the city? They will need to hop onto a train heading to the city via Chatswood. More services will HAVE to be put on to deal with the extra passengers.

True it is that the new plan includes a new line a few km east of the North Shore line to scoop up some areas not presently served, and plans for the much needed new harbour crossing. But these plans are over a decade in the future. Construction of the NWRL will begin during this term. Heaven knows how many terms it will taken for this new harbour crossing to move off the plans into the real world.

Photo by @sarethebear, the ABC's new NSW politics reporter

Of all the options available to O'Farrell, short of cancelling the NWRL altogether, it appears to be worst one possible.

But there can be no doubt - none whatsoever - that this broken promise is going to be one that that he is never allowed to forget. Whether he'll be forced to regret it will probably depend on whether his opponents can lift their game and make some criticism stick.

A Promise from the Heart III

This is getting stupid now.

Some of you might remember Labor's document "Barry O'Farrell's 100 Broken Promises" that I wrote about here.

It was a stupid document - when there are perfectly legitimate reasons to attack O'Farrell's government, why publish a document that clearly overreaches?  All that does is cement a belief that Labor don't really have any legitimate basis for feeling aggrieved.

Clearly the lesson was never learnt:

Document can be found here

I'm not going to spend my time going through it promise by promise - having looked through it, I can assure you that the same comments I made about the original applies: it is a document that could be damaging for the Liberals, but that attack is blunted by overreach from Labor.

A few examples:

And that's just a selection of the overreaching and, in come cases, plain misleading claims in the first 40 so called "Broken Promises".

If you're interested, you can go through the document yourself and let me know what you find.

It just baffles me why Labor would blunt a legitimate attack by what amounts to little more than padding.  When I asked O'Farrell what he thought about the original "100 Promises" document, he had this to say (read from the bottom):

I think he's right.  Perhaps if Labor spent a little more time trying to advance an alternative agenda rather than wasting time on this kind of document (which, lets me honest, no one besides wonks and jounros is going to read) Labor poll numbers might be showing a little more life.

Perhaps.

Broken Promise, Broken Heart

I came across a very interesting document today.

Full document here

Interestingly, the document does not appear to have any attribution on it.  There is no party logo and no mention of someone taking responsibility for the political comment.


The website itself suggests that the document was uploaded by NSW Labor, which may be enough to satisfy the lawyers.


A press release from Labor announces the document, so it is fair to assume that Labor has put it together.


In any event.


The list makes for very interesting reading.  Some of it is a little stupid and more than a little unfair, but a lot of what is said is damaging for the coaltion.


Starting first with the stupid.  

You can't count the promise to keep promises as a broken promise in a pretty average attempt to get the total into 3 figures.


While we're on desperate attempts to get the total to 100, there are a number of "promises" where the content is reused. For example, 

A large number of "promises" were in fact nothing of the sort.  The pamphlet quotes a number of "motherhood" statements and claims that the standard reached does not comply with the guarantee given.  For example:

A number of the promises are alleged to be broken when nothing of the sort has happened, and the writer has either twisted the words of the promise or simply drawn an impossibly long bow.

Some of the promises were made with a longer term view or in a general sense, meaning that any allegation that they had been "broken" is pretty unfair.

Several of the alleged promises were statements that the Coalition "had no plans" to do something.  It may well have been a lie, but it isn't a broken promise.

There are still other cases where no promise was made at all, or where the alleged "breaking" in fact had nothing to do with the promise that was made.  

Other allegations of broken promises are in fact plain distortions of the truth.

I think those are fair criticisms of the pamphlet.  The writer(s) of the document have made that far too common mistake of over-reaching - rather than having 50 perfectly valid, defensible criticisms, they go for 100 criticisms where half are confusing, deceptive, tricky, or just outright lies.


This is important because there are actually a lot of places O'Farrell can and should be criticised when it comes to broken promises.


The first category is infrastructure promised but not yet budgeted for, or where no progress has been made in the promised timeframe.  The list is long:

There are also a number of other areas where O'Farrell has gone back on his word that deserve further attention:

Why Labor had to overreach and make a whole bunch of allegations that were not reasonable when there were so many perfectly good options available remains a mystery to me.


As I was mulling this piece earlier today, I sent a tween O'Farrell's way asking his view.  He responded (read bottom to top):

He's probably right in terms of forcing good governance, but when it comes to showing up a government for its weaknesses, Labor are probably on the ball here. O'Farrell has broken a lot of promises, and no doubt there is a small but growing discontent.


This may well end up being the issue that makes the next election more competitive than it really should be.  If Labor can continue hammering the "Promise-breaker" line then people may start to switch off from the Coalition.


WIll it be enough to win back government?  On its own, probably not.  But by reneging, delaying and obfuscating the O'Farrell government is giving Labor an "in" they don't really deserve.


A final point - I don't know what the purpose of this document is, or how it is planned to be distributed.  I came across because of a tweet I randomly happened to notice (and now can't find).


As I have said above, I am not sure if the document is "legal" in its present form.


I found this press release on the NSW Labor website which draws attention to the broken promises and provides a link to the pamphlet, but it is hard to imagine that many people other than Labor loyalists and political wonks would ever visit their site at this point in an election cycle.


Exactly why a journalist would write about this is also a little unclear to me.


In any event, there it will sit and probably not be read by many people. An example of a government not keeping a promises and an opposition overreaching in trying to criticise the government.


Not a great pamphlet for either side, really.