One poor correspondent

Well I keep on thinkin' 'bout you, Sister Golden Hair surprise
And I just can't live without you, can't you see it in my eyes?
I've been one poor correspondent, I've been too too hard to find
But it doesn't mean you ain't been on my mind

Will you meet me in the middle, will you meet me in the air
will you love me just a little - just enough to show you care?

- America Sister Golden Hair

The NSW state politics reporter from a supposedly major newspaper has had the wool well and truly pulled over his eyes for many, many years. In this article our poor correspondent tries to blame Labor for this, but they're just doing their job: Imre is probably the last person in NSW who couldn't believe that NSW Labor's death-plunge is not some sort of acrobatic maneuver, it really is over.

All the way along, Imre Salusinszky has been poor at reporting NSW state politics. He has compounded that by being a willing tool of Labor plotters in the Sussex-Macquarie Street axis, to the point where he can't tell whether an education policy or a health policy or a planning policy is any good - only how it "plays" among his fellow wankers in said Sussex-Macquarie St axis. He starts his piece by telling you how you should interpret your own opinions, then declares that the foreseeable and practical phenomenon of not voting Labor is somehow "staggering".

This poll captures the government's chaotic power sell-off in December, which proceeded over the protest resignations of eight directors of state-owned electricity companies, along with the beginning of Labor's campaign advertising blitz.

It is likely the two have cancelled each other out, leaving Labor stranded on record low support.

If people will not listen to Princess Wonkyhair on free-to-air media, why would they listen to her in an ad? Jobs for the boys is one thing, but when the boys no longer want the jobs it's time to get out.

The only thing that might have caused a tightening of the numbers, and made Labor a viable prospect at the election -- not this one, but in 2019 -- is Kristina Keneally's appealing personality, obvious integrity and appetite for a fight.

This assumes that the Liberals are an inert force, and that only Labor can take the initiative. One can understand such a mindset in, say, 2002, but not today. None of the qualities you project upon her are present in polls or anywhere else outside your own skull.

Kristina Keneally has always been a hack who only impresses political insiders (very much like Kerry Chikarovski), just your standard pollie who talks a lot on the basis of poor advice from the sort of clowns who wedged her into what should have been a position of power, and who demonstrates their poor judgment by having to be the face of the backdown on their stupid proposals. She never offered anything but novelty value, and everyone could see that except Imre. As she cancelled and botched infrastructure projects, subjected little children to unflued gas heaters, and generally did whatever Sussex Street Sam told her to do, Salusinszky convinced himself that Labor had plenty of options with Keneally. There have been none, for over a year now. Everything that woman has ever said has been bullshit.

Like many conservatives, and most who consider themselves conservative thinkers, Imre Salusinszky started out on the far left. I pass up the opportunity to sneer at him for this: certainly, Maoism or Trotskyism or whatever flavour of coercive socialism was always unsustainable. If you're going to be a conservative, and report for a conservative paper from a conservative paper, you have to go looking for conservative aspects of policy that can be celebrated and breaches of same that are to be deplored. Instead, Salusinszky ebbed and wafted with each new development (now electricity production is to be sold off, now it isn't; now Tripodi is up, now down) like Michelle Grattan, operating outside of history while occasionally laying claim to its perspective.

The failure of press gallery journalism came when former Transport Minister Carl Scully announced over sixty times that a rail line would be built between Parramatta and Epping: no such line has been built. Every picfac, every question, every chunk and snippet of reportage at every such event has been an utter, utter waste. Having laughably revived this last year, this should never have happened: there should have been a turning of soil or a repainting of Carlingford station or something, anything other than silly Princess Wonkyhair going blah blah blah again.

Policy decisions aren't always feints in some smaller parlour game; there are times with big issues when the policy is the game. Press gallery journalists can't see this: so, abolish press gallery journalists and press gallery journalism.

Salusinszky should go once the O'Farrell government is sworn in. He took it as given that NSW Labor Right was politically invincible, and in operating from that basis he has misled readers for some time. Over the past year or so, infatuated with Keneally, he just assumed that what was obvious to him was shared by a wider readership, and never really made the case that readers should care about Sussex-Macquarie St shenanigans to the extent that he did. The whole she's so darn purty theme about Keneally lasted about a fortnight, a month tops; for Imre it continued until he had to file his story yesterday. He's been both sad and funny, like Dennis Shanahan in 2007 insisting that Howard was really going to reverse those bad polls.

Salusinszky is the Greg Sheridan of Macquarie Street: both are name-droppers who take care to veil their sources when it suits, but who otherwise add little to the political debate while insisting on some sort of standing to browbeat those who disagree with them. It's no less pathetic for Imre to mention that he lunches with Joe Tripodi than it is for Sheridan to do so with Donald Rumsfeld, and it doesn't help the credibility of the organ that employs them both to insist that their offerings are the kind of "high-quality content" which ought be priced above zero.

Conservative readers, subject to insider bumf about how the wily NSW Labor Right are going to pull one out of the fire thanks to spunky Kristina, have been had well and truly by Imre. It wasn't sly or knowing, he was geniunely sucked in. Sure, they might like it that way - the same imperative leads people in comfortable homes to enjoy murder mysteries. Smart readers would read through Imre and identify who had sat on him most recently to shape him in that manner. It is, however, a failure of journalism that a reader must see through a journalist in order to get the story. Salusinszky failed because he was having himself on.

This is why the coming O'Farrell government is relatively opaque: press gallery journalists have to ramp up to a party they had ignored. The NSW Coalition should be a known quantity and challenged by the media which had long ignored it: but it's gone into election lockdown now, too late. Salusinszky can't come to terms with the next government. He can't come to terms with the reason why this one failed. He did, however, everything a press gallery journalist should do: he cultivated sources, he got access to and made a fuss of irrelevant bullshit like "insider polling", and reported on the comings and goings of people who are neither here nor there. He failed because he did his job as well as it can be done, but the job itself is bullshit.

Sussex Street Circus

The journosphere has focused on the hapless Nathan Rees as Premier of NSW, how unpopular he and his government are, and how they have a kind of reverse Midas touch where everything they touch turns to dross. This is seen as some sort of contrast to the all-conquering feds. This reflects poor framing of the issue, and poor framing will make it harder for people to understand important features of our political system and what looks likely come from it.

However unwittingly, it is Imre who, like an old-school journalist, parades his contacts while keeping them hidden from outsider view. People who care about NSW Labor politics can guess who Imre's contacts are, I can't be bothered: it's just pathetic that he's the world's only Glenn Milne wannabe.

A SENIOR Labor official in NSW was recently heard to observe that "Nathan Rees is one bad Newspoll away from a crisis".

This could be it.

In all pertinent respects, this poll is as bad as those that were seized upon early last year by party and union bosses at Sussex Street who were bent on fatally damaging Morris Iemma - and ended up inflicting more damage on the Labor brand in NSW than anybody since Jack Lang in the 1930s.

The first three paragraphs of Imre's story tell you the real problem with it. Rather than focus on Rees - who never promised anything more than he has delivered - the real focus here should be on the geniuses who comprise the once-mighty NSW ALP machine. The rest of Imre's article rehashes every other article over the past year, another example of zero-value Murdoch content.

"Whatever you might say about the folks at Sussex Street" - what about that they, rather than Rees, are the real story here? These are the geniuses who thought that too much Bob Carr was barely enough. They are the same people who thought that Iemma was an ideal replacement - and when proven wrong, still think they have the right to pop the bonnet and tinker with the engine while considering changing driver. These are the same geniuses who think there's mileage in taking Imre out for a Chinese meal now and then.

The folks at Sussex Street are clowns. All of them.

If Rees is going to avoid a tap on the shoulder, he needs a big policy win, or a spectacular few weeks in parliament between now and Christmas ...

There are no "policy wins". Anyone who knows anything about State politics knows that, and it does no credit to a parliamentary roundsman to pretend otherwise. Nobody gives a damn about "parliamentary theatre".

This can't help but affect the coming federal election, especially given that it will occur before the next state election. There will be a lot of nonsense about state issues interfering with federal issues, when in reality the NSW ALP will stuff up the most promising political environment for Labor in a generation.

NSW has lost a seat in the redistribution; it's a Labor seat. In the olden days, NSW ALP hard-heads (the sort of people who wouldn't piss on Imre) would sort something out and chuck out some dead wood. Instead, the clowns at head office are being upstaged by a jobsworth with a severe case of born-to-rule syndrome: the Deputy Prime Minister of Australia has had to take time out of her schedule to sort this out.

Mr Ferguson served six years in state politics before joining Federal Parliament. It is highly unlikely he will ever serve in the ministry.

You can understand why they thought of him as political roadkill: but did they not count on the Deputy Prime Minister? What else are these clowns not counting on?

Barry O'Farrell has rebuilt the NSW Liberal state office largely in his own image: he's a former State Director, knows where the bodies are buried. If Turnbull keeps going the way he's going then O'Farrell will basically use the federal poll as a test run for the State Election in 2011. Certainly, the money coming into Liberal head office is predicated on state success, and any money coming to the ALP to curry favour with the federal government will go to national head office rather than Sussex Street.

Going by Antony Green's assessment of the next Federal election, let's look at the NSW seats and see just how badly the Sussex Street clowns could balls this up:

• Macarthur: had Pat Farmer been re-elected under the traditional Liberal Reverence For Dead Wood rule, Labor would have a real chance at that seat. Russell Mathieson is a serious candidate and all Labor have are the deadshit councillors they always run in that area. Prediction: Labor FAIL


• Macquarie: Louise Markus will win that, factional squabbling and the Greens will do for Labor. Prediction: Labor FAIL


• Robertson: Belinda Neal. Need I say more? She'll do enough to sail past preselection with the most unlikely Princess Di act ever, but will run out of puff into the new year as her husband no longer has the heft to pull her out of problems she causes. The Libs will choose a local bloke who wears polyester ties with shortsleeve shirts and a $10 haircut. Neal will court the national media, which Coasties don't give a damn about, doing glossy pics that make her look like a rouged-up front-end loader. Prediction: Labor FAIL


• Gilmore: Should be there for the taking, but isn't. Prediction: Labor FAIL


• Paterson: Like Gilmore, except you'll have to pry the seat out of Bob Baldwin's cold dead hands and the Hunter Valley ALP are even more useless than Sussex Street. Besides, anyone who's any good will go after Joel Fitzgibbon rather than Bob. Prediction: Labor FAIL


• Hughes: Oh come on, the redistribution has given a chunk of southwestern Sydney to Labor and Danna Vale is retiring. Even David Hill could win this seat now. Prediction: Labor could still stuff this up.


• Cowper: Held by the Nats, but demographics favour Labor if the economy stays on an even keel. Prediction: Labor could still stuff this up.


• Calare: Held by the Nats, a strong local candidate backed by a well-regarded state government could tip this into Labor's column: but where would they get some of that? Prediction: Labor FAIL


• Lindsay: Might be interesting if Whimpering Troy Craig stays out of it, otherwise it might not be. Prediction: Labor could still stuff this up.


• Bennelong and Eden-Monaro: Will be quarantined from Sussex Street influence. Libs will run no-hopers. Prediction: Labor will not stuff these up.


• Wentworth: Nah. Doesn't swing. Labor's next candidate is likely to be a hack rather than a McKew-style game-changer. Prediction: Labor FAIL

Labor will go backwards in NSW at the 2010 election: you read it here first. Like Andrew Peacock in 1984 it is possible that Turnbull could perform creditably against a first-term Labor government - but only within NSW, apparently.

The very model of a modern major Liberal

Since the 2007 Federal election it has become clear that there is a whole new set of criteria for those wishing to become Liberal MPs - certainly in terms of Federal (as I nostalgically call it) Parliament.

Time was that you needed a law degree - presentation skills and familiarity with legal complexities being largely sufficient for a political career, with a common touch and an understanding of wider public policy in a few pet areas as nice-to-have.

When I was a lad I served a term
As office boy to an attorney's firm ...

You also needed a wife, who could lead community activities without taking them over and excluding others (playing political games that could cut across your own), as well as to demonstrate that you weren't female or effeminate.

During the 1980s legal qualifications were only important if you were bound for the frontbench. If you weren't red-hot ministerial talent you'd have speeches written for you and be told how to vote; incisive thinking, appreciation of subtleties and independence of spirit was, if anything, a handicap under such circumstances. From then into the '90s, what you needed was sufficient clout within your community to be able to raise funds (Bill Heffernan used to say that if you couldn't hit the phones and raise ten grand within a day or so, you had no business being in politics) as well as some familiarity in dealing with the dreaded meeja. All sorts of drones would pop up as State Director of the Australian Association of Whatever, plugging talking points during Whatever Week and outlining factors impacting on Blah Blah De Blah, and after eighteen months or so of that you'd see them running for preselection touting their Extensive Meeja Experience.

That's all changed now. What you need now to become a Liberal MP is to have been a staffer in the Howard Government. This is part of a refusal to let go and an inability to conceive of a post-Howard Liberal politics, but part of a new realisation within the Liberal Party that politics is different to the business of law or business or whatever else. Jamie Briggs, Kellie O'Dwyer and now Paul Fletcher have shown that the entry points to a career as a Liberal politician is open only to a group of people whose ranks are finite and closed to new entrants. To get into politics you had to have been in politics. Even Josh Frydenberg, a person of less substance than his resume, has gotten an opportunity that could more productively have gone to others.

Handsome and charismatic, Switzer carried endorsements from leading conservative figures such as John Howard, Tony Abbott and Peter Costello.

Switzer had given everything to the contest, but his opponents had managed to brand him as the candidate of the Right: a disadvantage on the north shore ...

It isn't just his opponents who brand him as a creature of the right, Imre: Switzer has done a bang-up job of it himself. In Imre's own commentary on the vote, he admits that the right were firmly behind Switzer: successful branding that.

Following Switzer was barrister Greg Burton. In the reams of copy churned out about Bradfield in recent weeks, few had mentioned Burton. But he gave a strong performance that played on the local Bradfield background that he and Switzer share and that many of the leading contenders lacked.

Burton sounds like the very sort of chap that would normally have held the seat for twenty years and done bugger-all with it (like B W Graham or Silent Billy Jack after World War II, or like Brad Hazzard and Michael Richardson in the NSW Parliament today); the sort of person who has no chance today, and who the Liberal Party will not be smart enough to steer towards another seat somewhere else. The same can be said for David Coleman. Worth noting that Imre didn't rate Burton before the event either; I'd include myself in that, except blogpost "copy" can't be measured in "reams".

Fletcher, around the middle of the order, surprised the preselectors with the vehemence of his speech. "He was loud, almost banging the podium," said one of them later. Possibly, he was overcompensating for a reputation for being almost soporifically cautious.

Possibly? Definitely. He took his weak point and nailed it, like Tony Abbott taking the microphone from the stand and working the room in '94. He made sure that his speech was memorable, unlike the clearly unremarkable smarm and bluster you'd expect from Switzer.

One of Nelson's loyal staff, Simon Berger, had made a decision to speak openly of his status as a gay man during the campaign to succeed his boss. Berger was considered among the second rank of serious contenders. His speech did not return to the issue of sexuality, but he told the preselectors that he was proud in so many different registers that they got the message.

And the message is: it's all about me, me, me. If I win it'll all be about me, and not us and certainly not you darling, just me. The man was a staffer and he blew it. He talked himself out of a job. He could have been a Senator, and could yet be if he can bear to talk about something else, if only to realise that the best light to shine upon oneself is refracted - especially so since Howard.

Is being a gay man a "status"? For implications and accusations, however, it is hard to go past this:

Leeser, who bears the manner of a rabbinical scholar ...

This is Imre's sneaky way of saying that Leeser is a Jew, dear reader - yes, with a nod and a wink to Imre's sources in the far right, and to his old comrades on the far left - a Jew.

Leeser's supporters began to speculate on how soon Turnbull would be elevating their man to the shadow ministry: with Switzer eliminated, they assumed the Right would lock in behind Leeser. They were wrong. Switzer's vote split straight down the middle.

It is great that Julian Leeser has cross-factional support. Without wishing to jinx him, he is genuinec political talent, bright and personable and diligent, with all the makings of a very good minister. People are right to assume that he's solid frontbench material. He will not take long to eclipse Ruddock, a man of whom fairly little was expected but not even that was delivered. If Leeser had beaten Fletcher it would have been no loss. Having seen the RMs-clad far right and they would never have voted for a Jew in eine tausende Jahre.

It is a pity that Paul Ritchie did not do better, a bigger shame if he doesn't going forward. No women either, apparently: in my day Words Would Have Been Said about that.

So what, apart from factional support, carried [Fletcher] across the line? One of the preselectors tells The Australian it was his demonstration of policy smarts.

"He talked a little bit about his background in terms of telecommunications policy and demonstrated, through questions, a knowledge that gave people some comfort," the preselector says.

"He was also the only one who made the point that there were some real issues that should matter to the people of Bradfield and that he would be able to articulate a case about, in language that the people of Bradfield would understand.

"The two examples he gave were the reduction in tax deductibility around superannuation and private health insurance. Instead of just talking about platitudes like Liberal values, or the economic stimulus package, he gave a new ground upon which the Coalition would have a case to take some real issues to the Rudd government."

Every carpetbagger under the sun can bang on about Liberal values, and many preselectors would have watched in despair as the party tore itself apart in the 1980s and '90s over definitions. The Liberal Party is still suspicious of those who love government a little too much, like Kevin Rudd, or who love the hootin' and hollerin' of "parliamentary theatre" - it is up to staffers who have to keep their heads while all the members are losing theirs in Question Time. They don't get swayed by celebrity, unlike the seven plonkers who voted for John Alexander. They go off to that funny town near the snowfields and balance competing interests in a way that keeps everything ticking over, and what happens in The Holy Grail stays there, and [for Liberals] hopefully chip away at that Labor government that focuses a little too much about foreign goings-on.

There will be Liberal MPs who weren't staffers, but they'll want a significant local presence in their marginal seat, and they are unlikely to become Cabinet ministers (they may get junior portfolios if the next Liberal PM feels so disposed, like the ones Jim Lloyd and Fran Bailey got). At the same time be perfectly willing to go to Canberra and park their not insignificant egos in order to be told, and do, exactly what the legion of current and former Howard government staffers tell them to do. That's the real reason why it's so hard to get talented people into Parliament - it isn't pay or the fishbowl lifestyle. The cliche about politics as a "greasy pole" is partly because the learning curve is pretty much vertical and what one learns may not be that useful. Besides, it's so much easier if you've had the rough edges knocked off you already, and you know that blame and credit come your way rarely and at random. The Liberals want to get back into office as soon as possible and can't afford lead-in time for newbies.

Part of representative democracy is the idea - the dream, perhaps - that the representatives are just like us. If you're a truck driver, if you're a surgeon, if you're gay or Muslim or a Tigers supporter, you should be able to go to Canberra and look into the pit and see someone just like you. The Liberal Party is doing what it can to distance itself from that dream, just as Labor has spent a generation taking into Parliament those middle-ranking union officials not good enough to make it to senior office.

Paul Fletcher is not just the man of the hour, he is a man for his time - a policy wonk and a bit of a cold fish, with a temper that shows itself when he thinks nobody much is looking. If that reminds you of anyone - remember that Rudd himself proved that it can take one to know one, and to catch one, which only reinforces John Howard as the defining politician of modern Australia.

Blow that whistle, ref

68 years have elapsed since 1941. In that time, Labor has governed NSW for 50 of those years and the Coalition for 18. Major infrastructure problems can largely be sheeted home to NSW Labor, with its penny-ante perspective known as "laborism" guaranteeing that public sector wages will increase inversely to clear expectations of those jobs, while regarding infrastructure and education as the sort of thing only "the bosses" worry about.

Labor talks about "born-to-rule" a lot. It accuses the Liberals of having this attitude, but frankly those supposedly born to rule have little example of actually governing. Victorian Labor used to grouse about the Liberals in similar fashion, but when you consider how much of a lock the Victorian Liberals had on that state's government until the last quarter century.

Reba Meagher and Morris Iemma were prime examples of the "born-to-rule" attitude of NSW Labor, and now we see it plainly in Kristina Keneally.

With a display of arrogance far belying her two and a half years of ministerial experience, Planning Minister Kristina Keneally surely put paid last week to any dreams or perceptions some have of her being a future leader of the NSW parliamentary Labor party.

Hardly. Neville Wran did not take kindly to interrogation, and nor did Iemma or Roozendaal behave well when questioned over the various tunnel scams they perpetrated on Sydney.

Indeed, she behaved as if the opposition was breaching some sort of moral standard for even asking questions.

She's always behaved like that, though. If you were a NSW press gallery journalist, you'd know that, and if you were a real journalist then you'd have shared this with us long before now (and made other arrangements to get your informaton). This sense of entitlement and blockage of information whose supply is in the public interest is the essence of "born to rule" attitude. You can see why people were reluctant to get rid of Deirdre Grusovin to make way for her, and not just because the old duck wanted one last turn around the ballroom.

Keneally showed a lack of political maturity and showed her lack of experience with the estimates process, and ... shows, at best, a complete abrogation of her responsibility as a minister.

What possible control can the minister have over the planning department if she does not know who her number one public servant is being lobbied by? A real case of "see no evil, hear no evil".

Hopefully this casts light on any future announcements about things which she has supposedly initiated. It probably won't, though, as "the news cycle" will consign this issue to the bin and future announcements will be treated as though they matter.

Beside Keneally's accusations against the Sydney Morning Herald at the committee which have now been well reported that it is pursuing the McGurk story solely because it wants to stop declining sales, she twice accused a Liberal MP of being a slow learner by saying she had to speak slowly for him.

Kristina Keneally's judgment abut people and situations is crap, which means her political judgment is no good, which casts rather a poor light on those who've been talking her up (including Rees, who has put her in over her head). She is also a former disability services minister; everyone who dealt with her in that capacity and thought she was serious about those issues must now realise that she learned nothing from the experience and was never serious about issues that deeply affect many people.

Witness the following [exchange at the hearing of] the committee:

Liberal MP Don Harwin: You have not met with Mr McGurk or either Mr Roy or Ron Medich, have you ever met or had a discussion by telephone with Graham Richardson?

Keneally: No.

Harwin: No, never?

Keneally: No, never, ever, ever. Do you want me to pinkie-swear on it too, Mr Harwin?

Harwin probably knows Richardson better than Keneally does. After he fell out with Keating in 1994, Richardson began offering advice to the then moderates who ran the NSW Young Liberals at the time, including Harwin. They paid to pump him full of food and booze and he'd tell salacious but ultimately insubstantial tales. It was soon after this that the moderates lost control of the NSW Young Liberals, but don't let that get in the way of Keneally and the once-mighty NSW Labor Right who are to blame for her.

The talk is that it was Ms Keneally's husband, Ben Keneally, who was earmarked to take over from Deirdre Grusovin in the seat of Heffron by Labor's head office in 2003 but because of Labor's affirmative action policy we got Kristina Keneally instead.

Leaving aside the grass-is-greener perception of Benny boy, can you imagine KK as a political wife? She'd make Jeanette Howard or Belinda Neal look like the Governor-General for tact and decorum.

But last month Keneally got the sort of boost which could articially inflate any young minister's ego - an erroneous call from Channel Nine reporter Kevin Wilde that she was to be made premier "on Monday".

The challenge for Ms Keneally now is to get over her big head, get over her attitude that she should not be open to scrutiny and ... she should resist behaving like a pork chop.

She's already out of her depth and is being covere up for over this matter. She spoke to the Liberals to their faces in the way Labor hacks speak about them behind their backs. At a time when the constant narrative on the NSW State Government is one of arrogance, being out-of-touch an failing utterly on service delivery and longterm planning, Keneally reinforced all of those perceptions so much that it almost looks like some practical joke in cahoots with Harwin, O'Farrell's staff, and everyone else who's keen to see the back of these turkeys. If she had any sense the prospect of becoming Premier - on Monday or any other time - would appal her, as it apparently does Carmel Tebutt.

This does not, apparently, include Imre Salusinszky, a former communist who's used to churning out fawning propaganda about doomed regimes, and a News Limited employee used to eating shit while telling the few and dwindling numbers of those who care that it tastes like chocolate. News bag Fairfax all the time and Fairfax rarely respond, but when they do (as Andrew Clenell did at the end of his piece) it is telling.

THINK "NSW Right" and the image that comes to mind is of a pasty-faced, overweight male who is rarely seen in daylight, except when scurrying between one of his tribe's preferred Chinatown nosheries and Labor's nearby Sussex Street, Sydney, headquarters.

Actually, that's the picture that comes to mind about Imre.

He doesn't quite say about Keneally that "I did but see her passing by ...", because he interviewed her and if you look at the exchange you can see more than either intended to reveal about themselves.

And yet, despite the anomalies, the NSW Planning Minister has emerged as a rare, bright future prospect for the Right -- and for Labor -- in NSW.

Anomalies. Yairs. Ace reporting there Imre.

... few doubt she is a potential leader, perhaps as early as 2011, when Labor seems fated to begin a stint of rebuilding in opposition.

What about a stint of floundering, yelling at staff and colleagues and generally not getting it? That's what you'd have to expect from KK, Imre, providing the Greens don't get their at together. Have you learned nothing from your sucky portrait of Michael Costa?

No matter how scrupulous the incumbent, there is no portfolio that raises more powerfully the spectre of insider deals and special favours for Labor mates.

I didn't quote that stuff about a "shining aura" because I just couldn't bear it.

As for a scrupulous NSW Labor Planning Minister, I couldn't think of one - Imre is not so much setting up a straw man as a nothing against which to compare Keneally, in order that he might claim that nothing compares to her.

"I don't believe there is any credible basis on which to say there is some kind of underworld culture in Sydney property development".

And let that be her epitaph. She's Planning Minister of New South Wales, and she doesn't believe there is any kind of underworld culture in Sydney property development.

Imre, the woman's a liar or a fool; and so are you for not rolling around the floor laughing at the very notion.

... for the multimillion-dollar projects, [Keneally's predecessor Frank Sartor] introduced independent expert panels. The aim was to take the politics, state and local, out of planning and end the stench of a donations-for-decisions culture that had become pervasive after the Wollongong council bribery scandal last year.

In Sartor's original plan, this independent assessment would have included the bulk of the decisions at present taken by the state planning minister under the so-called Part 3A provisions, which were introduced by Knowles to allow state-significant projects to proceed apace. But Keneally has tweaked the intended function of the Planning Assessment Commission, limiting it to cases where the developer has made a political donation or there is a demonstrable conflict of interest for the minister.

The effect of this was the Augean effect of diverting rivers of cash that once flowed into Wollongong Council and other non-entities straight into Labor head office, and to make planning decisions arbitrary and opaque. Imre is so dazzled by Keneally that he has forgotten to be a journalist. No wonder Kate McClymont gets all the stories Imre, she doesn't dump on sources.

Some have claimed these changes reflect Keneally's closer links to the development industry via her factional ally and friend, Ports Minister Joe Tripodi (a sworn enemy of Sartor). She says it has been more a matter of moving from a long phase of reform, which looks towards the past, to a phase of vision, which looks to the future.

"The government has had a continuous program of improvement and modernisation of the planning system," she says, describing the reforms of Knowles and Sartor as being about certainty, efficiency and transparency.

In other words, Knowles and Sartor set the environment for Labor and all Keneally had to do was run it. She couldn't even manage that. This idea of "continuous improvement" contradicts the claim of breaking with the past and looking toward the future, doesn't it Imre.

Any rugby league analogy, it must be said, rings oddly in Keneally's accent, which sounds as if it set off from California and, at some indeterminate point over the Pacific Ocean, met Greg Norman's accent coming the other way. It is difficult to describe Keneally's pronunciation to those who haven't heard it: suffice it to say that, in parliament, "Mr Speaker" emerges as "Mr Spayka", and that she has never seen a terminal "g" that she did not make a valiant attempt to drop.

It is Keneally's American upbringing, and fears of how that accent will play in western Sydney, that have left some Sussex Street heavies unconvinced she is the great white hope for Labor in NSW.

NSW is used to people from other countries. Greiner from Hungary and Iemma from Calabria were elected no worries. Keneally lacks the confidence to project herself as she is. Nobody from Ohio need apologise for that and Keneally should be comfortable enough to speak with her own voice, as she claims unconvincingly at the end. She's trying too hard to be someone she's not, and that's what grates with everyone from the western suburbs, from Menindee to Maroubra and Tumut to Tweed Heads. Droppin' terminals and pronouncing "Spayka" like some bogan from Bankstown (or a would-be from Woollahra) is patronising and ingratiating at the same time. "Picking up the ball and running with it" is a cliché the English-speaking world over, Keneally had no right to be taken at face value on that.

"She is able to silence whole rooms of CEOs with one flick of her hair," says one industry source.

See, now we know that's bullshit. Keneally has a helmet of hair like the equally insecure (and alliterative) Bronwyn Bishop, but with an odd twist as though she suddenly jumped up from one of those old-fashioned hair-drying machines in 1960s hairdressing salons. When a horse flicks its head it shows it is being nervous and dismissive of people, and so it is with Keneally. Imre's source is as charmed as he is, but one can only conclude that neither of them have much experience with women or can get over the fact that one of them holds a position of responsiblity.

One area where relations have definitely improved for the government, under Keneally, is with the Urban Taskforce, a lobby group for large property developers that engaged in some legendary stoushes with Sartor.

That would be the lobby group run by a former Obeid staffer, and the brother of a Tripodi loyalist. Was McGurk a member of the UTF, Imre, or the Medich brothers? Find out before Kate McClymont does. Casts a whole lot of light on why Tripodi's been pushing her, or it least it would if you were a journalist. How important is the UTF to the State generally, Imre, or wouldn't you know?

"She has a very different style (to Sartor)," says Gadiel. "She makes a lot of effort to sit down with everyone and explain her decisions. You don't wake up and read her decisions for the first time in a newspaper.

Everyone has a different style to Sartor, Aaron, that's why NSW hasn't invaded Poland. Some lobbyist you are - your job is to influence the minister, not gain sneak previews to decisions that she would have made had you never been born.

"What impresses people is that she's extremely articulate and her thoughts are very organised."

Her thoughts are organised for her, by the sort of people who organise Aaron Gadiel's for him; impressive isn't the word I'd use unless I agreed with it, and could point out something other than a rendition of policy and personal disasters to demonstrate why.