It Would Be Funny If It Didn't Matter
Sydney Morning Herald
Saturday September 13, 2008
Peter Remfrey, secretary of the NSW Police Association, hadn't even got around to putting Matt Brown's details into his mobile phone before he received the 5.30am text message on Thursday that the new police minister he'd spent all the previous afternoon schmoozing had resigned - or been sacked, more precisely.
But so dysfunctional has the police portfolio been for so long, with seven ministers in five years, Remfrey's reaction was to shrug and go back to sleep.The circus clowns of NSW Government are at it again, sharing the spoils of office among a rapidly shrinking talent pool, as the debt-strapped state staggers into terminal decline.The soaring career of 36-year-old star ALP fund-raiser Brown didn't die this week because he was dancing around in tight undies to "Oxford Street techno" music on a chesterfield sofa during a late-night party in his parliamentary office three months ago. Nor was it because, while in that elevated position, he allegedly mounted the matronly bosom of the fiftysomething Wollongong MP Noreen Hay while calling out an obscenity to her adult daughter (claims Hay denies). No, he lost his important brand new portfolio because he misled the neophyte 40-year-old Premier, Nathan Rees, who is doing his very best to pretend he has control over the unqualified rabble the ALP state office has served him up for a cabinet."He gave me assurances that there had been absolutely nothing untoward about the evening that had been held in his office," Rees told reporters on Thursday. But "I subsequently put it to former minister Brown ... that there were 'too many reports of you in your underwear for me to ignore"'. What a joke. This is what happens when the unelected Karl Bitar, NSW Labor Party general secretary, chooses your cabinet. "My instructions [to Bitar] were: 'You manage this process,' " Rees told reporters of the cabinet selection.Now the leaking to the media of Brown's three-month-old indiscretion is just a hint of the internecine hatreds engulfing the Government, as the few remaining MPs with talent have quit or have been dumped while factional favourites are rewarded with the $100,000 pay rises that come with a cabinet berth. As the Brown fiasco has shown, it wasn't a matter of choosing the best minister to manage police. It's about entrenching petty fiefdoms.Meanwhile competent performers, such as Frank Sartor, the former planning minister with a reputation for integrity, are left languishing on the backbench. Rees can give no plausible reason for dumping him. But Sartor has never hidden his belief that the two men who are, inexplicably, party kingmakers, the new Finance Minister, Joe Tripodi and the upper house MP Eddie Obeid, had been gunning for him all year, unhappy with his autocratic style and his plans to reform the way development was done in NSW. This would all be a great lark if State Government weren't so important to our daily lives, to the running of our hospitals, the morale of our police, the effectiveness of our schools, the availability of public transport, the state of our roads, the shape of the suburbs we live in, and the price of just about everything. All are hostage to unnecessary budget blowouts, the state's threatened AAA credit rating, the incompetence and ill-discipline of serial ministers and the Government's entrenched kowtowing to union interests who ensure no proper reforms occur.Take the police portfolio, so casually handed to Brown. It has long-standing problems which are only hinted at by the abysmal clear-up rates for crime, historically among the worst in the country. They mean, for example, that there is only a 5 per cent chance police will arrest a suspect for stealing a car or breaking into a home, within 90 days of the crime. The irony is that the Police Commissioner, Andrew Scipione, in the job just over a year, has started to make a little progress, according to quarterly crime statistics released by the Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research this week. "Property crime is lower than it has been for about 15 years," said the bureau's director, Don Weatherburn. But that good news is tempered by concern over statistics for sexual assaults and their clear-up rate. The incidence of sexual assault leapt dramatically in the 1990s while the rate at which police "clear up" cases - in other words, arrest a suspect - halved to 20 per cent. Weatherburn believes such a large increase cannot be attributed simply to an increased willingness by women to report sexual assaults, but may be due to an inability of police to cope with the flood of cases. Police on the frontline, meanwhile, are frustrated by obstacles to "locking up crooks". The Police Association has called on the newest new minister, Tony Kelly, to cut the red tape that keeps officers "at their desks, rather than out on the streets fighting and preventing crime". Morale remains low after years of inadequate leadership. Experienced police are still leaving and new officers can't be trained fast enough.Any properly run government would have had a plan for boosting police numbers and raising morale, over a period when low unemployment rates and a heroin drought made fighting crime easier than for decades. Instead, the Government has focussed on criminalising law-abiding motorists. As roads minister, Eric Roozendaal, fresh from being general secretary of NSW Labor, oversaw a proliferation of speed and bus lane cameras in order to fleece as much money as possible from soft targets. Now he is our Treasurer, in partnership with Tripodi as Finance Minister, we can look forward to more such innovative measures to plug the state's budget black hole.Raking in loot from hapless motorists remains the only area of NSW Government that works with ruthless efficiency.devinemiranda@hotmail.com
© 2008 Sydney Morning Herald
