It would appear the order of regime change has been altered over recent days in the offices of The Australian. Either that, or the foot soldiers have been overloaded with their Machiavellian manoeuvres.
If that isn’t the case, why is Greg Sheridan – supposedly The Oz’s foreign affairs editor – writing op-eds about the trailing loose threads of New South Wales political history? The answer is very simple, as is divination of rationale behind any of Sheridan’s screeds. Pushing the barrow of the conservative cause. In this case he takes up another’s cudgel in a bid to continue that person’s vendetta against those who did in their political future. Morris Iemma, let’s be honest, spat the dummy when he couldn’t get caucus to come his way, probably hearing the sounds of knives being unsheathed, and jumped ship. Sheridan’s opening plaudit is as sickening as it is obsequious.
He is the last NSW Labor Party premier to win an election, and about whom it can be said he ran an honest government pursuing sound economic policies. He was cut down from the leadership because he tried to privatise his state’s electricity industry, as other states have done…… He could not possibly be regarded as a vested interest; indeed he was destroyed by many of the same vested interests that destroyed Kevin Rudd’s prime ministership.
And so on and so on. Sheridan draws an extremely long bow in attempting comparison with Post-Carr NSW politics and Rudd Labor. To suggest that the corruption within NSW Labor never existed under Carr is naive. To equally claim Iemma was such an honest & upstanding gent who had only the best interests of his constituents at heart is little short of blatant stupidity. Corruption of the sort we all saw come out of NSW Labor politics takes years to grow and evolve. Clearly the vested interests, as Sheridan calls them, existed Pre and Post-Carr, and Iemma knew it. That’s why he jumped. He was never pushed or knifed. He tried to strongarm his opponents by claiming that without him, Labor was lost, and he was wrong. Ironically, he turned out to be correct in the longer term, but one must remember that an unexcised canker will only grow if left untreated. As to federal Labor’s treatment of Rudd, it’s common knowledge that no-one in Labor ranks actually likes or respects Rudd for who he is of what he’s done. He was PM at a time when the party needed a new face, and one that could carry the “it’s time” message in 2007. His tenure was always dependent upon the polls. From November 2007 Rudd’s time was always in the hands of a Caucus that hated his guts. It still does.
As to Iemma’s separate piece disseminating the federal Labor Carbon Price mechanism and claiming we’ll all be roon’d by something neither he, nor Sheridan nor any reader of the Australian or so-called journalist writing for them can possibly understand, it’s impossible to consider either column as anything more than sour grapes, ideologically oriented pap and simply more of the usual crap that News Limited is renown for. Chris Mitchell should catch up on the 1990 BBC drama series, House of Cards. He might realise that those who write crap, often wind up being crapped on.