If there’s one thing that Australian politics has inspired in 2018 it’s been a retina-dislodging eyeroll followed by hiding under a pile of blankets and hoping that the crocodiles take over.
After all, if you believe Bob Katter, that appears to be their endgame…
Anyway: cooked as the national political landscape appears to be it’s nothing compared to the situation in NSW which has moved into “cooked, served up and scathingly reviewed on Yelp.”
Where are things at? Why, let’s take a look!
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LABOR
The opposition party are currently led by… um… you know, the white man that wears a shirt and has a face? Thingy. Michael Daley! That’s it!
To be fair, he’s only been in the job for a bit over a month, and why? Because his predecessor Luke Foley was forced to resign and leave politics at the next election after accusations surfaced in parliament that he sexually harassed an ABC journalist.
Those accusations were made despite the journo in question never having made them public, by a government MP under parliamentary privilege. And Foley announced plans to sue the journalist for defamation, and then quietly backed down.
So Labor have that hanging over them, and yet are still entirely competitive. Why? Because…
LIBERAL-NATIONAL COALITION
The NSW government of Gladys Berejiklian is hanging on for dear life partially because of high profile infrastructure up-cockery, like the CBD light rail development being over budget, behind schedule and subject to a legal challenge, and the controversial WestConnex motorway also appearing to be a complete boondoggle.
However the bigger problem is the federal Coalition government of Scott Morrison has been doing them no favours, with scandals and embarrassments and dismal polling.
That Scotty is a Sydney boy just compounds matters since few voters meaningfully distinguish between Members Of The Liberal Party Of NSW What Work In Sydney and Members Of the Liberal Party Of NSW What Work In Canberra .
Thus they’ve been forced to attempt to distinguish themselves from their on-the-nose federal colleagues by, among other things, asking the PM not to help campaign and openly defying their federal colleagues on matters of energy policy.
And to be fair, federal Labor are doing well on a policy of distancing themselves from the Morrison government, so it makes perfect sense for Berejiklian to do the same.
THE GREENS
The NSW party has always had a schism around those who advocate for better environment policues and those who want to burn capitalism to the ground, and that turned very public with the decision not to re-endorse federal senator Lee Rhiannon.
But things really got messy when MP Jeremy Buckingham was accused of sexual harassment, a claim he has consistently denied, which came to an ugly pinnacle when MP Jenny Leong used parliamentary privilege to name her colleague in parliament and read a statement from the alleged victim.
Buckingham has now spitefully quit the party and is planning to contest his seat as an independent while the local party are split between those who support him, those who agree with Leong, and those who wish the whole thing would just go away.
OTHERS
It’s all but certain that current federal senator and headline-magnet David Leyonhjelm will quit on the not unreasonable grounds that he definitely cannot hold on to his senate seat federal election and will almost certainly notch up the much, much lower number of votes necessary to get into the NSW Legislative Council.
That prospect is unlikely to fill any NSW parliamentarians with enthusiasm.
In short, it’s probably a coincidence that people are fleeing Sydney for Melbourne at the highest rate in decades.
Or maybe not.