NO MERCY

NO MERCY AS VOTERS PUT ALP TO THE SWORD

(Sunday Telegraph March 27^th 2011)

Reporters: Linda Silmalis and Claire Harvey: [POLITICAL WRITERS].

There was no last minute reprieve, no late face-saving swing back. NSW voters yesterday showed no mercy and delivered the 16-year-old Labour government the almighty hammering it had feared.

The once-proud NSW ALP was reduced to a rump in State Parliament, left with at most 21 seats in the 93-seat parliament once the smoking wreckage clears.

Among the casualties were former ministers David Borger, Virginia Judge, Phillip Costa, and Frank Terenzini. Others, including Deputy Premier Carmel Tebbutt and Education Minister Verity Firth, are hanging by a thread.

Few areas were spared the 17 per cent anti-Labour swing, but the harshest judgements were delivered by voters in Labour’s heartland in western and south-western Sydney, the Illawarra and the Hunter.

Formerly safe seats were wiped away, including Bathurst (a 37 % swing against the ALP), Riverstone (31 %). Parramatta (25 %) and Campbelltown (21%).

In the Hunter, formerly impregnable Labour strongholds such as Charlestown and Swansea fell to the Coalition.

The result was clear just minutes after the polls closed.

It’s a massacre. It’s a slaughter, the likes of which we have never seen, Labour campaign manager, Left faction leader and Upper House MP Luke Foley said on the ABC.

Mr Foley’s bleak summation came at precisely 6:31p.m., before viewers even had time to settle to watch the Keneally government dumped into the dustbin of history.

Some Labour diehards could not stomach witnessing the disaster unfolding – there were no television screens set up at the site of Ms Keneally’s official wake, the Randwick Labour Club.

Ms Keneally took responsibility for the result, saying she would not re-contest the leadership and would go to the back bench. But she said labour had only itself to blame.

The lessons we in the party must take from tonight’s result are the importance of unity and the importance of putting the people we serve and the principle we hold above all other motivations, she said.

The reality is that our lack of unity and discipline, as a party and with some individual members, put the very future of the NSW Labour party at risk.

Party elders were left shaking their heads. Former Labour powerbroker Graham Richardson said: It is historically the worst result in more than a century and will take many, many years to recover from. Former premier Bob Carr, who led Labour to three victories, said four years of ‘lamentable’ politics had led to the defeat.

What should have been a swing-of-the pendulum defeat has become something else: a disaster, he wrote in a post-mortem blog.

One of the first Labour seats to fall to the Coalition was Miranda, won by former NRL referee Graham Annesley.

Former minister John Della Bosca, who resigned from parliament in 2009 after a sex scandal, told Channel Seven indiscipline was to blame for Labour’s woes, along with the divisions caused by privatisation of the power industry.

Look, I was part of it. I was in the middle of it in my terms trying to refocus some of the issues back then, but it was very hard to do that, he said.

In safe Labour seats, the swing was palpable: many voters refused Labour how-to-vote-cards, others trode into the booths with minds already made up.

Mr Borger, who was roads minister and a rising Labour star, claimed he was victim of a dirty-tricks campaign in Granville, where Muslim volunteers were paid $300 to say Labour was against mosques.

A eight booths, we witnessed women in headscarves telling voters that Labour was opposing the building of mosques in the area, while Tony Issa was going to approve at least two, he said.

In Sydney’s west, the mood was clear.

It’s time for a change, said Cabramatta’s Phuoc Tran.

ROCKDALE

Former Labour fronebencher Frank Sartor was unable to help his candidate survive against the ant-government backlash.

Mr Sartor who had held the seat with a 10.3 % margin, did not stand for this election after retiring from politics.

Labour candidates Steve Kamper was unable to withstand the 13.3 % swing to the Liberals, despite strong support from Kristina Keneally, who campaigned in Rockdale on the eve of the election.

New Liberal MP John Flowers is a former mayor of Rockdale.

Mr Sartor who had held the environment and climate change portfolio, congratulated mr Kamper.

The Labour candidate put in a good campaign but the anti-Labour swing was too much, he said.