A funny thing happened on the way to Macquarie St.
Before the March NSW election, Barry O’Farrell was a seemingly banal, workmanlike and mild-mannered Liberal leader who spent years rebuilding his party’s broken morale, even at the cost of reining in powerful far Right factional elements. Rather than projecting the leader he would be and the government he would lead in terms of a vision, strategy, or program, he chose a smaller-than-small-target approach, highlighting the ALP’s corruption, incompetence and mismanagement in contrast to his own non-ideological style of can-do managerialism. This image at times seemed to the Left of the ALP on social issues, such as the state’s high rates of incarceration and its shocking lack of attention to mental health services.
Yet in recent weeks O’Farrell has played quite a different hand. After initial attempts to paint the state as having a Budget black hole blew up in his face (yes, Virginia, the ALP really were deficit hawks who let public services crumble to maintain their AAA rating), he has been scorned for a series of right-wing policies: The regressive shutdown of the Solar Bonus scheme, mandatory life sentences for people convicted of killing police, publicly speculating he would sell off the entire power industry, flouting promises for greater government transparency, and now announcing the most draconian attack on workers’ rights to collectively bargain in generations.
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From:http://left-flank.blogspot.com/
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