Category: State
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Phoney war against organised crime
Australia’s spooks and cops can bug the Indonesian president, his wife and Cabinet ministers but not the phones of criminal gangs in Sydney, Brisbane and Melbourne. Why? Liberal and Labor Governments will bend over backwards to supply Washington with intelligence. But protecting metropolitan neighbourhoods from drug trafficking, street shoot-outs, money-laundering and major tax evasion –…
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Behind the Nathan Rees “scandal”
Former Premier Nathan Rees’s private life has been aired in Sydney’s Tank Stream media, The Daily Telegraph and The Sydney Morning Herald, to devastating effect. Reporters Andrew Clennell and Sean Nicholls have climbed into Rees over an affair with a 40-year-old mother of two which occurred a year ago. Two consenting adults have brief affair…
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Labor ministers decline to testify against Obeid
During the latest Eddie Obeid hearings at the Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC) four former Labor ministers testified they had no idea Obeid had financial interests in Circular Quay restaurants, lucrative water leases and a health service firm. The Four Wise Men – two former Treasurers Michael Costa and Eric Roozendaal, Police Minister Carl Scully…
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A paradise lost, and a new start
We’ve left our dream home in the hills of the Tweed Valley after a five-year fight against a development project that we consider environmental lunacy. We’re making the best of our enforced migration from one end of the Tweed Shire to the other – an easier and healthier lifestyle, more time to exercise, read, write…
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High time for Eddie Obeid to come clean
Does former NSW ALP powerbroker Eddie Obeid have a breaking point? During the year-long anti-corruption investigations Obeid has studiously protected his former colleagues. But will his protective silence last? Obeid has the dirt to take down his ALP accomplices in the Carr to Keneally Governments which ruled NSW between 1995 and 2011. Obeid has already…
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Albo and Billy Boy: Pygmies go to war
Anthony Albanese says: “What you see is what you get.” And what do you get? A gold-plated dill. Forget all the spin, Albo is an authentic machine politician, a product of Sussex Street, the notorious address that has come to symbolise the bureaucratic dysfunctionality of the NSW branch of the ALP. After five general secretaries…
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Obeid’s gopher heads to Senate
It’s all over bar the shouting – former Eddie Obeid gopher, Sam Dastyari, will be the next ALP senator from NSW. Dastyari, current general secretary of the NSW Labor Party, used to work as a researcher in Obeid’s 10th floor office in the NSW Parliament. As a 24-year-old Young Labor operative he joined Obeid’s staff…
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Art Lovers the book
My book Art Lovers has just arrived from the printers, and it looks terrific! It’s the 60-year history of the Art Gallery Society of New South Wales – six decades of social and cultural change. I’ve loved working on it. It will be launched by the Governor of NSW, Professor Marie Bashir AC, during a…
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Roozendaal starts job-hunting
When Eric Roozendaal departed the NSW Upper House in early May, the former general secretary of the NSW ALP and treasurer, delivered the most self-serving speech heard in several generations. “Electric Eric” made no attempt at self-criticism or to review his political career when he was in charge of the Sussex Street machine, co-managed the…
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Event for Sydney readers: Alex Mitchell with Hall Greenland
Tuesday April 16, 6pm, Better Read Than Dead Bookshop, 265 King Street, Newtown (upstairs room). Alex and Hall Greenland (pictured), author of Red Hot and Greens candidate for Grayndler, will discuss the current ICAC inquiry, the future of the NSW Labor Party and the upcoming federal election.