It beggars belief that in the coming national election the chronic state of Labor in NSW will not translate into a gain for the Coalition of some federal seats, possibly Robertson, Eden-Monaro, Dobell and Bennelong.

Given the federal election will be held well before the NSW election, there is every possibility that voters will punish federal Labor for the sins of state Labor.

Kevin Rudd was supported in his bid to win the 2007 election by the powerful NSW Labor Right but this year, with the web of links between Labor ministers, staff and advisers at both levels of government, there is a risk of electoral contamination for federal Labor.

Unlike NSW Labor, whose electoral situation seems terminal and whose defeat will most likely lead to Keneally being replaced as state Labor leader (probably by Frank Sartor, the former lord mayor of Sydney), Queensland Labor may still have a chance of turning things around in that state, where the government of Anna Bligh is very unpopular.

While there will be state elections this year in South Australia and Tasmania (on March 20), as well as in Victoria, the two least popular state governments in Australia will not face the people until next year in the case of NSW and 2012 in Queensland.

Nevertheless, the poor electoral standing of both governments will have an important effect on this year’s federal election. These NSW and Queensland Labor governments are far too big a target for the Liberals and Nationals to ignore. At the same time, it will be fascinating to see whether, and how, the Prime Minister attempts to distance himself from his state Labor colleagues in NSW and Queensland.

As well as highlighting the hopeless state of Labor in NSW, the feisty, straight-talking Tony Abbott will zero in on state Labor in key federal regional Queensland seats. These include Dawson, Herbert and Leichhardt, where state Labor’s plan to sell Queensland Rail is most unpopular. This is because if Abbott is to defeat federal Labor, it is in Rudd’s home state of Queensland that the Coalition will need to pick up seats.

In Queensland, in particular, the merged Liberal National Party is polling strongly but largely on the back of an unpopular government. The opposition has yet to show to Queenslanders it is ready to govern and this year the LNP will come under increasing pressure to demonstrate it can be a strong alternative government.

There is already some internal criticism emerging from within the LNP parliamentary wing — from two or three maverick backbenchers — about the lack of policy and preparation for government. This will gather momentum if state Opposition Leader and member for Surfers Paradise John-Paul Langbroek and his experienced, country-based deputy Lawrence Springborg don’t lift their game substantially.

The Queensland government has slightly more than two years to run before the next state election. Bligh has decided to tough out her decision to privatise Queensland Rail and port assets against the opposition of a significant bloc of unions, mainly from Bligh’s left faction, and from a vast majority of Queenslanders.

This year will determine whether this move is politically smart and electorally astute.

The other challenge facing Bligh is whether she is able to do what her mentor and predecessor Peter Beattie did in late 2000 and early 2001 when he confronted a large electoral rort scandal in his party. Beattie not only reshaped the state ALP but also the political landscape to win the largest number of seats in the ALP’s history in Queensland at the 2001 election.

To save her government in early 2012, Bligh needs a significant political shift in her fortunes this year and next. Indeed, how she manages the sale of the assets will help determine whether she is still Premier at the end of this year.

Bligh has been saved in the short term by the reluctance of possible alternative leaders, such as Speaker John Mickel, to challenge her. In the long term, trade union opposition to the assets sale will determine whether that reluctance continues.

On the other hand, Langbroek has to prove to Queenslanders he has the policies and character to be premier. To do so, he has a lot of work ahead.

But rest assured, the federal election campaign will have a big influence on the futures of Langbroek and Bligh. If both perform poorly this year there may be a totally different leadership team in Queensland by year’s end.

The situation in Western Australia is more complex as the Liberal Party won 11 of the 15 federal seats in the 2007 election.

There are five marginal federal seats, four of them held by Liberal members who have strong local links. Don Randall, a seasoned campaigner in Canning, has a 4.3 per cent margin but is up against a former state Labor minister, Alannah MacTiernan. However, there is talk that the Liberal Party has attracted an outstanding candidate for the Labor-held seat of Hasluck, which is one of the most marginal seats in the country.

Labor’s new industrial relations laws are playing out very badly in the west, where Abbott’s deputy Julie Bishop is performing well. The return of union militancy in the mining and resources sector and on construction sites near Perth, and large wage claims with no productivity gains, are early signs of the return to the bad old days of union strikes and industrial anarchy that damaged WA’s reputation as a reliable exporter of commodities in the 1980s.

Employment and Workplace Relations Minister Julia Gillard, with her refusal to acknowledge the risks to the local state economy caused by her new workplace laws, will be one of Labor’s biggest liabilities in WA.

More generally, it also remains to be seen whether this year Rudd’s political focus and electoral popularity holds up under the blowtorch of a rejuvenated, Abbott-led opposition.

The Weekend Australian, February 27, 2010

This is despite the fact that NSW Liberal Party leader Barry O’Farrell is a conspicuous underachiever and a lacklustre media and parliamentary performer.

The fact is the NSW Labor government has well and truly lost its way. It is clearly on the nose and is widely perceived as divided and incompetent. It’s simply not listening to the concerns of voters and not acting decisively on their behalf. Under Keneally, it still seems unable to get any positive messages out into the wider community about what it may be doing reasonably well.

It is also not properly utilising its two most talented parliamentarians, former Sydney lord mayor and present Environment Minister Frank Sartor and, especially, its hard-nosed numbers man John Della Bosca, who has been banished from the ministry. Ironically, with the NSW cabinet largely devoid of listeners who can initiate decisive action, Della Bosca’s position on the back bench could be to his long-term political advantage.

In NSW’s Legislative Council late last year, Della Bosca made a highly public declaration of love and public apology to his wife, Belinda Neal, a federal Labor MP, after his affair with a 26-year-old woman, an affair that had led to his resignation as health minister. Significantly, a large number of women seem to have been impressed by his apology.

This is important because for all his personal faults, Della Bosca is one of two politicians who could get NSW back on track (the other being Sartor). Indeed, Della is arguably the most talented and politically astute state Labor MP in NSW.

When former premiers Bob Carr and Morris Iemma wanted something difficult done, they called in Della Bosca, their Mr Fix It.

As disability services minister, he negotiated the biggest increase in disability spending in the state’s history: $1 billion for more respite and permanent care places. As the minister responsible for the motor accidents authority, he made changes so that no matter who’s at fault, anyone catastrophically injured in a car accident now gets the long-term care and support they need.

As minister for industrial relations, he led the NSW fight against the Howard government’s Work Choices, and won. In education, he introduced tougher measures to get children to school, led the work on raising the school-leaving age, and provided more options for young people wanting to pursue a vocational rather than an academic path.

In WorkCover, Della Bosca was handed a scheme that was bleeding business dry and yet wasn’t helping the people who were injured at work. No one got everything they wanted but the scheme was fixed through balanced decision-making and consultation, and so far it has been sustainable.

In health, Della Bosca was refreshingly honest. He admitted NSW could no longer afford a health budget of $15.1 billion a year, which represents almost 30 per cent of the state budget, and which is growing exponentially. He would often say, “We have to use taxpayer dollars more wisely.” In less than 12 months, he visited hospitals throughout NSW, sat down with doctors, nurses and other health workers and listened, then acted. Before he resigned from the ministry, he had begun introducing measures that enable doctors and nurses to return to doing the thing they do best, saving lives, not wasting their talents on time-consuming paperwork.

A comparison of Della Bosca with successful Queensland ex-premier Peter Beattie is salutary. Both Della Bosca and Beattie were handed the poisoned chalice of health, and unlike almost every

state politician in recent memory, both performed extremely well in this difficult portfolio. Under Della Bosca, Labor invested heavily in health and as a result NSW now has the best emergency department and elective-surgery performance in Australia, according to the federal government’s data.

Despite some highly orchestrated local and regional complaints, even the Australian Medical Association agrees that NSW is a standout performer. Compare this with Queensland’s recent dismal record in health.

The truth is that any government worth its salt requires experience, enthusiasm and balanced leadership. NSW has a crucial role to play economically in the nation. It also needs to act as a leader in the important work that the Prime Minister is undertaking to refashion the Federation.

After Labor loses the next state election, it seems more than probable that the NSW Labor Party may be forced to call on Mr Fix It, especially as he will not have been tainted by any membership of the Keneally government.

Good government is driven by good policy and balanced decisions. Although Della Bosca hasn’t always played it safe as a minister, he has a track record of consultation and collaboration to come up with the best solutions. That’s his style, an inclusive approach.

Maybe next year Della Bosca could be the person to save state Labor from utter demolition. This is despite the fact that tradition seems to be against him. Usually the parliamentary leader comes from the Lower House, but a precedent has been set by Liberal prime minister John Gorton, who moved from the Senate in 1968, and Barrie Unsworth, who vacated the Legislative Council after he became Labor premier of NSW in 1986.

In the end, does it matter whether the best person for the job of running the state is in the Upper House at present? If anything, it makes a premier (or shadow premier) more accountable to the people because he or she would have to front both houses of parliament and have no place to hide.

In any case, if Della Bosca is drafted to the state Labor leadership in 2011, there will be plenty of time to arrange for the wily, number-savvy member of the Legislative Council to move to the NSW Legislative Assembly.

By then, if recent history is any guide, all and any of Della’s personal indiscretions will be well and truly behind him.

Published in The Weekend-Australian, January 2-3, 2010. Ross Fitzgerald is a member of the NSW Expert Advisory Group on Alcohol and Other Drugs, which was established by John Della Bosca as health minister.

The biggest influence is in NSW. When Catholic World Youth Day descended on that state in July last year, many taxpayers resented being forced to pay $20 million in security charges for the event and $40m for the use of Randwick racecourse. The reason that atheists, agnostics, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Anglicans and even a few Catholics were being forced to go along with this was essentially because then premier Morris Iemma and many of his fellow committed Catholics in the NSW ALP Right were born into that religion. They didn’t want a confrontation with Catholic Archbishop of Sydney George Pell over a cheaper location.

The idea that NSW taxpayers could be forced to fund a Scientology convention or a Rastafarian smoke-in would be laughable. But they’re both bona fide religions in their own right and meet roughly the same criteria as Christianity and Islam for all the lurks and perks.

Why was there little organised opposition, then, to this unpopular rort? The main reason was that there was no significant dissent from within the parliament.

On the opposition side, a man who reputedly is influential in the NSW Liberal preselection processes, upper house MP David Clarke, is very strong in some of his Catholic views. Two other devout Christians, Fred Nile and Gordon Moyes, happened to sit on the all-important cross-benches in the upper house, with the result that the propriety of handing $60m in NSW taxpayers’ money to support an already wealthy religion could have been better examined.

More recently, Clarke and Nile were guest speakers at last month’s Australia’s Future and Global Jihad conference in Sydney, alongside Danny Nalliah from the Catch the Fire Ministries. Other attendees were Peter and Jenny Stokes from the fundamentalist Christian morals group Salt Shakers Inc and Emmanuel Michael from the Assyrian Federation of Australia. Why would one of the Liberal Party’s top policy-makers be at such a conference, which was backing the notion that our Christian heritage was under attack from evil forces? And what about Kevin Rudd’s attendance at the Australian Christian Lobby’s annual general meeting last month?

The secular Nathan Rees’s elevation to the premiership in NSW afforded a glimmer of hope that the state’s politics would not be dominated by conservative Christian ethics.

But those hopes were dashed by the recent ascendancy of another devout Catholic to the top job in NSW. Sporting a strange mix of American accent and fashion chic, Kristina Keneally boasts a BA in political science and religion and a masters degree in feminist theology from Ohio. She met her Young Labor husband at Catholic World Youth Day in Poland in 1991, which says much about her leanings.

The election of Christian hard-liners to positions of power and influence in NSW doesn’t stop at Macquarie Street. NSW Police Commissioner Andrew Scipione is a devout Baptist who worships at the influential Hillsong Church. He is responsible for the first official police Bible, bound in police blue with an official NSW Police crest on the cover. On Scipione’s watch, all new NSW police graduates from the Goulburn Academy are routinely offered one of these special Bibles.

While Scipione is doing good work in trying to curtail alcohol-based violence, he has made no secret of the fact he brings his Christian faith into his policing work. Out at Hillsong that means treating homosexuality as a disease to be cured rather than an identity to be lived. But is it a fair whack that taxpayers are funding police Bibles? Will they also produce a Koran with a NSW Police logo for Muslim officers? With 38 per cent of our federal politicians being members of the devout Parliamentary Christian Fellowship, and a half-dozen well-known journalists in the press gallery claiming Jesus as their saviour, the non-believers, infidels, atheists, secularists and our many slightly spiritual but anti-organised religion citizens need to be delivered from this anti-intellectualism.

The final word on the Christianisation of Australian politics surely comes from the head of the Australian Christian Lobby, former SAS officer Jim Wallace. Unlike some stakeholders, Wallace has publicly claimed to have had regular contact with Communications Minister Stephen Conroy – Catholic – as Conroy developed his unpopular model for filtering our internet.

Last month Wallace sent out a media release urging other parties to preference the Australian Sex Party last in the Bradfield and Higgins by-elections, as they had done with One Nation.

The Sex Party came third in Bradfield and a close fourth in Higgins.

Wallace needs to take a cold shower. That there is now an Australian political party prepared to challenge the pious claptrap that dominates most of the other parties is refreshing.

The Newspoll survey published last month showed that 32 per cent of NSW voters thought there was too much religion in politics.

With the orchestrated rise of Keneally and Tony Abbott, that figure may have risen.