There are 351 sleeps to the NSW election, but you can feel it already.
There’s the shift in tone. The narky edge creeping into everything. Announcements that sound more like attacks. Statements that feel less like governing and more like campaign pledges. Everything has a pitch, a ‘we’re better than them’ angle.
We are still a long way from the NSW election, and already it feels like we’re stuck in the sewer, with the foul stench of campaigning wafting across the state.
The necessary burden of an election campaign would be manageable if the fundamentals were sound. If the state was running well. If there was any sense that the people in charge were focused on fixing the things that are plainly broken.
But here, in the New England, all is not well. There is almost no area of state government responsibility you can point to and say ‘we’re doing really well in this’.
The current fuel situation is the clearest example of how fundamentally broken everything is. The current crisis has exposed just how fragile our systems are – how incredibly vulnerable the New England is – and the consequences are not going to disappear when the headlines do.
New England businesses have already gone to the wall. Farmers are considering not planting winter crops. People asking on Facebook if adults can catch school buses as households figure out what to do.
And it took metro service stations running dry before it was treated like a serious problem. Yesterday.
That tells you exactly how this state is governed. For them, not for us.
We know this joke well. NSW, in practice, means Newcastle, Sydney, Wollongong. If you are outside that metro area, you are expected to manage. To make do. To wait. To put up with it.
We have been waiting for decades for a government that genuinely cared about the rest of the state. Although in truth, I have no idea if my warm fuzzy memories of the Greiner era is just because I was a kid who didn’t know much then. Maybe they didn’t care either.
But I don’t ever remember as a kid, growing up in Moree, going to the hospital and there not being a doctor in the building.
Health services are stretched beyond what anyone should accept right across the region. Hospitals without doctors. Patients transferred for care that should be available locally. Having to travel for basic testing and imaging. Nurses and staff carrying the load of a system that is clearly broken beyond recognition.
What exactly happens when we don’t have the fuel to transport patients from Inverell and Moree to Tamworth or Armidale to access basic care, as is the current preferred operating model of Hunter New England Health? One shudders to think.
I also don’t remember the roads ever being this bad.
Roads crumbling, not in theory, in reality. Layers of patchwork holding together infrastructure that should have been rebuilt properly a decade ago. Speed limits being reduced rather than roads being fixed. Roads that are more pothole than road, and people literally losing their lives to highly preventable crashes.
You know what else you could do when I was a kid? Choose between two excellent public high schools in Armidale. There were also two, albeit not so excellent, high schools in Moree too. Both now only have one.
And you could travel to and from most centres in the region – both north and south – by a choice of transport options. Now we have towns without taxis, let alone buses and trains.
Just like we have towns without police.
None of this is new – you know the state of play already. This is what decades of neglect looks like. Not one catastrophic failure, but a steady erosion driven by short-term thinking and a persistent “that’ll do” attitude to regional infrastructure and services.
They have ripped, and cut, and cancelled, and defunded for literally decades, and now, with all these city people fleeing for the country… our communities don’t have the basic systems and structure they all take for granted, and aren’t dealing well with the influx. And the systems break down even more.
And into that reality, we add a year of ugly partisan political theatre.
Because the politicians don’t want to know unless there’s an ‘announceable’. A ribbon cutting, a podium, some festive happy thing they can associate themselves with. In an election frame, nothing gets done. Nothing get fixed. Just lots of photo opps.
On one side, One Nation is already turning up the volume. The rhetoric is not just overblown, it is frequently racist and bigoted. It leans into division because division is easy, and because it draws attention. That already reached fever pitch when Barnaby defected, it only gets worse from here – particularly following the stupid in South Australia.
But they are not the only ones contributing to the decline in standards.
There has been a broader erosion of basic respect across the political landscape. Language has hardened. Opponents are caricatured rather than engaged. Complex issues are flattened into slogans that inflame rather than inform. It has been building for some time, and it is accelerating.
That part that I find most difficult to stomach in all of this is a tiny bureaucratic thing that probably only I care about. And that’s the use of government resources for what is, plainly, partisan campaigning.
This week’s statement from Yasmin Catley is a case in point (forwarded to me by one of the team who was equally perplexed by what on earth they are trying to achieve by this statement). It attacked the Liberals and Nationals for not having identical positions on gun laws.
No kidding, a call for the Liberal and National parties to explain that they aren’t the same party?
On its face, that is a perfectly fine political argument to make – stupid, because you’re asking your opponent to explain their core point of difference and reason to vote for them, but y’know, if you want to play an own goal, go for it.
And I can even ignore the distastefulness of using the ham fisted emotional guilt trip of my friends being killed at Bondi Beach to demand support for gun laws that would never, and will never, make anyone safer.
But it belongs in party channels. On a Facebook page. In a media release issued by NSW Labor. In a speech at a campaign event.
Instead, it was distributed as a government announcement, using government resources, carrying the authority of an official communication, under a NSW Government logo. Money and resources that should have been fixing our roads, our schools, our hospitals was instead spent on partisan hackery.
I’m actually more pissed off by that than I am by the NSW Government’s complete refusal to accept that the electoral commission’s computer is broken and no state or local election has been counted correctly since 2011.
It matters because trust in institutions depends on the idea that official communications are issued in the public interest, not for partisan advantage. It matters because it blurs accountability. And it matters because it distracts from the work that actually needs to be done.
We are heading into a year where the incentives run in the opposite direction to what needs to be done. More noise. More division. More announceables. More performative politics.
And absolutely no solutions.
It’s going to be a long year.
End rant.
Dr RK (Kath) Crosby is the CEO of research and strategy company KORE CSR, former strategist for the Australian Democrats, and holds a PhD in political behaviour. She is also a well known migraine and health advocate, and the Publisher of New England Times and North Coast Times.
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