By Paul Sheehan
If I ever visit the office of the new Premier of NSW, I'll be looking for a dent in the woodwork. The dent may be hard to spot, it may appear insignificant, but it serves as a reminder why the state's voters have just delivered the most emphatic mandate in the history of politics in Australia.
Strangely, that mandate has gone almost unremarked. Yet the one thing certain about this mandate is that it was a repudiation of the dominance of insular, self-serving machine politics. And what did voters get? A new government that already contains a machine just as insular, just as self-serving, and even more shadowy than the one just rejected.
Illustration: Michael Mucci
The dent in the bookshelf was made on a Sunday soon after the NSW elections in March 2003. Bob Carr, at the height of his powers and newly re-elected as premier, had called Eddie Obeid into his office on the 41st floor of Governor Macquarie Tower. He told Obeid, who was 63, and had served four years in cabinet, it was time to make way for fresh blood.
After an hour, with Obeid still complaining about how this was a loss of face, Carr snapped.
He picked up a coffee mug, adorned with a picture of Mao Zedong, and hurled it in the general direction of Obeid's whining. The Mao mug bounced off the wooden frame of a glass-panelled bookcase. If that bookcase is still there, then the dent is still there. It should have heritage listing.
Obeid did not go quietly. He resumed his factional manoeuvring with vigour, feeding the internal divisions that eventually engulfed the NSW Labor government. People forget how quickly Labor disintegrated in NSW. Four years ago, it had just been re-elected with a solid majority.
''The great mistake Morris Iemma made,'' Carr told me, referring to his successor as premier, ''was allowing Eddie Obeid and Joe Tripodi to have direct access to his office. They used this access, which brought the appearance of power, to greatly increase their own power.''
Barry O'Farrell should be very careful who he lets through his office door. The Liberals already have their own would-be powerbrokers. Their names are Michael Photios and Nick Campbell. They are the two vice-presidents of the NSW division of the Liberal Party.
Both are lobbyists. Both operate outside Parliament.
Before O'Farrell could win office he had to quell the ingrained factional rivalry within the NSW Liberals. He then conducted his election campaign, and the transition to government, with caution and integrity. His praetorian guard - chief-of-staff Pete McConnell, transition director Peta Seaton, and chief media adviser Peter Grimshaw - are all untainted by factional alliances. They laid down a transition that has been rigorous and ethical.
The same cannot be said for the Liberal Party itself. It is an ethical swamp. All the factions and sub-factions with the NSW Liberals have contributed to this devolution. There was a time when the factional divide was over policy, the natural fault line between conservatism and liberalism, but the factions have mutated into fiefdoms built around self-advancement.
The Photios-Campbell faction, which controls the state executive with 12 votes out of 19, is an amalgam of left and right, of pragmatism and self-perpetuation. It is led by Photios, who runs his own political consultancy, and Campbell, the local in-house head of government relations for the pharmaceutical giant Johnson & Johnson.
Photios is a vice-president of the Liberal Party yet stands to make commercial gain through his consultancy, MP Consulting PL, via the perception of access to members of the Coalition who are ministers or parliamentary committee members. Lobbying is an ingrained part of the political process, but being a lobbyist - which in politics is a term interchangeable with consultant - while holding a senior party position raises some concern.
The Department of Premier and Cabinet maintains a public register of lobbyists in NSW. There are 118 companies listed. Nowhere on that list is ''MP Consulting PL''.
It is well known, and has been reported repeatedly in the media, that Photios has been a paid consultant to the Australian Hotels Association in NSW. Last year, the Herald reported that the AHA was the biggest donor to the NSW Liberal Party. A former deputy chief executive officer of the AHA (NSW), David Elliott, has just been elected to Parliament thanks to a contentious Liberal preselection contest for the seat of Baulkham Hills. Photios and Campbell combined to get Elliott over the line. The circularity of all this is self-evident.
But Photios has not always had a smooth ride with the party. In 2006, after he had secured the numbers for preselection to a safe spot on the Liberal upper house ticket for the 2007 state elections, Photios also had to be approved by the party's Nominations Review Committee. After attending his NRC hearing, Photios withdrew his nomination.
As for the great lobbying machine that oils politics in NSW, it did not even slow down with the change of government. Look no further than 100 William Street, the building where the NSW Liberals have their headquarters. Now, on the floor below, are the offices of the lobbying firm Barton Deakin, headed by the party's former state leader Peter Collins. Not subtle.
Barton Deakin is the creation of the STW Group. The same company owns Hawker Britton, the spin machine of the NSW Labor Party, and the principal creator of the spin-over-substance manipulations that the voters in NSW have just exposed as a soulless fraud.