“Underwhelming” is the description of The Australian’s Brad Norington.

True enough, in a corporate journalism kind of way. The media praises the Liberal Government’s efforts in transport infrastructure. But, really, the current administration only looks good here because its predecessors going back thirty years didn’t do their basic day jobs.

NOTHING

State governments are there to do these things, nothing more and nothing less.

There’s no need to reiterate the manifest failings of the Perrottet regime. Are there alternatives?

Regular readers will be aware of my affection for Edmund Burke’s prescription for members of democratic parliaments.

Leave your ideology and your hangers-on and your local pressures at the door, and address the big issues with sensible rationality. So few of our current crop of politicians get close to this ideal, of course.

The average politician these days sees his or her role as “getting stuff” for the locals. Executive governments are only too ready to join in the game.

A superior politician with principles and free thought will formulate positions on the key issues and then make these issues and positions relevant to each locality. Or, better still, eschew local issues altogether, as we now face crises that affect every State electorate.

Clearly there is only one politician in NSW who approximates the Burkean ideal.

That would be Mark Latham. Or, perhaps two, given that Craig Kelly has organised an Upper House ticket of “UAP independents” (since he wasn’t able to get the United Australia Party registered in time in this State.

Latham, who leads One Nation in NSW, is that pleasant combination of superior intellect – which, on a daily basis, makes those of his Upper House colleagues look like pigmies – and sensible centrist policy inclinations.

He also has an urge to push back against elites and the powerful. His working-class upbringing sees him focused on the ordinary voter while holding a healthy and often re-stated contempt for political correctness in all its forms.

He has a visceral anger at political and policy corruption in all its forms. NSW is target-rich, to put it mildly.

His opponents still think in terms of late twentieth century categories and Pauline Hanson’s alleged racism. Her opponents often also make much of her assumed dimness.

The latter certainly couldn’t be said of Latham. This reflexive sniggering works for the self-professed insiders in the media, of course. They think in straight lines, to the extent that they can be said to think at all.

Candidates for high office should be judged upon what they emphasise, their priorities, what they talk about the most.

KEAN

For example, take the two senior Liberals. Matt Kean talks most about Liberal Party pre-selections, transgendered rights, renewable energy and the importance of climate change. Not so much on fiscal rectitude. He is the Treasurer, after all.

As Latham has noted, of 362 policy changes in the last two State budgets, only three were costs savings. $182 billion in gross State debt. So much for Kean the Green. 

What about his current leader – his fourth in a decade? Perrottet has been talking about how he cannot control his bureaucrats in relation to abhorrent vaccine mandates for public servants. About how sorry he is for wearing a Nazi outfit at his 21^st.

About how his Government isn’t in disarray despite a high-speed bolt for the door by numerous ministers and members. About how COVID vaccines don’t stop transmission (which he must have known at the time he was spruiking them).

About how he is on-board with the abhorrent intent of the Mr Rainbow, Alex Greenwich, the imported gay Kiwi woke activist, to criminalise the perfectly sane practice of seeking help to overcome same sex attraction.

And to offer Greenwich anything else he may want. You name it. So, there we have it.

Kean is a Left-wing ideologue and Perrottet is a confused wimp. Neither are worthy of high office.

What of the almost invisible Labor leader? What does he talk about most? His name is Chris Minns, and his job should be the easiest of any Opposition leader in living memory.

Who would know what he thinks about difficult issues, though? He always seeks to avoid them. Both he and the Premier are joined at the hip in their shared desire to manufacture a consensus about unimportant issues so that the election then becomes about “management” and not core values.

I do not recall Minns questioning COVID totalitarianism. Because he agreed with it.

Does he also agree with the corruption of children through NSW’s woke education system run by teachers’ unions and ideologues in the Department of Education?

No support was forthcoming for Latham’s bill related to parental rights.

Climate change? Minns is on board. Legislation for net-zero? You bet.

Minns will ruin the State. We are going to get a Net-Zero Commission. You read it here first.

Would Matt Kean as Opposition Leader disagree? I think not. The Liberals have held the door wide open for Labor simply to press the pedal on the climate accelerator as we all hurtle towards the cliff edge.

ISSUES

Leaders’ reputations as proper Burkean representatives of the electorate also depend on their capacity for identifying the real issues for real people.

Not what focus groups, twenty-something apparatchiks from head office and viewers of The Project and Q and A tell them.

And they should have sound views on issues that may not be front-and-centre for middle-of-the-road voters, but should be.

In other words, they should lead opinion on things that may not be fashionable. Finally, it is wise to listen to the language and tone of a politician.

How does he or she say things? It is a giveaway. What is the level of cliché, for example? Do they say what they mean, and mean what they say?

What are Latham’s emphases? His issue selections?

Well, education and energy for a start. The Government and Opposition seem to agree on destroying the NSW energy sector and on making NSW education all about woke.

Parents and energy users are in despair at the ways in which the NSW political class has betrayed them.

Latham is also very big on elites, the betrayal of voters by bureaucrats, and the COVID crimes. He is for fiscal continence. Not a conspicuously religious man, he has spoken up over the sidelining of Christians and their abandonment by the most Catholic Premier we have ever had in the face of cultural opposition and the requirements of power politics.

Which, in NSW, means the Liberal Left and the aforementioned Alex Greenwich, who has done more for what Pope John Paul II called the culture of death in this State than anyone.

Latham provides policy leadership on fashionable and unfashionable issues. He talks the talk of normal people.

He is a truth-teller: “Militant woke propaganda is brainwashing schoolchildren.” To the point. No cliches there. No obfuscation.

GLORIOUS

Another example: “No one in our society should be afraid to say four of the most glorious words in our civilisation – ‘I am a Christian’. Hence his stated need for religious discrimination laws.

I would expect both major Parties would be running for cover on this one. Including Captain Catholic Premier. Latham is doing his job for him.

And Latham still calls himself a “social democrat”. In other words, he retains his affection for the working class and seeks to advance its position in society. This situates him somewhat in the old DLP camp and the Catholic Church’s social teachings (before they went off the rails).

Mark Latham also keeps us all amused with his massively popular Outsiders Facebook page. The memes are superior. Even the dad jokes are impressive for voters of a certain age. As always with these social media pages, it is the commenters that give a very precise guide to the thinking of the silent majority.

Someone calling himself Glenn Twiddle – possibly not his real name, though I don’t want anyone calling me namist – said the following on Mark Latham’s Facebook page: “When can I go banging on about my fetish for chicks for a month and get it celebrated?

“I got a few gay mates, and I never asked, and they never offered, for them to celebrate what I get up to in the nether region!

“Keep it in the bedroom I reckon.

“There you go, old fart not wanting to hear about your bedroom shenanigans said his piece.”

Sounds reasonable. Further evidence that Latham’s Facebook page is an indispensable resource for anyone following the guttersnipes in Macquarie Street.

While there is no evidence that Latham is remotely a homophobe, he might well say “hear hear” to Glenn Twiddle’s post.

The people of Sydney have had been subjected to a month of in-your-face “pride”. They have probably had it up to their necks.

Pride, which may or may not go before a fall, has assumed power in NSW. Those of us who saw the injustices meted out to homosexuals up to the 1970s as abominable and wished to see this prejudice done away with, had no idea that homosexuality would one day be made compulsory.

CRAZY-WEIRD

This crazy-weird festival, under Dominic Perrottet’s nose and with generous government funding, has twisted the polity into something unrecognisable in the name of unelected elites with woke genes.

In the face of gay ideology now infiltrating our schools, the innocent pleas for equality back in the day have taken on far more sinister shape.

And Latham is one of the few who will speak truth on this, as on so many other issues. What the Labor Party of Latham’s youth used to be for.

Latham’s approach is a case study in both contemporary political defeatism and in how to push back.

Even Latham’s old foe from the old politics, Tony Abbott, seems to harbour affection. Latham’s latterday acceptance by the authentic Right-of-centre speaks to the magnitude of the changes that have occurred in our time in respect of old political cleavages.