Fast-track to disaster for Australian's beaten Labor

Kristina Keneally. Photo / Getty Images

After 16 years, Labor's grip on Australia's most populous state will end today with a defeat that will reduce the party to a shattered rump in the New South Wales Parliament.

Polling has consistently shown that Premier Kristina Kenneally is driving a train wreck to disaster. The most recent, in yesterday's Daily Telegraph, predicted Labor would win barely enough seats to retain party status.

On these numbers, her defeat at the hands of Liberal Leader Barry O'Farrell's Opposition will be Labor's worst in more than a century, and will give the Coalition its third state.

Labor has lost Western Australia and Victoria, and looked to be well on the way to losing Queensland.

Premier Anna Bligh had been expected to fall as hard as Kenneally, but has recovered strongly after her performance during Queenland's floods and cyclone. She has also been aided by division within the state opposition.

South of the border, nothing can save Kenneally. Former Labor senator and powerbroker Graham Richardson predicted this week Labor would keep only 13 of the 93 seats in the lower house, a forecast even worse than the 20 to 25 most others have predicted.

Yesterday's Galaxy poll in the Telegraph supports Richardson's pessimism. It gave Labor a primary vote of 22 per cent against the Coalition's 51, translating to 70 seats for O'Farrell and 14 for Labor, with nine independents.

The Greens still hold hopes for a lower house seat, and ABC election analyst Antony Green believes two or more rural independents could lose their seats to the National Party, the junior Coalition partner, because of their association with Labor.

In the upper house, the final composition is less certain, but the Coalition can expect big gains. Labor now holds 19 of the 42 seats, the Coalition 15, the Greens four, the Shooters' Party two, and Family First and the Christian Democrats one each.

There will be sideshows - more than 300 candidates, including former One Nation leader Pauline Hanson, are running for the upper house council; almost 500 are competing for lower house assembly seats.

They include actor Mel Gibson's brother Chris, campaigning on an anti-obesity, anti-alcohol platform.

And religion has put its boot in.

Sydney Catholic Archbishop Cardinal George Pell and nine of his bishops, supported by the Baptist Union and evangelical churches, have attacked the Greens as anti-Christian.

The Rev Fred Nile, the sole Christian Democrat in state Parliament, added that a Christian agenda had more chance of success with the Coalition than with Labor.

All want to ensure the Greens - who could increase their council numbers to five - do not hold the balance of power in the upper house, as they will in Canberra from July.

None of their arguments compares to the fury that will hurl Labor into the pit today. American-born Kenneally, like O'Farrell a committed Catholic who once campaigned for the Democrats in the US, was doomed from the start.

Labor came to power in 1995 under Bob Carr, who quit a decade later before his government began to slide. By the time Kenneally replaced his two successors, Morris Iemma and - briefly - Nathan Rees, the premiership was a poisoned chalice.

Under Iemma the NSW economy tipped into steep decline, and outrage over transport systems - reflected in western Sydney's swing against Labor at last year's federal election - was inflamed by problems with trains and the cross-city and Lane Cove tunnels.

Labor was also hit with a run of scandals - abuse and sex revelations that brought down four ministers, one a paedophile, accusations of jobs for the boys; and allegations of improper links with developers, notably in the southern coastal city of Wollongong, where the Labor-controlled council was sacked and an administrator appointed.

In addition to other serious inherited policy potholes, including the appalling state of many NSW hospitals, Kenneally made her own blunders, none worse than the decision to partly privatise state power stations, against popular anger and furious political opposition.

Her campaigning has done little to stem the inevitable. On both sides, this has been an almost issues-free election, with O'Farrell riding high while promising only good intentions and a series of reviews and inquiries into such areas as transport, electricity privatisation and state finances.

Paraphrasing former Labor Leader Bill Hayden as Liberal Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser faced crushing defeat by Bob Hawke in 1983: A drover's dog could win this one against Labor.