Four weeks ago to the day, former NSW Premier Kristina Keneally condemned her government to obliteration with the farcical announcement of Sydney’s pretention to be the nation's 'rock capital'.
If re-elected, Ms Keneally promised to appoint a NSW Commissioner for Rock with a brief to promote Sydney as the premier destination for the live performance of rock and roll.
The rest, as they say, is rapidly becoming history…
On the weekend an almost unprecedented 16.5 per cent swing against NSW Labor saw its 16-year-old government thrown out in this country's most dramatic voter backlash since the second world war.
The swing against the NSW government surpassed even the 14.6 per cent swing which devastated its 1955 Victorian counterpart, led by John Cain Senior, after the Labor party tore itself apart in the catholic/communist schism which was to last two decades.
In fact, the only greater swing against a government in the history of Australian electoral politics is the tsunami-like 22 per cent which swamped the Scullin federal Labor government in 1931 after the onset of the Great Depression. Even the swing against the Whitlam government, in the turbulence of 1975, was a poultry six per cent.
While thousands of pundits, pollsters and professional commentators are now pointing to the plethora of factors which contributed to the weekend's result, none of them have identified anything capable of creating a seismic political shift on a scale previously associated with the Great Depression or the Evil Empire.
Like the proverbial butterfly wing that creates an earthquake, her blunder went
almost unnoticed; its significance misunderstood.
This clear demonstration of their former premier's delusion clearly horrified NSW
voters, recognising as they must that Australia can have only one rock capital and
one rock commissioner.
Comments contained in posts such as 'Cue the fat lady' and 'Begone you stupid, stupid woman' gave a foretaste of the force with which the NSW electorate would remove its teenage Labor government. One reader even advised the ex-Premier to 'invite Michael Jackson so she can also be a part of never-never land'.
Methinks she already is.
