The Moora Incident

The Perth Labor Party has made some good decisions, some hard decisions and some utterly indefensible ones. They were going to close School of the Air. The public backlash was so great they back flipped & the narrative they attached was awkward & concerning for many reasons.
Awkward because it was all in the name of budget repair, yet the replacement was ill defined poorly understood, badly explained and not costed within an inch of its life. Concerning because the regional Labor MPs didn't even know about it until it was announced. They weren't consulted so the so called advantage of having Country Labor MPs was a complete furphy and misnomer. When the pressure mounted MPs like Darren West dug in & battle on the PerthLabor battle hymn whilst Kevin Michel MP looked like the rabbit in the spot light. Others went missing in action & one with an office in Kalgoorlie wasn't at the rally outside his office at all. Concerning also because there was no stakeholder consultation at all. Not some, not too little...absolutely none.
We never got to find out what small group made up of which small number of people made the decision.
They backed down thankfully as the decision clearly became evident as being wrong on so many levels and yet to be found right on any. Thing is SOTA is not unique to WA and the entire northern half of Australia was mobilising for a nation fight on it & much of the southern half was coming along. Added weight was metro people who were previously unaware were against the abolition of SOTA as soon as they were made aware of the plan.

It was one of THE most embarrassing political moves we've seen in many decades and the proper true believers of old would roll in their grave. "Honest John" Tonkin would no doubt disbelieve Labor would become what it has.

Yes hard decisions have to be made but Hansard even points out many of the decisions WALabor Government has made are not sensible nor Budget Repair Related. Some are unashamedly part of political payback. Ken Travers says it, Ben Wyatt said it & so too did Darren West.

 

So why? Well politically there are reasons. The bush doesn't back down so they're not friendlies and need to be closed down in argument and blame needs to landed upon Labor's political opponents.
Why? How? What?

Well shutting down Moora Residential College is supposed to save $8million yet that number is clouded in mystery and it appears $500,000 will keep it operating. $7.5Million point of difference? Yes as embarrassing as that is but wait there's more...that $500,000 may actually include some of the staffing costs.
Here's the thing, the $8Million plus that Labor points at is actually for a full, extensive rebuild of the entire facility. It only needs $500,000 to stay open with suitable reno work. But what if the $500,000 doesn't include staffing, well doesn't matter if it doesn't. You don't close a place and jobs disappear as a cost saving or if you do it's entirely against Labor's "More Jobs" mantra.
The staffing is required somewhere, so there's no real change whether Moora closes or stays open.
Its an easy turn around to smart, informed fairness but Labor have painted themselves in the corner & need it to disappear such is the ongoing embarrassment Labor has installed.
Labor Ministers Ellery, Wyatt & McGowan won't visit Moora, still none have engaged with the community or any stakeholders. In fact if there hadn't been rallies in Moora & Parliament House there'd be no exchange between Sue Ellery & stakeholders, Moora locals or the parents of affected students at all. People who are spread out over 1000s of square kilometres to the north & north east. People who cannot afford private schools in Perth.

Labor was caught not funding the SW Rescue Chopper and stalled when they were caught out. It took the emergence of another loud campaign before they acted. They shouldn't be embarrassed about the backflips, they should be embarrassed about the original appalling decisions that led to corrections.
With Moora, their dug in assuming it would flitter and go away. They strangely thought it would die down, be accepted & go away.
They made yet another misjudgement. Now an ex-AFL legend has been pleased to get a selfie with the "Moora Quokka" that is the poster child of the Save Moora College push. Kudos to Dustin Fletcher, former Essendon great.

Moora still set to close yet PerthLabor sinks $3 Million into helping Perth's live music scene.
So why is this Government so badly out of kilter? (Yes Perth Live Music scene is set to get $3 Million to develop their live music. I kid you not)

Why so out of common sense kilter?
Seats. There are 8 Labor held seats sitting on a paltry 3% swing. There are 12 seats sitting on an 8% swing. THAT IS SUPER CLOSE.
Whilst we did see a massive red tide against the Barnett Liberal Government many of the seats weren't massive crushing political defeats. If Labor loses those 12 seats they will lose Government. Their chances of winning traditional rural seats is slim perhaps non existent but the battle ground will be in Perth. Those 12 seats are metro based.

The so called $40 odd billion Barnett debt is a bit of a dodgey Labor claim too. $11 Billion isn't actually real previous government money on the line, so Labor has to take ownership over that $11 Billion. It will be their addition to the dark debt line. There's money being tipped into Perth projects & Perth P&C committees that didn't apply for. There's huge concerns about the Labor initiative called Local Jobs. We're now hearing the majority of money is going out without proper application process. It's just being sent to chosen recipients.
No way to run a government.

Yes we're in a dead set mess of trouble. Royalties for Regions is being deeply slashed in the arms as well. Its going to be used as something it never was, its going to suffer a history setting example of appalling cost shifting. It will and is being used for paying for projects & expenditure that should be coming under normal ministry budgets or general expenditure. It lightens their load and shifts cost off the various departments. R4R is safe, its legislation, however where it goes is not safe at all & is being taken away from its original intent.

The take home message is this IS NOT a Perth vs the Bush thing. Perth people are slowly learning what's happening and slowly the groundswell that dominated the rural & regional areas is slowly creeping into the Perth metro area. Perth people realise that damage to rural students and country people is happening and apart from it being utterly wrong, unfair & indefensible it will have to be rectified later. Repairs to broken families will have to happen. Its a strange position and I've never seen such as short sighted political strategy ever. They had a bit of a plan to win the unlosable election & rather than having a plan to govern they have just gone over to plan to get re-elected in as many metro based seats as possible.

Pork Barrels aplenty in the Labor Held Seats. Eventually that will back fire and it will backfire far earlier than Labor will expect and when it does it'll be far too late. If this mess continues, then we maybe looking at a one term WALabor Government and unless there's a real mess up a 2 term Liberal government. All Libs will have to do is get re-elected and show real deliberate intent to fix the mess McGowan & Barnett governments have delivered.

So far Premier Mark McGowan was within his first year in government had overseas trips to Washington, UK, Germany, Dubai, Japan & China. Now into months of his 2nd year of his government another trip to China. The first cost over $250,000
The trough is deep with gravy for the greedy. No returns on those trips nor any real explanations of the reason for the trips except to tell our overseas customers "we're open for business"

Moora Residential College is open for business now, but only for this year.
For all his faults Colin Barnett might be very right on one thing. He warned another WA Inc was on the way. It may be sadly very prophetic.

No this is not a Perth vs Country people fight. This is very much a PerthLabor Party fight against anyone that might stand between them & re-election. What ever it takes appears to be the motto.

Here's some dots to join...