I recently finished reading a book I'd heard mentioned on my favourite talk back radio station.
The book is called "Betrayal" with the tagline "The underbelly of Australian Labor".
Don't you just love how underbelly has become the new descriptive for everything that's not-so-kosher?
Anyway, it's written by a guy named Simon Benson, whom I believe is a senior political journalist for the Daily Telegraph newspaper (my apologies to Simon if this is incorrect).
It's all about the NSW Labor party and in particular, the nameless, faceless, power-hungry, factional puppeteers behind the scenes. A large portion of the book talks about the attempted privatisation by Morris Iemma (former NSW Premier) of the state's electricity networks, and the struggles involved with that.
It's probably quite evident already that I am not a Labor supporter, but I must say that Morris Iemma was treated pretty bloody poorly by these people.
And, I must hand it to Michael Costa - what a character. I do admire his straight-shooting style. He says what he means, and means what he says, and I believe that he genuinely had the state's best interests in mind in the carriage of his role as Treasurer.
The book is a fantastic snapshot into how Labor runs its politics, and I've got to say that I finished the book disliking Labor more than I did before I started reading it!
It also goes some way to showing what Kevin Rudd (former Australian Prime Minister) is like. If only we'd had this book before Kevin 07!!
Paul Keating (former Australian treasurer, then Prime Minister) was quoted as saying "...where goes NSW, so goes Federal Labor".
If that's true, and I believe it is, then that's a real worry!
For anyone who's interested in politics, then I'd recommend this book. It was a good read, entertaining even.
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