Things I learnt at KristinaKeneally.com.au
NSW Labor has posted a wonderful new website so we can get to know our new Premier, almost three months after she was elected imposed on us, and a full year before she faces the polls. I took a tour to discover the woman we like to call "Kristina Keneally", because we don't yet know or like her enough to have a nickname for her. And guess what? She's a woman! She's blonde! And she was born in America! As for what she's done so far, or what she's planning to do... did I mention she's blonde?
After a wander around Premier Keneally's snazzy new website, here's what I've found so far:
She doesn't belong to any political party! Unprecedented, but it must be true, right? I mean, if she was, she'd have put their logo nice and prominently on the page somewhere, surely?
Intriguingly, it does say "Authorised By Matt Thistlethwaite, General Secretary, NSW Labor, 377 Sussex St Sydney" down the bottom, but I assume she just had to get permission to put up the website from that horrible, useless mob who've run this state into the ground. Thank goodness she's not connected to them!
She's a Lawrence Leung fan! In his show Choose Your Own Adventure (which I worked on), Lawrence discovered how to use neuro-linguistic programming to make subconscious suggestions that would help him pick up. He learned that that when you say "new direction", the subconscious mind registers "nude erection", and thinks about sex.
And guess what the Premier's new slogan is? "A new direction!" Maybe the association will help her seduce voters into doing something they really don't want to, like giving Labor yet another term?
She's achieved a lot in nearly 100 days! It's traditional to compile a report card after 100 days of a new administration. It was done endlessly for Barack Obama, and in keeping with his image as a man who loves reports, Kevin Rudd released one of his own. So, what achievements has Premier Keneally to boast of after nearly the same period at the helm of NSW? The front page of the site lists them:
I’ve already introduced MyZone to make public transport fairer, easier and cheaper. There’s a lot more to come.
Okay, so she's only done one thing in 100 days, and it doesn't come into effect until April 18, so saying she's "already introduced it" is not entirely true.
So anyway, what is this marvellous MyZone? Is it, you might wonder, the integrated smart ticketing system we were promised for the Olympics, like they have in London and Hong Kong? Um, no – she's just reduced the number of zones in the system to make things a bit less absurdly complicated.
But that's not all – for the first time, she assures us, all tickets in NSW will have the same logo. Now there's a win.
She's spent a lot of time in the community! Almost all of it being filmed for [rokbox title="A new direction!" text="this video" size="640 360"]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nR8rLb1zNoo[/rokbox]. But she read an old person a book once, by the looks of things, and it wasn't a huge, nerdy treatise on American history, so she's already more in touch than Bob Carr.
She's trying really hard to lose her American accent! Instead of what was presumably once a charming Ohian drawl, she now has a strange, denatured accent that occasionally has an Aussie twang, and occasionally an American sound, but mainly sounds like some weird bastardization of the two. She says "introdooced" like an American, but "transp-ought" like an Aussie. The strangest part is where she says "easier and cheaper" - the first word like an American, the second like an Aussie. Madam Premier, seriously - please just talk like an American, it's got to be better than this.
She knows it's a tough job being Premier! Of course she does – after all, she's seen from Nathan Rees how easy it is to get stabbed in the back! What she probably doesn't understand, though, is that it's even tougher being an ordinary resident of NSW, who doesn't get a chauffeur and has to rely on the joke that the NSW Government calls "public transport", even though it rarely manages to actually transport anybody. Still, she's got it tough too, don't forget!
She has big plans! In her "Policy Centre", there's a whole bunch of stuff she'd really like to do with education, health, infrastructure and so on. All the stuff that Labor should have done over the nearly 15 years it's had in Government. But this time, it'll be different, because... look, we're just going to have to trust her.
She's going to win the next election! No really, she probably is. She's already astonishingly popular with voters in the polls. All she has to do is disassociate herself from the Labor stench through websites like this one, and in particular the guys like Joe Tripodi and Eddie Obeid who gave her the job in the first place, and there's a strong chance she'll win.
And why is that? Because even though he's been the alternative Premier since 2007, almost nobody knows or likes Barry O'Farrell, and that's hardly likely to change in the next 12 months. So unless they dump him for someone with a bit of support like Malcolm Turnbull, she'll win an even unlikelier victory than that other guy's... what was his name... oh yes, Morris Iemma.