Part of the reason for that is that for the most part they are dull, unintelligent and uninspiring people. But perhaps even more importantly they have nothing of substance to say. They are a strategy-free zone. The NSW Government is directionless. They stagger from snafu to snafu. The health system is cutting back on operations and can’t seem to pay its grocery bills ontime. It now charges private hospital patients for blood. The public transport system in Sydney is a joke. The roads are clogged. Railcorp is blighted by corruption as well as bad service and terrible planning.  The NSW economy is going down the toilet. We are growing used to major electricity blackouts in the CBD. So much for the global city.

The media brings a stream of this sort of bad news every week if not every day. No amount of clever media training is going to convince the electorate that NSW is somehow back on track. It’s not and it won’t be under this government, unless they decide to bite the bullet and govern rather than simply media manage.

Instead of fixing the policy problem, NSW Ministers typically revert to announcements (that are reversed or abandoned shortly after the next election) or to weather report type media performances giving updates on services which would be better handled by some bright thirty something in the department’s corporate affairs area. Why NSW Ministers and their advisers think that saturation coverage of message mumbling ALP nobodies is going to boost the Government’s standing in the electorate is beyond me. Less is more in media performance, you should appear for a reason better than just getting more airtime.

They need content. They need real policy, not just cheery announcements in glossy brochures. But none of the NSW front bench has shown any capacity for serious policy-making. Other state labor governments, for reasons I don’t understand, seem to be much better, for the most part, at strategy and policy-making than NSW.

When Wedderburn is doing the media training, he should make sure there is a big sign prominently placed at the front of the room which reads “It’s the content, stupid”.

“Around 120 people are affected and we will aim to redeploy as many of these people as possible into other roles within the organisation. The role impacts are broadly spread across all areas of our business.”

MLC is currently consulting with employees over the proposed changes with final role impacts to be determined in early February, the spokesperson said.

“Final role impacts” sounds kind of serious to me. Sounds like, err, sacked.