The stranglehold of the 'career politician' and how it is costing us all BILLIONS.

What do Gladys Berejiklian and Morris Iemma have in common?

They are both failures of a political system designed to groom people for ‘top jobs’. Neither of these people actually had ‘real jobs’ prior to entering Parliament and both have virtually no history apart from their ascendancy into politics (the same exists at a federal level). They preside (and presided) over the affairs of taxpayers with one thing in mind, themselves.

It speaks volumes for the state of politics in our State. They also have another thing in common, they were virtual unknown quantities before their rise to the top, and both have surnames that most people can't even pronounce let alone recognise them in public.

Iemma was the brains behind a billion dollar desalination plant, that has no use today apart from costing the taxpayers of NSW through the teeth. The former Roads Minster (Carl Scully) was quick to stick the boot into Iemma in his recently published memoirs but he himself is no better. He was part of the Carr government who as Transport Minster gave Sydney the massive failure of the Cross City Tunnel. A $680 million dollar failure of transport planning in Sydney, that still has not reached anywhere near the estimates forecast by the government when it was announced and commissioned.

Sydney's Cross City Tunnel was predicted to fail before construction even began. In February 2002, a year before tunnelling commenced and four years before it ultimately fell into receivership due to low traffic volumes, Sydney traffic planner Michelle Zeibots told local media that the tunnel was incapable of carrying the volume of cars that the Transport Minister, had predicted. She said it was "physically impossible" for the tunnel to carry the predicted 95,000 cars each day, and she has been fully vindicated as a result of its many failures.

The story gets worse, water quality concerns regarding the proximity of the seawater inlet to the desalination plant and the nearby sewage ocean outfall is just as disconcerting. Environmental economists from the Australian National University studied the project after its completion and determined that "it was a costly decision that did not need to be made while dam levels were high." In 2014, it was reported that the desalination plant was costing the taxpayers $534,246 per day as the plant sits idle. This was the price that the NSW Liberal-National Coalition Government (with Gladys Berejiklian as Minister) agreed upon when they set the 50-year lease with the plant's owners upon privatisation in 2011. To turn off the desalination plant all together would cost an extra $50 million.

These two examples are just the the ‘tip of the iceberg’ when one looks at waste and mismanagement in government. Of more pressing concern is what this NSW government is doing and what it is about to do with WestCONnex. This is the biggest infrastructure project in NSW at the moment and will represent a total abrogation of the role of government to provide an adequate road network for all road users.

The NSW government has already earmarked that it will be privatised and its no secret who will snap this tollway up, Transurban. They can all con us with the machinations of it being a ‘tender process’ but no such thing will happen and the working people of Western Sydney will be enslaved to pay an ever increasing toll for generations to come. All of this money will flow to the private sector and top end of town including the politicians own superannuation.

It is a shocking gouging to the good people of Western Sydney and proves yet again that these ‘career politicians’ experience in society is limited to pleasing the commercial affairs of their political donors, to the detriment of the State as a whole. Our Parliaments (State and Federal) are replete with these 'manufactured' politicians and it manifests everyday when they trot out the same scripted lines fed to them the night before by their 'minders'.

They lack vision, insight, foresight and are wholly incompetent to manage civic affairs in the interests of the common good. Without their speech writers and political 'advisers' (and there are a plethora of 'hangeroners' costing us billions) they wouldn't even be able to muster an original thought or public policy initiative.

What NSW and Australia needs now is a radical shake up of the political class. A real third force needs to emerge in this vacuous state of politics and it is not a protest vote to Hanson and her minions who are themselves bereft of vision. We need to get rid of all of this ‘dead wood’ in Parliament and it must happen soon or else the masses will revolt.

No more bottles of ‘flat lemonade’ we need fizz and bubbles if politics is to remain viable and cogent.

The two party system is completely broken.