‘Competition policy’ academic Mick Costa to front ICAC
Eddie Obeid reckons he’s going to fight to protect his ‘good name’ as an honourable man and overthrow the Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC) inquiry’s findings against him. His trouble is, if he succeeds, the whole system would stand exposed as rotten to the core and the system surely cannot let him succeed.
Eddie’s mate, Ian McDonald, formerly the Minister for Primary Industries, walks around, in spite of all the revelations, with a weird manic grin on his face. Some think it’s because he has some secret knowledge or brilliant insight that tells him, when it goes to court, he’s going to get off. Somehow, I doubt it. If he and Eddie ultimately walk free, it’ll be a historic exposure of the realities of politics and society in the history of Australia; the moment of revelation that destroys the confidence of millions in the nature of “democracy” itself.
But if Eddie and Ian go to the Big House, will anything really change?
The system’s classic response to the exposure of high-level immorality or illegality is to loudly condemn the abuse in question and then quietly make it legal. And that’s surely what Barry O’Farrell and the Liberal Government is doing. Through the establishment of Infrastructure NSW and their revisions to the planning process, they’re moving to regularise the assault on environmental safeguards, good urban planning and residents’ rights that, under Labor, had to proceed largely by stealth and corruption.
Next up, ICAC will be looking at Joseph Tripodi and one Mick Costa, formerly Labor Government minister of nearly everything and currently Conjoint Associate Professor of the University of Newcastle, “researching” stuff like “competition policy” and “regulatory environments”. Ho, ho.
Let’s concentrate on Mick, because his CV reads like a potted history of the political degeneration of the NSW Labor Party.
ICAC’s interest in Mick Costa focuses on a privatisation deal. In November 2011, after he’d left politics, Costa was appointed to the lucrative chairmanship of Australian Water Holdings (AWH), a firm in which, the Commission alleges, the Obeids held a secret interest. It’s alleged Costa, while in office, put an end to a tender, already advertised by Sydney Water, that would have threatened AWH’s future contracts with the State Government. Nobody, least of all this struggling PI, is suggesting there was any connection between these alleged things.
Mick Costa began his political career on the far left of politics when he was recruited to the Young Socialists, the youth group of what was then known as the Socialist Labour League – the most conventional of the trotskyist groups around at the time (today they’re called the Socialist Equality Party (SEL).
But Mick was keen to get in on politics. He left the SEL for the less stringent Socialist Workers Party but it wasn’t long before it must have occurred to him that the Trotskyist left offered nothing but poverty, forced marches and a lonely death, and he drew the happy conclusion that if a working class boy wanted a career in politics, the ALP was the place to be. In 1983 he went to work on the railways, trained as a train driver and became an activist in the Australian Federated Union of Locomotive Enginemen (AFULE), although he never actually progressed to become a train driver.
Six years later in 1989, he was elected as an organiser of the Labor Council of NSW, a body loathed by union activists as the “Graveyard of Disputes”. All the while Mick was drifting relentlessly towards the social, economic and political right.
He became the Secretary of the Labor Council in 1998. Three years later he snuck into the NSW Parliament as a member of its upper house.
Renegades from the left are always useful, and the Carr Government recruited Costa into cabinet almost immediately. He became, in rapid succession, Minister for Police, Transport, the Hunter, Roads, Ports, and Economic Reform, Finance and Infrastructure, and finally, Treasurer.
As he moved towards fully-fledged Thatcherite market fundamentalism, Costa became increasingly and flamboyantly contemptuous of public transport. Amongst his most disastrous decisions was that to truncate the Parramatta–Chatswood rail line so that only the section from Epping to Chatswood was completed. In 2005, during his brief reign as Roads Minister, he abolished State Government funding for cycling.
He became the Carr Government’s leading climate change sceptic, railing against the Greens and going ballistic when Tim Flannery became Australian of the Year in 2007. After he quit politics in 2008, a columnist’s job with the Murdoch Press inevitably followed. He was eagerly embraced by Tim Blair, Andrew Bolt and Alan Jones.
Costa was given his position with University of Newcastle’s Australian Competition Policy Research Alliance (“A partnership between the business and academic communities”) after he retiring to his Hunter Valley property. In 2011, in a lurid address to the NSW Minerals Council he claimed that at least twice during his years with the Labor Government, there were serious attempts to close down coal mining in the state.
If only it were true. Big coal is strip mining the Hunter Valley on a ghastly, unprecedented scale. Australia has become perhaps the world’s biggest exporter of greenhouse gases and Mick reckons that’s just wonderful.
