Image: I’d slept in after working half-way through the night on a case, and when I woke and went down to the café for breakfast the sun was already poking into Werrong Lane. Bicycles littered the lane and a clutch of the regular cycle commuters from the offices along Sydney Street were tucking into Joadja’s celebrated breakfast menu.
I’d slept in after working half-way through the night
on a case, and when I woke and went down to the café for
breakfast the sun was already poking into Werrong Lane.
Bicycles littered the lane and a clutch of the regular cycle
commuters from the offices along Sydney Street were
tucking into Joadja’s celebrated breakfast menu.
“Hey Nick, you scruffy old gumshoe, you look like you
slept in your clothes. Come and join us.”
It was Tarkis from the advertising agency. He was
right. I had. He was looking very natty in a multi-coloured
lycra skin graft. I ordered the vegetarian breakfast and a long
black.
“Will you look at this,” Tarkis went on, waving the
local paper. “Barry O’Farrell’s bashing Clover Moore over
her cycleways again. Boy, is he dancing to the Murdoch tune.
Didn’t take long, did it?”
“Yeah, but does he really believe a word of the nonsense
he’s spouting?” said old Stanley, the retired colonel,
who usually stopped by for breakfast after his morning
ride around Centennial Park.
“Of course he doesn’t. And the proof is that his own transport
master plan is sure to enshrine the importance of cycling.”
He pulled a wad of A4 printout from his daypack and
flipped through the pages.
“Here it is, right here in the government’s discussion
paper: ‘5.2.6 How can cycling be encouraged?’ And it’s pretty
good stuff too: ‘Cycling and walking have become more
popular in recent years. There are opportunities to maintain
this trend by improving, connecting and expanding
cycling and walking networks …’.
And this, ‘In the Sydney city centre, cycling has increased in peak periods’ and here, ‘…
an opportunity for Transport for NSW and councils to work
together to increase the use of bicycles…’
And they say they want to double the bicycle mode share for trips of less
than 10 kilometres by 2016.
Wonderful! But 2016 is only four years away. If they’re
going to achieve that, they’d better start pedalling.”
Tarkis wiped the mushroom juice off his plate with his last
bit of toast.
“It does sound very Clover Moore. So why does O’Farrell bullshit like he
does? And why has he saddled himself with a political corpse
like ‘Nicotine Nick’ Greiner and this silly Infrastructure
NSW mob who are working at cross-purposes with Gladys
Berejiklian? She seems to me to be doing things that needed to
be done for public transport.”
“Well, on one reading, he has to. The evil Murdoch
press demands it. Day in and day out they bash Clover
over her cycleways. What’s a conservative politician
supposed to do? All we can hope for is that he says one
thing and does the opposite.
“Speaking of grubby twofacedness and corpses rising,”
I said. “What about Gillard resurrecting Bob Carr? This
is the bloke who gave us spin-cycle managerialism and
the shambolic government that led the NSW ALP to
disaster; the bloke who gave us Obeid, Tripodi, Costa and
Roozendaal, to name but a few.
When he got himself into the media saying good things, you
knew he was about to do the opposite.”
“Yeah. It’s really weird,” said Joadja, who had brought
out my order. “I saw him the other night on TV. He looked
like some character from a Medieval woodcut – like a
danse macabre corpse, rising from his political grave.” She
shuddered involuntarily.
Maybe Carr’s appointment could be explained by the
ALP’s decaying talent pool.
It certainly seemed ‘unsafe’. I had the feeling that maybe
the circumstances surrounding Carr’s surprise resignation,
right after the Cross-City Tunnel debacle, in July 2005,
might come back to haunt Gillard.
Carr passed off his resignation as a decision to
“move on” after 10 years in the job, but I wasn’t the only one
to wonder about the timing.
Nor about the fact that Carr was immediately followed by
his deputy, Andrew Refshauge, and treasurer, Mike Egan.
At the time, there was speculation that Sir Li Kashing,
Asia’s richest man, might sue the government over the
incredibly dodgy traffic figures backing the tollway he’d been
sold. He might have lost, but the sordid details, trotted out
in court, would have brought down the Carr government.
• More Nick Possum at brushtail.com.au
