By Steve Painter
SYDNEY — Despite declarations that he will fight it out, NSW Premier Nick Greiner will probably fall as a result of an Independent Commission Against Corruption finding that he acted corruptly.
The finding concerned Greiner's appointment of independent MP Terry Metherell to a high public service position in return for his resignation from parliament. This brought on a by-election that returned an extra Liberal to the parliament.
Environment Minister Tim Moore is also unlikely to survive after ICAC commissioner Ian Temby made a similar finding against him.
The big question is whether the Liberal government will fall along with Greiner. Upper house Democrat Richard Jones says Greiner's stand may lead to a vote of no confidence in the entire government: "If the Liberal members of the cabinet passed a vote of confidence in the premier, it may be difficult for the independents to support a vote of no confidence in the premier alone."
Following Temby's finding that there are reasonable grounds to dismiss Greiner, the premier's fate is in the hands of the three independents who hold the balance of power in the lower house: John Hatton, Clover Moore and Peter Macdonald. While the independents are vacillating, it is unlikely they could emerge with any credibility if they support Greiner. Meanwhile, some Liberal MPs want the premier to resign so the minority Liberal government can appoint a replacement.
The most likely alternative to this is the replacement of the minority Liberal government by a minority Labor government, headed by Bob Carr.
This variant is reportedly not favoured by the federal Labor Party, because the Keating government's slim chances in the next federal election hang fairly heavily on the unpopularity of the Greiner Liberals in the largest state. With state Labor governments extremely unpopular in Victoria, SA and WA, federal Labor appears to be depending heavily on the relative popularity of Goss Labor in Queensland and strong anti-Liberal votes in NSW and perhaps Tasmania.
The corruption scandal looks like putting an ignominious end to Greiner, who in March 1988 became the Liberals' great hope nationally when he became the party's first NSW premier for 12 years. Since then, NSW has been a policy laboratory for the federal Liberal Party.
The Liberals held out particularly high hopes for Greiner's harshly anti-union Industrial Relations Act, drafted while the NSW Liberals were riding high, but not passed into law until after Greiner emerged with a minority government from an election he was expected to In one parliamentary term, the Liberals had become as unpopular as Labor, which had been turned out of office in a huge electoral swing in 1988.
Since the 1991 elections, the Greiner government has stumbled from disaster to disaster, and in particular has been unable to press home its attack on the unions. Instead of becoming the model for a federal Liberal government, Greiner's administration became living proof of the corruption and incompetence pervading the entire parliamentary system, and the bankruptcy of both the leading parties in Australian politics.
Ironically, Greiner is quite correct when he points out, plaintively, that Temby said his actions, while corrupt, were not contrary to "known and recognised standards of honesty and integrity". With that sentence, Temby delivered a scathing indictment not just of Greiner, but of the entire Australian political system. Meanwhile, the next elections will be a test, not of policies or even personalities, but of which party is least unpopular.