The Cuckoo Clock!
In the week when the news has been full of Oscar awards, I was thinking of one of the most memorable scenes in cinema, where Orson Welles’ plays Harry Lime in the 1949 classic The Third Man.
This old black and white movie with its intriguing music from the zither played by Anton Karas, haunted people everywhere, a worldwide phenomenon in itself. The British Film Institute recently polled a thousand film critics and The Third Man was voted the greatest British movie ever. The film is set in fractured Europe post-World War II . Shady characters dip in and out of the shadows of postwar Vienna, still shell-shocked from battle.
Orson Welles, does not appear until over half the movie is over and only remains on screen for three major scenes. Orson Welles’s long-delayed entrance in the film – arguably one of the greatest in film history – has become one of the hallmarks of modern cinematography.
Here we find the film’s most famous passage of dialogue spoken from a huge Ferris Wheel, Harry Lime muses:
In Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love – they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock …
In New South Wales we have had a long history of continuous Labor Government. It produced Bob Carr and other political luminaries. Through most of this time, NSW was a land of peace and democracy. Because of Labor’s dominance in the Legislative Assembly, it had little to concern it from the Opposition and the Independents. Then under the last three Premiers we have had a time – to quote Orson Welles “of warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed” including the beheading of two premiers and the demise of the third.
But what has this era of peaceful dominance produced? A cuckoo clock!
I look back on 700 speeches I have given in Hansard over the past eight years, and the issues I sought improvement and betterment for our state are legion. This era must have seen by far the greatest period of money wasting in the history of our nation.
Electricity assets sale debacle, the agreement to develop a coal mine to increase the profits of private companies; the understaffing of hospitals; the replacement of scripture classes with ethics; the failure to upkeep public housing; the gay adoption policy; the scandalous funding support for horse racing; the failure to extend the North West and South West railway lines; the $500 million waste on the off-again on-again metro light rail; the on-again off-again Tillegra Dam; the refusal of the Department to bring the Ambulance Service abuses to an end; faulty speed cameras; school library closures; lack of regional gynecological and radiation services; unflued school heaters in class rooms; imposition of V8 Supercars at Homebush; imposition of Repco Car Rally in the Tweed National Park; Promotion of coal mines in the Hunter and Central Coast; and so on and so on!
Arrogance, inefficiency, decline in personal moral standards, resignations of Ministers for discipline reasons flourished along with the rejection of their own leaders by internal squabbling.
The danger with the March election is that a fed-up population will give the Coalition a mighty majority (my estimate 58/37) in the Lower House as it did Labor a decade ago. That will lead to peace and democracy as they will have the numbers. That leads to arrogance and lack of attention to detail, waste and an attitude that they were born to rule.
The only thing that will keep the Government honest, is a finely balanced Upper House (Latest Poll Figures Alarm Christians). The trick is to give the major parties roughly equal numbers, but not allow the Green Party to dominate the agenda and frustrate the Government’s legislation.
Having a Family First Member will give us a fine balance without frustrating the Government’s right to govern, but with the possibility of bringing the Government to heel if it starts making Cuckoo Clocks!
REV THE HON DR GORDON MOYES AC MLC