It's hard to believe that with everything else that's going on, the Government of New South Wales stumbles from crisis to crisis.
It's impossible to know what the economic state of affairs is.
The new Premier, Nathan Rees has said that revenues had only started to dive since July.
Yet it's clear that if any Minister was half across his responsibilities he would have seen stamp duty revenue at $416 million in December and yet in February, almost half that. And the figures continue to deteriorate from February on.
This is just stamp duty.
Property taxes are down 37 per cent for the first eight months of the calendar year.
So which incompetent Treasury official forecast a 2 per cent growth in revenue in the State Budget of $3.8 billion over the $3.6 billion forecast for the previous year.
How can the Premier say that the revenues have only just started to dive since July?
The Treasury figures contradict that.
But Mr Rees says he only learned of this days before Michael Costa blew the whistle in his farewell media conference last month.
Ministerial incompetence and bureaucratic incompetence have got New South Wales on the ropes.
Forget about any international financial crisis.
When Nathan Rees wasn't Premier but the Member for Toongabbie or Western Sydney, he wrote to the former Health Minister Reba Meagher saying that the Westmead Morgue must stay open and must be upgraded.
I had previous Health Ministers assure me that the Westmead Morgue would not close.
Now it's going to close, the argument being there are no forensic pathologists.
So someone who dies in Western Sydney will have the body transferred to Newcastle.
This will tie up police and ambulance crews which have to accompany family to formally identify the body.
Now common sense will tell you in the past city people went to Glebe, Western Sydney people were taken to Westmead.
Same old story, police and ambulance officers are too frightened to talk, given the possible consequences.
Over the long weekend there were only 11 spaces left for dead people at Westmead Morgue.
The morgue has to keep spaces for the bodies of people who die in Westmead Hospital. So anyone who dies outside the hospital has to be taken to Glebe or Newcastle Morgues.
Westmead has asked Glebe to help with the case load with six post mortems. Glebe has said they had two homicide cases on their hands and were too busy.
So if they're too busy, how do they take control of Western Sydney as well?
Or is this all because the budget forecasts in relation to revenue are way out and the public have been lied to about revenues?
They were lied to this week when the Premier said he only just found out about the shortfall in property taxes.
But that shortfall's been obvious since December.
Now is Nathan Rees the Premier, the member for Western Sydney - proud, he tells us, of his heritage - is he going to tell grieving families that during the horrendous period of grief they've then got to travel unbelievable distances so that the body of a dearly departed can be forensically examined?
As of six o'clock this Friday there'll be no more bodies coming into the Westmead Morgue. Staff know how bad it is. Government ignore it.
New South Wales Health, well, they're appalling before you begin.
This is the sort of stuff that people normally would march in the streets about.
Don't we care?
Doesn't the Government care?
It's no use asking Alan Jones and Ray Hadley to solve these problems.
The public are going to have to take a stand.
This is worse than a scandal.
Untruths being told on one hand about revenue, the consequences of that mean that families in Western Sydney being treated like dirt.
Just when you think it can't get any worse, it does.
Remember, Nathan Rees, before he was Premier, wrote to the then Health Minister Reba Meagher urging that the Westmead Morgue be retained and upgraded.
How, as Premier, does he preside over its closure on Friday?
Work that out.
