NSW Election: Issues to watch, issues to ignore

New South Wales Labor is toast. Everyone knows it, but that doesn't make the election a dead rubber. As mentioned in the previous post, the upper house (Legislative Council) is uncertain and many seats are marginal. Moreover, election funding is associated with number of primary votes, so your first preference still gives a few dollars to the party you select.

Although it is late in the day to be offering it, Steve over at the Box Pop has been writing a five-part series on the election. The first post highlights just how narrow and misleading some of the groups claiming to give a "Christian" assessment of the parties are. The second explains the relevant differences between state and federal elections. The final three posts each offer one issue worth paying attention to and one that is a red herring. First, public education is worth preserving, but ethics classes are now a done deal. Second, ecological responsibility can't be sidelined by claiming that Christians disagree (since that applies pretty much everywhere),* whereas foreign policy has little to do with state government. The final post is yet to be published, but I'm hoping it will be about sustainable infrastructure planning that is not in bed with developers (to my mind, this has been one of the biggest failures of NSW Labor over the last sixteen years).** Hints in the first post suggest otherwise, but I can dream on for another couple of hours until it goes up.
H/T Andrew Cameron.
*For example, it's worth remembering that Newcastle is already the world's biggest coal export port and is currently dramatically increasingly its capacity. Once completed, the expanded facility will be able to handle a volume of coal so large that the resulting emissions will be greater than all of Australia's other emissions combined. We cannot pretend that we in NSW are not a serious part of the problem.
**Did you know that only one party refuses to accept donations from either unions or corporations? Can you guess which one?
UPDATE: Steve's final post is now up. It is not on infrastructure, but on something else also very important.