Red-faced … John Robertson. Photo: Adam McLean

BLACKTOWN CITY COUNCIL has fallen to the Liberal Party in a knife-edge result that has embarrassed the Labor leader John Robertson, the state MP for the area.

The fall of Blacktown is another in a string of working-class areas in outer Sydney that swung away from Labor to the Liberals at last Saturday’s elections.

They include Liverpool, Auburn, Bankstown, Campbelltown and Parramatta.

In Blacktown, the swing was 10 per cent but it was the victory of independent Russ Dickens over Labor-endorsed independent Kathie Collins that will take the council out of Labor hands for the first time since 1989.

The NSW Electoral Commission confirmed the result on Friday, with Dr Dickens, a former mayor, prevailing by 868 votes.

Former Liberal councillor Nick Tyrrell said the area had rejected Labor. ”This has got to be an embarrassment for Robbo. In his own backyard, people are still throwing rocks at the ALP,” he said.

The new Liberal mayor is likely to be Jess Diaz, a migration lawyer whose son Jayme narrowly lost the seat of Greenway at the last federal election.

Labor Party assistant general secretary Jamie Clements said that there was no shame in the result for Mr Robertson, whose area overlays wards four and five, where the Labor vote held up. Those wards cover suburbs such as Blacktown, Doonside, Shalvey, Mount Druitt and St Marys.

”There has been significant demographic changes in Riverstone and Toongabbie and that’s where the vote was softer. It was only for the quality of the candidate in Nathan Rees that we hung on to Toongabbie at the state election,” he said.

Meanwhile, Nathaniel Smith, the son of the NSW Attorney-General, Greg Smith, has started his political career, with his election to Kogarah City Council. Mr Smith, a registered lobbyist, is expected to seek preselection to get into state Parliament.

”I’ve seen from my father how much work is involved in being a good politician and I am in no rush,” he told The Sun-Herald.

Despite the O’Farrell government’s laws that forced several MPs to relinquish council seats, there remains a strong link between local government and Macquarie Street.

Both electorate staff of the Mulgoa MP Tanya Davies were elected. Mark Holmes was elected in Blacktown and Patrick Conolly, the son of the Riverstone MP Kevin Conolly, at Hawkesbury council.

Steven Issa, son of the Granville MP Tony Issa, will replace him on Parramatta City Council.

Katherine O’Regan, the chief of staff for the Environment Minister, Robyn Parker, was elected as a Liberal on Woollahra council and will quit her role with the minister as per orders from the Premier, Barry O’Farrell.

Bernard Bratusa, media adviser to the Sports Minister, Graham Annesley, was waiting to learn whether he had been elected to Penrith City Council.

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We can’t ignore it. It doesn’t matter how good our policies are if the message isn’t getting through to the electorate, he said. What is our strategy to fix the situation?

Hayes has a relatively safe seat, Fowler, with a margin of 8.7 per cent. But his seat includes part of Liverpool and the swings against Labor in the council elections, if replicated federally, could wipe him out. Labor did improve its vote in inner west areas, where the Greens lost a good deal of support, but in the outer west it was a bleak picture.

As the ABC’s psephologist, Antony Green, summarised: ”There were consistent swings of 5 per cent to 10 per cent from Labor to Liberal in Blacktown, Bankstown, Parramatta and Campbelltown.”

The results, Green said, revealed that Labor had not yet recovered from the drubbing it took at the state election 18 months ago.

”More worrying for Labor is that these results may also reflect attitudes to the Gillard government,” he said.

”For all the talk of federal Labor’s poor polling in Queensland and Western Australia, it is NSW where the real damage to Labor could be done at next year’s federal election.

”Labor still can’t recover its base in western Sydney, even at grassroots elections. It is a serious warning of how bad next year’s federal election defeat could be for Labor.”

So there was a good deal of caucus interest in Swan’s answer. The survival instinct focuses the mind.

The Deputy Prime Minister and Treasurer replied that the result was ”patchy”, with some good results and some not so good. He said that, at the same time, there were signs of a revival in the Labor vote in Queensland after the election of the Liberal National Party of Campbell Newman and with the anticlimax of the carbon tax.

Labor now had some more clear air to get out its message on jobs, education reform and health, Swan said.

It was designed to be reassuring but it didn’t amount to a strategy and it didn’t satisfy the MPs fearing that they could lose their seats.

A second backbencher from western Sydney, John Murphy, spoke up. Murphy is especially vulnerable. He holds his seat of Reid by a margin of 2.6 per cent.

He agreed with Swan that the ALP performance had been ”patchy” and cited two contrasting local experiences. The Labor mayor of Canada Bay council, Angelo Tsirekas, managed to win a 10 per cent swing in his favour.

But in Auburn, where Labor had long held an unassailable dominance, the party had been outpolled by the Liberals by a margin of two to one.

If that’s not an alarm, Murphy said, I don’t know what is. We’ve got to take notice and get into these communities, he urged. Canada Bay and Auburn fall within Murphy’s federal electoral boundaries.

Swan offered a reassurance that things would turn around but again offered no strategy. A third MP, Stephen Jones, echoed the concerns of Hayes and Murphy.

It was a moment of ironic tang for some in the room. Some caucus members remembered hearing Julia Gillard justify her coup against Kevin Rudd by saying that she was not so much troubled by the Rudd government’s difficulties but by the fact that he seemed to have no plan to get out of difficulty.

But as the week developed, something of an opportunity arrived for the Gillard government. It came from the Liberal Party. Not the kerfuffle over whether Tony Abbott did – or did not – intimidate a rival in student politics 35 years ago.

It was the staccato series of announcements from the Liberal state governments of plans to slash health and education services.

This provided the government with one opportunity after another to lambaste the Liberal premiers for their savage cuts and to warn that an Abbott government would do the same, only bigger. ”It’s a gift from heaven,” one Labor MP crowed.

By the middle of the week, Kevin Rudd helpfully appeared on TV live from Beijing to help the government frame its attack on the Liberals. The Liberal premiers were the entree, Rudd said, and Abbott was to be the main course.

Rudd supporters said his interview on 7.30 was a reminder of how effective he could be as a campaigner; Gillard supporters gnashed their teeth and accused Rudd of taking advantage of the Prime Minister’s bereavement to destabilise her government.

These two themes – a sense of creeping desperation among some in the caucus and the subterranean competitive tension between Gillard and Rudd – help make sense of the most remarkable political development of the week.

Last week, the government decided to allow the fishing supertrawler, formerly the Margiris but now known as the Abel Tasman, to catch its approved quota under strict conditions. But this week the government reversed its position and changed the law with the specific aim of stopping the ship from operating in Australian waters.

This was an extraordinarily erratic piece of work by any standard. The Environment Minister, Tony Burke, moved changes to the law specifically to ban such a vessel, aiming at one vessel in particular but only for one year.

The amendment to the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act that the government successfully got through the House gives the Environment Minister an unfettered new power to ban commercial fishing if ”there is uncertainty about the environmental, social or economic impacts of the fishing activity”. And it’s enough for the uncertainty to exist only in the mind of the minister.

That’s sufficiently sweeping that the minister can stop anything at any time.

A number of ministers in the Gillard cabinet are privately appalled by the decision. They include the Minister for Agriculture and Fisheries, Joe Ludwig, who argued in the cabinet against arbitrary decisions and in defence of due process and the established scientific evaluation methods, and the Communications Minister, Stephen Conroy, who argued against whimsical bans on economic activity and in favour of commonsense – much as the entire government did last week in its decision on the sale of Cubbie Station to a Chinese-Australian consortium.

But surely the ban on the supertrawler was a prudent environmental decision to prevent overfishing?

Not at all. The quota to catch 18,000 tonnes of fish off Tasmania remains intact. It will just be fished by other vessels now, smaller ones. Not one fish’s life has been saved by the decision.

OK, but the ban will prevent the monster ship’s vast nets from killing dolphins and turtles as ”bycatch”, won’t it? Not at all. The supertrawler’s nets are the same size as the ones already in use on smaller vessels, as my Herald colleague Lenore Taylor has documented this week.

So why is it called a supertrawler? Because of the size of its capacity to process and refrigerate and store its catch, not because of the the size of its nets.

In fact, the strict conditions that Burke had already imposed on the Abel Tasman probably would have made it safer than the standard vessels in protecting dolphins and other bycatch. The conditions he laid down last week included the stipulation that two fisheries officials must be on board whenever it is fishing to monitor the catch and that it must position cameras in its nets to guard against collateral damage to species other than fish.

So what was it all about? It was a populist reversal by a government under attack from environmental campaigners at GetUp! and Greenpeace. And a panicked response to what the Coalition’s Greg Hunt has called ”the Ruddism that has infected the government”.

That is, policymaking by a government in fear of a Rudd leadership campaign. When a Labor backbencher, Melissa Parke, said she would move a private members’ bill to stop the trawler, she was soon supported by Kevin Rudd.

Fearing a backbench revolt led by Rudd, the Gillard cabinet reversed its own policy and made a populist decision that was unscientific and economically irrational. And despite superficial assumptions, it offers no improvement of environmental protection.

The Coalition called it ”government by GetUp!”. But, in truth, it is a government ruled by its own weakness. It is fearful of its electoral standing and fearful of a potential leadership challenge.

It has made a series of announcements of multibillion-dollar new promises that it cannot afford and now makes a populist, arbitrary and counterproductive policy decision that has some of its most senior members in despair. ”What we see is the collapse of the intellectual capacity of this government,” one cabinet minister lamented privately at the supertrawler decision.

The Gillard government says it is a year from an election, yet it is so busy campaigning that it is getting very sloppy at governing. The Labor caucus craves a strategy but it is getting a campaign and not a very rational one.

Peter Hartcher is the political editor.