FIRST, ROAST A CHICKEN. AFTER you’ve enjoyed the bird (and the roast vegies, and the stuffing, and the gravy, and the etcetera etcetera), you’re left with a carcase and a whole lot of gristle and fatty bits. In the morning, grab a pair of scissors, slice the bones up, simmer them in water for several hours with a couple of small onions, some celery, a carrot or two, thyme, and lots of salt. You weren’t planning on going to work that morning were you? You aren’t too hung over from the very nice white wine you had with the chicken to handle the congealed leftovers before noon? Good. Once it’s all bubbled away, strain it into plastic takeaway containers and put them in the freezer for later.

This is genuinely wonderful, this cooking with masses of power at the flick of kitchen switches. In one large dinner and the preparations for some others, it’s pretty much a process of congealing fossil fuel electricity into nutrients. Taste that—you can almost savour the Hunter Valley bituminous coal.

There’s no getting away from it: you think you’ve cut up and settled the issue of power privatisation and the NSW Labor caucus one year and suddenly you open the freezer and there’s the shock of it back again, reminding you of the original heat back in 2008 and 2011.

Sources close to Mr Roozendaal confirmed yesterday he was considering breaking ranks with his Labor colleagues and supporting the power sell-off when it comes into the upper house, possibly as early as Wednesday.
“He finds himself quite conflicted because of his strong support for power privatisation,” a reliable source told The Australian.

Ha ha ha. Even it it’s only really relished by those of us who remember, there’s so much irony in that it peels away like a long-boiled, fat-greasy onion.

Expel him, or don’t. I don’t really care. We’ve established now that crossing the floor is a menial crime, at best, punished with a chuckle and a paper suspension. Bring on, in fact, a looser discipline and a three-line whip as in the UK or in other countries.

For the moment, though, let’s just savour the irony of a man who was installed into an upper house seat through his own unswerving loyalty and discipline, and his enforcement of the same onto others, hinting that he might defy a Caucus on an issue that was a major factor in the flogging—once-in-generation flogging—of two State Labor governments.

Ha ha ha. You muppet.

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