I've been away from this blog for several months, largely due to illness, but I couldn't let Local Government Minister, Tony Simpson's, resignation from Cabinet, on the grounds that he no longer had confidence in Premier Colin Barnett's leadership, pass without comment.
Readers of this blog (and the more recent one dealing with the City of Perth Act) will know that I have been very critical of Simpson in his role as Local Government Minister.
In retrospect, however, it is unclear how much of the local government so-called reform (aka forced amalgamation) fiasco was Simpson being malicious and how much his simply being unable to stand up to Barnett. Certainly the fatuous and false 'economies of scale' argument came from Col's half-baked economics - I commented more than once that he must have attended the lecture on economies of scale but skipped the next one on diseconomies of scale.
Simpson was often the scapegoat for Col's ignorance and intransigence.
Even so, Simpson cannot be held blameless, as he should have stood up to Col - that was the time to resign - but, in fairness, he was too new a minister for resignation to have had much effect.
Simpson has performed much better and more consistently in his other portfolios of Community Services, Seniors and Volunteering, and Youth, but these are not high profile ones and he has got little public recognition from them.
Col's predictable and rather puerile response was that Simpson's resignation provided an opportunity for someone else to be a Minister - as if the Government benches in Parliament were brimming with talent. Whoever gets the gig, we can only hope that their tenure will be short-lived.
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