DOES the NSW Cabinet need to start paying people to have lunch with them?
Yesterday Morris Iemma held one of the NSW Labor Party's business dialogue luncheons in the boardroom of one of the country's top 500 companies.
These are the talk-fests that businesses pay anywhere from $10,000 to $100,000 to join every year.
It gives them access to Ministers and intimate meetings with the Premier.
But it wasn't anything anyone said -- or ate -- at this particular tete-a-tete that left the profound hint of something wrong hanging over the room.
It was the vacant seats in the half-empty room, according to one of the guests.
Reportedly, there were about half the number of attendees who normally turn up to these high-powered forums -- about 60 in total.
They are used to filling rooms holding about 150. That amounts to a lot of campaign cash not coming in the door.
The same guest said that Iemma heaped the virtues of his Government upon the corporate bigwigs and said anyone who suggested they were anything other than a good Government was, well, just plain wrong.
Perhaps Iemma's plans to sever the party machine's ties with corporate donations has been taken literally.
At another lunch being held today in Brisbane, a speech of a different kind will be delivered on the need for Labor Party reform and the growing disconnection between political parties and those who live on Planet Earth.
Bruce Hawker is one of the country's most savvy Labor political lobbyists and strategists. And even he reckons punters are not getting what they deserve in their politicians.
In 1971, only 24 per cent of Labor MPs had come directly from an ALP or union job. In 2005, the figure was 67 per cent.
A troubling picture emerges when you consider Labor Party membership has plummeted from 370,000 in the 1940s to about 7500 now.
``A shrinking group of people are determining who our parliamentarians will be and they are less representative of the broader community than at any time in living memory,'' Hawker said.
``They are the pool from which our ministers are drawn.
``I can see very little wrong and a lot of good in a system which would allow the Prime Minister or Premiers to appoint, say, 20 per cent of their ministry from outside Parliament.''
It happens in the US and the UK -- the home of the Westminster system.
Maybe it's time to consider it here.
