IT’S a shame that Hollywood doesn’t do leading men in the shape of Senators Freddie Cohen and Ian Le Marquand, because there was a touch of tinseltown magic about both last week.

They may not look like the stars of a gritty 1970s cop thriller, but maybe there’s a frustrated maverick in both of them. A rule-breaker, desperately yearning to break free of the shackles of a stable political career and burst loose.

And having spent the first four years of his career on the political stage typecast as a wistful, dreaming sideman obsessed with ‘world-leading architects’ and ‘Jersey’s design vernacular’, Senator Cohen embraced the new genre with aplomb.

While the Retail Strategy Framework proposing a new supermarket flopped about on the floor like a badly-beaten suspect, Senator Cohen did what all good dirty cops would do. Radio for back-up? Call for an ambulance? Administer first aid?
No. He drew his service piece, put four bullets in the scumbag, and slipped away before the corpse had even stopped twitching.

That’s how he operates. Sure, he breaks rules. But he gets results, Damnit.
‘My position is no to a rural development (BLAM!), no to a semi-rural development (BLAM!), no to a greenfield site (BLAM!) and no to a glasshouse site (BLAM!),’ was the Environment Minister’s verdict on the report, which advocated building the new supermarket in the countryside if the clearly non-existent urban sites could not, in fact, be found.

In truth, the strain had been showing for some time. Senator Cohen was clearly that most dangerous breed – a maverick cop at breaking point.

He had been pushed first by his other colleague, Housing Minister Terry Le Main, who labelled the new Island Plan a ‘disaster’ because it contained no fields for rezoning. He managed to keep his cool then, barely, but sometimes, an Environment Minister’s gotta do what an Environment Minister’s gotta do.

All of this is not, it has to be said, ‘joined up’ government at its absolute best. That phrase – one of the most-used cliches of the ministerial reforms – promised that policies right across the States would complement each other, that conflict between departments would be over, that ten ministers working together could steer a path through the hideously tangled mess of their ten overlapping spheres of responsibility without running aground.

The problem is that it doesn’t matter if the ministers are ‘joined up’ – the policies have to join up, too.

Sometimes things have been dropped because money ran out (the irresistible force of government spending meeting the immovable object of no-more-cash), and some of the time the language around the policy – the Strategic Plan that overarches all departments especially – is so vague, ill-defined and woolly as to be practically useless.

Planning is an interesting case in point – the policy objective of not building in the countryside just cannot square with rezoning fields to build affordable homes, or creating a new supermarket to increase competition and lower prices. They are each of them laudable aims, but you can’t have them all. A big part of responsible government and opposition is levelling and being honest about those conflicts, and picking one side of them and sticking with it.

Which takes us, rather indirectly, to our second renegade, the Home Affairs Minister Ian Le Marquand and his ongoing trials and tribulations about the suspension of police chief Graham Power, and the proposed appointment of acting police chief David Warcup as his replacement.

He’s taking heat from all sides over the case, and there was a touch of Dirty Harry in his response, which was effectively to threaten to throw in his badge and weapon and retire from the force if he didn’t get his way.

‘But Le Marquand! You’re one of the best officers in the precinct!’ the imaginary jowly commissioner behind the desk at City Hall might possibly have said in response.

‘Call me naive, but I tend to do things because I think they are right,’ was the totally unimagined line from the Senator to the Scrutiny panel questioning him on the subject, which shows that, if nothing else, Senator Le Marquand has a cracking ear for Hollywood dialogue.

It’s a funny old move, the threatened resignation. The last one that I remember was ‘after the act’, with former Chief Minister Frank Walker saying that he would have gone over a lost vote on GST exemptions, but only a couple of days after the vote took place.

While you could take the remark as simply honest but off-the-cuff, Senator Le Marquand has a bit too much political savvy for that kind of thing.

The only way it would make sense is if he thought that he was personally more popular than the Warcup appointment – if he thought that the threat of losing him would get Members in line behind the new police chief.

And the only way that makes sense is if you imagine him as totally committed to the job in hand, and with little time to get it done. Almost as if, in the finest tradition of the 1970s thriller, it was a long shot, but it was the only shot he had.