The Age’s Damien Murphy cleverly calls it the “White Lady Funerals strategy”: turning to women when the party’s fortunes start to tank. And so it has turned to Kristina Keneally as its great blonde hope to rescue it from political oblivion ahead of next year’s New South Wales election.

In shallow beauty pageant terms, the strategy is working. Keneally is popular — at least compared to the alternative in Barry O’Farrell, who nobody much likes no matter how rotten the government is. Keneally is up five points on the Newspoll scale, keeping the wolves from the door on 40 points compared to O’Farrell on 31.

But make no mistake, this is a rotten government. Voters know it — Keneally’s relative popularity hasn’t arrested an abysmal primary vote that would sweep them from office next March. Not nearly soon enough.

Not that O’Farrell’s mob instills anyone with much hope. And that’s the devastating reality for the people of NSW and a national economy anchored by the weight of NSW government incompetence — a solution isn’t really at hand.

NSW desperately needs a circuit breaker of the kind Jeff Kennett inflicted on Victoria in the 1990s — a big painful dose of medicine that recalibrates the direction and mood of the state and its economy. It needs big brooms and sweeping reforms.

It doesn’t need an early election. It needs a designated bastard to drag the state out of its mess through tough, disciplined and unpopular economic policies that people will be forced to accept through gritted teeth because they know it is the least worst solution to a really big problem.

Maybe that’s Keneally. Though given Labor’s factional divisions and desperate politicking for another 12 months that seems pretty unlikely.

Blonde she may be, bombshell she ain’t.