Loose seams at Team Barry

Jocking for position in the O'Farrell government ... Gilded career ahead for former Freehills person Gabrielle Upton ... Three other women ministers looking wobbly ... Serious adjustment needed by Johnny Howard's old chum, Pru Goward ... Alex Mitchell reports 

Gabrielle Upton, Sports Minister with a bright O'Farrell future NSW Premier Barry O'Farrell is losing Cabinet ministers at the same pace as weight is falling from his ample frame. 

Finance Minister Greg Pearce was sacked in August and a few weeks later Sport and Recreation Minister Graham Annesley, a former NRL referee, quit to take a lucrative job on the Gold Coast as CEO of the Titans.

Meanwhile, three senior female members of Cabinet - Family and Community Services Minister Pru Goward, Health Minister Jillian Skinner and Environment Minister Robyn Parker - are under pressure with relentless questions about their competence. 

Andrew Constance, one of the leading Liberal "wets" is the new Finance Minister, while the new Vaucluse MP Gabrielle Upton has entered the ministry to replace Annesley in the testing Sport and Recreation portfolio.

Ms Upton, who succeeded Peter Debnam in the blue chip Eastern Suburbs seat, seems over-qualified for the job - at least on paper.

She has an MBA from New York University, law and arts degrees from the University of NSW, she a former pro-Chancellor of UNSW, and has worked for Phillips Fox, Freehills, Origin Energy, Toronto Dominion Bank and Deutsche Bank.

Two Gabrielles

Another Gabrielle held the sports portfolio between 1995 and 1999. That would be Gabrielle Harrison, Labor MP for Parramatta, a keen sportswoman, who was sacked after the 1999 election by Premier Bob Carr.

She remained on the backbench until 2003 when she was purged from parliament by Eddie Obeid's faction and replaced by Tanya Gadiel, a prominent Terrigalette.

Ms Upton can expect brighter prospects in the near future. Her current ministry is merely a work experience appointment. When O'Farrell makes his "generation change" reshuffle next year she will be promoted to a senior Cabinet position.

He aims to face the electors in March 2015 with a significant number of women ministers to underline the difference between his political approach and Tony Abbott's.

While Abbott has the solitary female presence of glacier-eyed Julie Bishop in his first ministry, O'Farrell has six in his current Cabinet and is planning to have at least 10 in 18 months' time when he faces the voters.

Liberals at war

Being saddled with a massive parliamentary majority brings its own peculiar problems for O'Farrell.

Ambitious backbenchers feel that the government needs their unique talent in the Cabinet and many are restless for promotion.

Two of the most ambitious are right-wingers, the MP for Wollondilly Jai Rowell and Matt Kean MP for Hornsby.

Kean is a favourite of radio ham Alan Jones and is regularly on 2GB giving Alan his opinions on current affairs.

Apart from rumbling in the ranks, the Coalition is discovering the impact of having a public service that is largely pro-ALP and pro-Unions NSW.

Senior and middle-ranking bureaucrats are regularly leaking emails, letters and documents to John Robertson's Opposition.

Department heads have been forced to issue internal statements warning staff not to leak confidential ministerial documents - with the warning emails themselves being promptly leaked.

Senior ministers are rattled by the activities of Labor's fifth column in the state bureaucracy. But the more they try to stamp out the disclosures, the worse it will get.

The saner tactic is to keep governing. That is what Transport Minister Gladys Berejiklian has decided to do, and it seems to be working.

The trouble with Pru

Goward: friend and biographer of "Honest John" (pic. Frockwriter)

Pru Goward, on the other hand, is taking the leaks from her department personally. As the Opposition demands her resignation for misleading parliament about case worker numbers, La Goward is bent on a course of self-righteous justification.

It doesn't seem to be washing. 

The media is uncritically giving space to ALP deputy leader Linda Burney to attack Goward, while forgetting that Burney was a former DOCS minister (2008-2011) and a former Director General of the NSW Department of Aboriginal Affairs, when indigenous welfare was reportedly a disgrace.

Goward things it's all frightfully unfair. 

A former ABC breakfast radio presenter she became one of Prime Minister John Howard's favourites. She discovered her forte for administration when "Honest John" appointed her executive director of the Office of Status of Women in the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet in 1997.

That was the same year that Goward and her partner, right-wing journalist David Barnett, co-authored an execrable biography entitled John Howard: Prime Minister.

In 2001 Howard promoted her to Federal Sex Discrimination Commissioner. Her initial five-year term was then extended by an additional three years.

She occupied a spacious office in Canberra and employed a large staff to manage her working life, her travel, appointments and meetings.

Elected MP for Goulburn in 2007, she was elevated to the ministry after the Coalition's 2011 landslide and handed Cabinet's hottest portfolio, Family and Community Services, formerly DOCS.

Goward's approach has been to fly a desk and administer by commandment.

Unfortunately, she hasn't grasped that she is no longer a senior civil servant. She is now a polly responsible to parliament and ultimately the electorate.

These realisations take time.