Joe Hildebrand and Clare Masters, January 19, 2008, The Daily Telegraph

THE State Government has gone into attack mode - launching an unprecedented onslaught of spin in a desperate bid to sell its controversial power privatisation plan.

The Government has hired private spin doctors with links to Premier Morris Iemma to try to spruik the controversial sale.

A top PR consultant can charge up to $500 an hour - the cost is expected to run into the millions.

Taxpayers will foot the initial bill for the consultants, however Treasurer Michael Costa argues the cost will be recouped from whoever buys the utility.

On top of this, all ministerial media advisers were ordered into campaign mode at a special crisis meeting this week in an effort to salvage Mr Iemma's record.

Mr Iemma has also taken the extraordinary step of writing to every ALP member urging their support at the upcoming State Conference, where he faces being rolled over the $15 billion power privatisation.

The Government engaged elite corporate PR firm Cosway to sell the benefits of the privatisation.

The boutique firm is home to Mr Iemma's former media adviser Ben Wilson, who declined to comment yesterday. The deal is thought to be worth tens of thousands of dollars.

A tender was yesterday put out for the full task of convincing the NSW public that the power sale is good for the state - in the face of opinion polls showing more than 80 per cent oppose it.

That contract is expected to be worth millions.

At the same time Mr Iemma has ordered all the Government's media minders to treat 2008 as an election year.

Media advisers will now have to meet twice daily to discus strategy, with a 4pm conference added to the existing 9am meeting.

Press secretaries have been told to concentrate on pushing the Government's virtues and building up its image as an active can-do administration.

Another plank of the Government's campaign is a mass mailout of a glossy 16-page booklet to ALP members preaching Mr Iemma's virtues and urging them to support him.

It comes ahead of the special May State Labor Conference where virtually all unions and rank and file members are expected to vote against the privatisation, forcing the party and the Government into deadlock.

Entitled "Morris Iemma: A Labor Premier Delivering for NSW", the "special publication" does not mention the power sell-off.

Instead it stresses the Government's social justice achievements in a thinly veiled warning to the Left and unions that, if the Premier falls, Labor's human services agenda will go with him.

The booklet was funded by the Labor Party.

Mr Iemma told The Daily Telegraph yesterday: "We make no apologies for keeping the community informed."