By Alexandra Smith, Lucy Cormack and Tom Rabe
NSW Premier Dominic Perrottet spent the final day of the campaign sandbagging Coalition seats while Labor leader Chris Minns went on the offensive, targeting key electorates he hopes to snare from the government as Liberal strategists feared the election was slipping away from them.
As NSW heads to the polls on Saturday, both leaders made their final pitches to voters as they toured critical electorates, but senior Liberals were downbeat, with one describing the potential outcome of the election as a “train wreck” for the Coalition.
Premier Dominic Perrottet and Stuart Ayres on the campaign trail in Penrith on Friday.Credit: James Brickwood
In an embarrassing development for the Liberals late on Friday, the independent Parliamentary Budget Office issued an extraordinary statement complaining that its work had been misrepresented, and the Liberal Party had failed to correct the error.
The Liberals have campaigned heavily on the state government’s economic credentials, accusing Labor of axing key projects from WestInvest, the fund established from the sale of WestConnex.
However, the independent office was scathing of the Liberals’ take on its costings, saying the party misrepresented the PBO and wrongly quoted it as the party’s source for the claim that “Labor have cut more than $2 billion from the WestInvest Fund”.
Despite the fears within the government, the election is still likely to come down to the wire, with Labor needing at least nine seats to govern in its own right, or six to form minority government with the support of the Greens.
A senior Labor source, not permitted to speak publicly, said despite polling in its favour, the party remained concerned about “getting the right number of votes in the right marginal seats”.
Despite published polls indicating Labor would win the election, Perrottet ended the campaign with a blitz of eight key seats.
Criss-crossing Sydney, the premier visited pre-poll booths, including the two most marginal seats in the state: East Hills and Minns’ seat of Kogarah – both held on a wafer-thin margin of 0.1 per cent.
The premier’s path on Friday – from traditionally blue-ribbon northern Sydney seats under threat from teal independents, to Liberal strongholds in the west – suggested an eleventh-hour sandbagging by the underdog Coalition.
Perrottet did not stray from his campaign talking points, repeatedly insisting it was “only the Liberals and Nationals with a long-term economic plan to keep NSW moving forward”.
“Right here in western Sydney, the schools the hospitals, the metros, the motorways that continue to make a real difference to people’s lives ... growing our economy, creating opportunities and prosperity for people right across NSW, putting downward pressure on household budgets,” he said.
“We cannot risk a Labor government.”
By day’s end, the premier had visited Willoughby, North Shore, Penrith, Holsworthy, East Hills, Kogarah, Ryde and Oatley, accompanied by his wife Helen and daughter Celeste.
Perrottet’s first visit was a Chatswood pre-poll booth in the electorate of Willoughby, where Liberal MP Tim James is fighting to protect the seat formerly held by Gladys Berejiklian.
It is under threat from independent challenger Larissa Penn. The premier also visited the seat of North Shore, where teal candidate Helen Conway is taking on Liberal MP Felicity Wilson.
The electorate covers much of the federal North Sydney electorate, which former federal Liberal Trent Zimmerman lost to the teal wave in last year’s May election. Joining the campaign, Zimmerman told the Herald he was confident Wilson had done enough to protect the seat.
“I think people are judging their vote on state issues,” Zimmerman said. “And also, if you look at an area like this, one of the big issues [in] the federal election was climate change. The NSW government’s been leading the country on making sure we respond to climate change. I think voters are recognising that.”
Perrottet also headed west to the ultra-marginal seat of Penrith to meet local MP and his former Liberal deputy leader Stuart Ayres to make a last pitch to voters in western Sydney.
Liberal strategists fear strong local support for One Nation in that electorate could split the conservative vote, and the party has pulled out all stops to hold the seat – including a mail-out from former prime minister John Howard.
As Perrottet raced across town, Minns’ last two stops on the final day of campaigning were in the Liberal-held electorates of Ryde and Parramatta.
Minns and his wife Anna joined Ryde candidate and local teacher Lyndal Howison for a street walk through Eastwood Plaza. Labor is targeting the seat as popular MP and senior minister Victor Dominello retires from politics. The party would need at least a 9 per cent swing to secure it.
Minns pushed further west with the Labor campaign bus on Friday afternoon, holding his last press conference of the campaign in Parramatta, a seat Labor must win if it is to form government.
Mr Everywhere: Chris Minns raced around Sydney on election eve, as this multiple exposure illustrates.Credit: Janie Barrett
Flanked by deputy leader Prue Car and local candidate, Parramatta Mayor Donna Davis, Minns said Saturday’s vote was going to go “down to the wire”.
“If Labor, and me as party leader, can shine a spotlight on [Davis’] candidacy with our final press conference then that’s exactly what I want to do at the end of the day,” Minns said.
After a gruelling three-month campaign, Minns said he believed voters were ready for a change, and reiterated his campaign mantra of ending privatisation and funnelling more resources into schools and hospitals.
“I believe we can rebuild our schools and our hospitals and do it all without selling the assets that people of this state need to run businesses to run their families and to get around Sydney and NSW,” he said.
Earlier in the day Minns toured a train manufacturing facility in the Labor-held seat of Auburn, spruiking Labor’s plan to boost local procurement of public transport rolling stock.
One senior Liberal said the government was on track to lose East Hills, Riverstone, Parramatta, Penrith, as well as possibly Ryde and South Coast. There were also concerns about North Shore and Willoughby, which Perrottet visited on Friday.
The Nationals were more upbeat, however, with one senior source confident the party would hold all its lower house seats and possibly pick up Murray from independent Helen Dalton.
One Nation NSW leader Mark Latham, who is hoping to build on the party’s representation in the lower house, on Friday tweeted: “Perrottet has obviously been campaigning in a way that was defying Liberal polling, thinking he could turn it around.
“Labor is winning, and we need One Nation as a handbrake on them in the upper house.”
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