Mike Baird: Mum helped guide the Premier to his decision to resign with the words ‘It’s time’
AS NSW Premier Mike Baird (pictured this morning) waves goodbye to life in politics, it’s been revealed his mother Judy and wife Kerryn were the driving force behind his momentous decision to quit.
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“MY mum said ‘it’s time’.’’
With those two words, Judy Baird ultimately helped guide her son, the NSW Premier, to his momentous exit announcement yesterday.
The verdict was delivered just days ago at the Manly home of Judy and her husband, former MP Bruce Baird, and, along with a similar recommendation from Mike Baird’s wife Kerryn after an idyllic coastal holiday, eventually gave the state leader all the advice he needed.
“Obviously, they’re familiar with politics and they know the impact and the cost; they have watched it,” Mr Baird told The Daily Telegraph of the crucial meeting with his parents.
“Listening to the arguments we put (about whether to retire or not to retire) and going through the discussion, she just thought it was time.”
A similar debate took place when Baird left the NSW north coast village of Sawtell with his family after a holiday there just this month.
“Kerryn said … ‘it just feels right. It feels like the right time’.”
I'm retiring from politics. It's been an honour to serve you, NSW. pic.twitter.com/eFInOqoC19
— Mike Baird (@mikebairdMP) January 18, 2017
However, he said at other times in the lead-up to his decision to quit politics, his wife had actually taken the “opposite” view on him retiring.
Mike Baird’s decision to quit is a decision months, if not years, in the making, but it was only around Christmas that he decided for certain that it was his time to depart.
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He visited his former Liberal Party deputy leader father, who had had open heart surgery, which meant he was no longer able to adequately care for Judy, who suffers muscular dystrophy and needs 24-hour care.
He also visited his sister Julia in Melbourne last week after her successful second cancer operation.
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All of this came after he was reflected on the stress of his job in the middle of the year with one of his daughters copping threats over the Premier’s lockout laws.
All through the job he has had to deal with threats, just as his father did when he served as a politician. One time when Mike was a child the family was evacuated from their home.
This is the often untold toll of public life.
Mike Baird, the man who had always said that he would be in the job for a “good time, not a long time” — and whose main focus was to do what NSW premiers dating back to and including Bob Carr failed to do — sell the electricity networks to pay for infrastructure — had decided the reshuffle he foreshadowed to The Daily Telegraph last August, should also see him walk out the door as well.
“I actually wanted a refresh,” Baird said yesterday.
“I wanted to think about the refresh (over the holidays) and the more I thought about it, we’re (shaping) the team for 2019 or beyond, it just became clear for me, this doesn’t include me.”
A couple of Mr Baird’s senior staff knew of the departure “weeks” out and began to prepare his exit. However, close cabinet colleagues and the majority of his staff were left in the dark until just before the announcement — although suspicion remains that Treasurer Gladys Berejiklian had been told by Mr Baird at some point to prepare.
There will always be a suspicion that when Ms Berejiklian agreed not to run against Mr Baird for the leadership after Barry O’Farrell’s shock resignation in 2014 that the Manly MP had agreed to leave midway through the next term and hand the job to her.
Last week, Ms Berejiklian’s office raised eyebrows when it contacted three key offices — those of the transport, planning and Attorney-General, to ask for key talking points in their areas to ensure she was “on message”.
But Mr Baird says it was only when he met Ms Berejiklian for breakfast yesterday that he told her he was going.
Ms Berejiklian and her team of Left organisers swung into action, as she tackled any possible threat from Transport Minister Andrew Constance or Planning Minister Rob Stokes — securing a deal with the Right, led by Finance Minister Dominic Perrottet and Industry Minister Anthony Roberts and the Centre Right, led by Corrections Minister David Elliott, with reported conversations with Liberal lobbyist Nick Campbell and Mitchell MP Alex Hawke, to ensure she had enough votes.
Mr Constance was not giving up last night, with supporters saying he had some “undecided” backers. Ms Berejiklian had asked to meet him and that was set to happen last night or this morning.
Even during the last election campaign, the question inevitably arose as to whether Baird really intended to see out the term. The uncertainty intensified when he was forced to decide on whether to reverse his controversial greyhound racing ban.
Such was the speculation that Baird gave an interview in March last year with The Daily Telegraph where he said he was prepared to bet a bottle of Grange — the same expensive wine that felled his predecessor Barry O’Farrell — that he would stand again in 2019.
That’s not the only thing. Fed up with continual columns suggesting he was retiring, Baird and his press secretary Imre Salusinszky dummied up a joke statutory declaration by Baird marked February 16, 2016, by Michael Bruce Baird which declared: “I will stand in 2019” and left it on my computer one morning.
“I’m never going to convince you other than (to say) I count every day in this job as a privilege and I want to stay as long as I can,” Baird said in the March interview. “If you want to put a bottle of Grange down, you tell me what (year) the Grange is.”
At the press gallery Christmas party last year I joked to him: “That Grange will taste good.”
All the Premier afforded me was a weak smile.
Yesterday he promised to share it with me.
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