Campbell: Loss for Perrottet Government would be bigger than normal disaster for Libs
If Chris Minns wins the NSW election, Tasmania’s Jeremy Rockliff will be head of the only Liberal Government in the country, writes James Campbell.
Opinion
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By this time next Sunday, Jeremy Rockliff may have risen through the ranks to become one of the most important, if not powerful, people in the Commonwealth of Australia.
Jeremy, who? Jeremy Page Rockliff, 53, who since July 2022 has been the 47th Premier of Tasmania.
And the reason why, going forward, you might be hearing more of the thoughts of Premier Jez – if that is indeed his nickname, who knows, it might be Jerry – is next Saturday’s NSW state election.
Of course if Dominic Perrottet gets the chocolates, journalists will still be googling to check who occupies the top job in the Apple Isle.
But if Chris Minns salutes, Rockliff will suddenly be thrust into the national limelight as the head of the only Liberal Government in the country.
And if that should come to pass, this state of affairs will continue until at least August 2024, when the NT goes to the polls.
Even if things weren’t so crook for them elsewhere on the mainland, losing NSW would still be a big deal for the Liberal and National parties.
Not only is NSW the most populous state with the biggest economy, it’s also the most important to federal politics.
That’s because as well as having the most seats in the federal parliament, at every election it also has the most marginal seats.
Obviously, sooner or later, time runs out for every government everywhere.
But a loss for the Perrottet Government would be bigger than normal disaster for the Liberal Party.
State Governments usually get re-elected, so if it wins next week, the chances are Labor will have eight years to remake the state in the same way Labor has done in Victoria.
And if that experience is anything to go by, the evidence is that, out of office, the political skills of Liberals waste away pretty quickly at a state level.
The national implications will be big too.
For the past 10 years the NSW Coalition Government, despite being on to its fourth premier, has managed to project an aura that the Liberals have sorely missed everywhere else: competence.
The last time the non-Labor parties managed to get on the treasury benches in Queensland, Victoria and South Australia, they were ejected by the public after a single term.
They’ve occupied office for longer than that in Canberra, of course.
But although the last Federal Coalition Government was re-elected twice, its record of achievement was modest, to put it politely.
Whatever you think about the O’Farrell-Baird-Berejiklian-Perrottet governments – they have actually done things, building roads, train lines, hospitals and schools across NSW.
It also managed the fiendishly difficult job – politically – of amalgamating local councils.
Amazingly for NSW, all of this was achieved without a single minister going to jail!
There’s another reason beyond all this, why next weeks’ state election in NSW is really important.
As I said, time runs out for all governments eventually but, if it does, it’s usually pretty clear as it was last year in Canberra, that it’s run out of things it wants to do.
But, again, whatever you think of Dominic Perrottet, it’s pretty clear there are things he still wants to do.
For as long as I can remember, economists have been railing against stamp duty – Perrotet is the leader of the first government to actually do something about it.
On Friday, the Productivity Commission dropped a door stopper of a report full of things it thinks we need to do as a country if we want to keep getting richer.
Its message was pretty simple: in certain sectors of the economy – namely mining and agriculture – Australia is world class.
In the rest of the economy, not so much.
The biggest drag on us getting richer is the non-market segment of the economy, things like health, education, aged care and disabilities.
Because combined they now make up so much of the economy, unless we can find a way to get them to perform better we are not going to be able to raise wages across the economy.
As Jim Chalmers was quick to point out, many of the recommendations the PC has come up with to make these areas work better are the responsibility of the states.
As anyone who has watched the performances of the Queensland and Victorian governments for most of the past decade can tell, Labor at a state level has shown it has zero, zip, nada interest in lifting productivity in any area of the economy it controls.
Not if it means having a blue with the public sector unions.
Moreover, some of the things it has done, like legislating ratios for staff in public hospitals, have actually made it harder to improving things, the Productivity Commission says,
Indeed, under Andrews and Palaszczuk, state government has become little more than a machine for shoveling taxpayers’ money into the pockets of favoured groups of public servants.
If NSW elects Chris Minns next Saturday, you can bet your life the biggest state will soon follow suit, which is why everyone around the country should be watching the result closely.
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