Why Gladys Berejiklian our best chance at a secure future
The 2019 NSW election is a very tough one for Gladys Berejiklian to win because she has shaken up this state — and the problem is that nothing is quite finished yet. But voters should give the Government the opportunity to see through its transformation.
Are you and your family better off now than you were eight years ago? That’s the question that will be ringing in the ears of voters as they head to the polling booths on Saturday and throughout this week at early voting stations around the state of NSW.
It’s a perfectly reasonable query, and it will be the sentiment that determines whether or not Gladys Berejiklian and the Liberal-National coalition get the chance to reap the benefits of their enormous effort to transform NSW over two terms of government.
Am I financially secure? Do I get to spend enough time with my children and family? Are our streets safe? Can we be optimistic about the future?
All that boils down to one measure of voter sentiment: contentment.
Fair or not, this is the metric that incumbent governments must be laser-focused on: because no matter how much money they save and spend, voters will give them another chance — or kick them out — depending on gut feel.
That makes the 2019 NSW election a very tough one for Gladys Berejiklian to win: because she and the previous two premiers, Barry O’Farrell and Mike Baird, have shaken up this state. They’ve torn up roads and dug up pavements. They’ve knocked down houses and fired up bulldozers: from Sydney’s east to west, and across its north, there are tens of thousands of workers demolishing and building.
And the problem for the Government is that nothing is quite finished yet.
MORE NEWS:
PREMIER ORDERS ALL SCHOOLS TO HOST AFTER-HOURS CARE
DALEY’S VOW: MORE NURSES, BETTER MENTAL HEALTH CARE
We are still deep in the disgruntlement phase of the Government’s big-ticket infrastructure program, and it must be painful for Gladys Berejiklian and her ministers to know that they may not get to cut a ribbon on any of their signature projects.
Whoever is Premier on March 24 can anticipate four years of basking in the glow of gleaming new freeway lanes, trams racing up and down Anzac Parade, driverless trains zooming in and out of the city and, well down the track, a western Sydney airport.
If the Government loses this election, you can bet the next time a political party promises major infrastructure projects they will be held to a very tight four-year timetable, to be delivered just in time for election day.
And that, in a way, is the tragedy of the Coalition government. It has achieved so much — more than it was able to handle.
The eastern suburbs light rail project, which should have shored up the electorate of Coogee for the Liberals, became mired in an unseemly legal dispute that only highlighted the Government’s inability to have foreseen the potential complications of digging up the city’s major artery and the eastern suburbs’ most important road without really knowing what lay beneath.
Workers have dug up unexpected cables, mysterious pipes, human skeletons and even — unfortunately — the perfectly good tram-tracks another State Government buried a half-century ago.
The WestConnex project, which should have ensured the entirety of western Sydney was grateful to the Government for finally making their lives easier, has been beset with fear and angst from inner-west residents worried about their quality of life, without a single Government minister clearly explaining why the WestConnex would be a safe, pollution-reducing project.
The truth about all of these projects is they will make life much, much better — just like the Sydney Harbour Tunnel and the Eastern Distributor did in decades past (and both projects, remember, were beset by delays and controversy before their eventual opening).
On healthcare the Government has timed its achievements much more adeptly, delivering gleaming new hospitals around the state, including Royal North Shore, the Northern Beaches, Wagga Wagga and Dubbo, with several more on the way. Ambulance super-stations have been delivered, making it easier and safer for paramedics to save lives.
In the bush there have been serious missteps, like the hasty ban on greyhound racing that saw country voters turn against the Government and triggered Mike Baird to spit the dummy and leave politics prematurely — and the Government’s inexcusable flat-footedness on the drought that was ravaging our state for months while the National Party did nothing to garner assistance for farmers.
If the Coalition loses seats like Lismore and Tweed to Labor and Barwon and Upper Hunter to the Shooters, it will be because the National Party is deservedly being punished for its complete failure to represent constituents who desperately needed a strong voice in Macquarie Street.
In towns and shires across the state, families are forced to use foul-smelling and unsafe water while begging charities for hay to keep their livestock going. It should not have been left to a Sunday Telegraph campaign to draw attention to this drought.
On education, the Government has much to be proud of. This new school year saw students walk for the first time into eight brand-new schools and nine significant school redevelopments. The Government is airconditioning 1000 schools, has opened hundreds of playgrounds in holiday periods and has slashed the school maintenance backlog across the state. Now the Government is promising to massively accelerate the building program as well as ensuring every school offers out-of-hours care: a huge boon for families struggling to make old-fashioned school hours fit into today’s work-family balance.
But the Government was slow to anticipate an effective Labor campaign about the huge numbers of students who learn in demountable classrooms in overstuffed schools, an issue that enrages parents in rich and poor areas alike.
Demountables are the education equivalent of congestion: a physical manifestation of the widespread feeling that NSW is becoming awfully crowded. It’s hard to feel excited about a growing Sydney when your kids spend all day sweating or shivering in a glorified shipping container.
And what of Labor? Well, there’s no doubt leader Michael Daley knows how to campaign. In his short time as leader, he has transformed the fortunes of a party that just a few months ago was reeling from the loss of its own leader in an unfortunate sexual harassment scandal and showing little sign of being ready to govern. Daley has seized on the issues that rankle most with voters: demountable classrooms, the infrastructure logjam, the poorly executed stadium rebuilds and the overall sense that the Government is beholden to powerful interests. He has promised to lift public sector wages, aircondition all the schools, legislate proper nurse-to-patient hospital ratios and expand national parks. But Labor has not yet done enough to atone for the sins of its recent history.
Labor is not alone in having an ICAC problem — just ask Barry O’Farrell and the other nine Liberal MPs who resigned as a result of the corruption watchdog’s probe into campaign financing irregularities.
But the scale of Labor’s past transgressions makes the conservatives look like amateurs. Take Eddie Obeid for starters: the most powerful man in the Labor Party for two decades is now serving a five-year jail sentence for misconduct in public office. Eddie didn’t just work for the Labor Party. He wasthe Labor Party, and his fingerprints were all over the leadership ructions that saw an entire generation of politicians burned by ambition and greed.
This state has had a decade of instability in leadership. Uncertainty has not served us well or made us happy. That might be enough to encourage many voters to stick with the Coalition government.
But The Sunday Telegraph believes Gladys Berejiklian and her team also represent our state’s best chance of the professional, effective government we deserve. We believe voters should give the Government the opportunity to see through its transformation of our state.
Credlin: Why must we wreck the country to ‘save’ it?
Net Zero is a gigantic act of economic and environmental self-harm that must stop before our country is scarred by forests of gargantuan windmills, writes Peta Credlin.
Another Macron faux pas recognising Palestinian state
Emmanuel Macron will formally recognise a Palestinian state at the United Nations general assembly in September – but the French don’t have a great track record in international affairs, writes Piers Akerman.