Joe Hildebrand: NSW Liberals do not deserve another term in government

Millions of people in NSW face a key decision today. But it will also have profound implications for the rest of Australia.

Today the electors of NSW will make a decision that has profound implications not just for the future of their state but for the future of the nation. What happens in the NSW tally room tonight will have a butterfly effect on Australia as a whole.

We know this because it has happened before. In 2010 the so-called “NSW disease” — the knifing of political leaders at the first sign of trouble — spread from Sydney to Canberra and then from Labor to Liberal.

It took twelve years for the nation to recover and just consider the cost.

The Rudd/Gillard/Abbott/Turnbull/Morrison years were a quagmire of equivocation and stagnation: constant oscillation on national security, climate change, taxation and superannuation. A never-ending cycle of doing and undoing that resulted in nothing getting done at all.

The point of this is that what happens inside major political parties matters. And it matters not just to the players involved but to all of us whether we like it or not.

Thus that culture of cutthroat revolving-door leadership that germinated in the NSW Labor Party a decade and a half ago ended up becoming a political pandemic that crippled the nation for more than a decade.

Chris Minns and Dominic Perrottet during the Sky News debate. Picture: Justin Lloyd

For this reason alone party division should always be punished by voters. It is rightly said that if a party cannot govern itself then it has no hope of governing the country.

And this is why the NSW Liberals do not deserve another term in government. For all my deep admiration and personal affection for Dominic Perrottet — who has done many outstanding things as Premier and been heroic on the campaign trail — the party he presides over is a burning building.

And if, against all the odds, it is returned for a fourth term I have no doubt it will collapse in upon itself, just as Labor did when it won an unexpected fourth term and the NSW disease was born in the desperation that followed.

Like Jesus in the desert, the Liberals need some time in wilderness to figure out who they are and what their purpose is — and how to resist the temptations of earthly corruption.

It is a long and agonising process but a vitally necessary one. And, somewhat providentially, it is a process that Labor has just gone through and emerged all the stronger for it.

NSW goes to the polls on Saturday. Picture: Roni Bintang/Getty Images

It is no secret that the NSW ALP has had a horror show decade since the fateful knifing of Morris Iemma but now, under Chris Minns, is exactly what any political party should be: united, disciplined and firmly focused on mainstream Australia instead of itself.

As with Perrottet, I am enormously impressed by Minns and it’s little wonder the two men also like each other. While his policy agenda may not be as far-reaching and visionary, he has solid and sensible political instincts and this is often far more important for a political leader.

While we all love hearing about what Paul Keating called “the vision thing”, 90 per cent of the job of Prime Minister or Premier is crisis management — responding to events beyond your control as they unfold in real time.

It is whether you have a strong centre, a strong sense of true north, that will determine whether you make a good decision or a catastrophic one.

Many on the left — including, sadly, the left of the Labor Party — see the world purely through an ideological lens and respond to such issues according to political doctrine and the results are almost always disastrous. (See: Russian Revolution, Cultural Revolution, Victorian coronavirus response.)

Minns is the opposite of that. He is practical and pragmatic and grounded firmly in Australia’s cultural traditions and suburban sensibility.

What happens in NSW will have a ‘butterfly effect’. Picture: Julian Andrews

As a result he represents the very best of what Labor should be: helping people get ahead in life and delivering better schools and hospitals but without all the silly woke and identity politics that have so embarrassingly derailed the left.

So it is critical for anyone who wants the left to be focused on real mainstream issues — indeed anyone who believes that politics in general needs to retreat from the extremes and return to the sensible centre — to support Labor at this election.

It is also vital for anyone who supports the long-term viability of the Australian Labor Party — or who even supports the long-term viability of Australian two-party democracy — to ensure that the ALP remains a mainstream party focused on mainstream issues, not boutique causes or ideological obsessions.

NSW Labor has historically been the ballast that has steadied the national party and curbed its occasional flights of fancy. If Minns loses the left will claim it as proof the ALP should adopt a more out-there agenda. No sane person wants this.

And so this election comes down to one simple choice for the people of NSW: vote Labor and restore it to the grand old party of Bob Hawke and pre-crazy Keating or vote for a party that will almost certainly implode even if it wins.

A nation holds its breath.