Perrottet for prime minister? Mike Baird says yes

The NSW parliament is not regarded as the home of particularly great oratory, or a cradle of bold ideas and brave debate. But earlier this week, former premier Dominic Perrottet delivered a speech you deserve to know about.

After taking over from Gladys Berejiklian in October 2021, Perrottet quickly challenged the preconceptions of some voters that he was some right-wing, ultra-religious nut job, and made his mark as premier before the 12-year-old Coalition government’s defeat at the March 2023 election.

During his time in office, Perrottet often sought advice from John Howard, but it may surprise some readers to learn that former Labor prime minister Paul Keating has also been a big supporter. Howard taught Perrottet about the importance of middle Australia, and Keating encouraged him to realise the power of imagination in politics.

Former NSW premier Dominic Perrottet after his valedictory speech to parliament.Credit: News Corp Australia

Perrottet brought the house down on Tuesday when he told a packed Legislative Assembly: “This may sound strange because obviously John and Paul are completely different, but sometimes I feel like I am their political love child.”

Perrottet’s resignation from parliament this month is a big loss to public life. I ran our Parliament House bureau in Canberra for five years and have observed NSW politics closely since becoming editor of the Herald at the start of 2022, and I can assure you Perrottet is an incredibly rare breed of politician in that he has both brains and guts.

Perrottet and his family will move to Washington DC later this month after he accepted an executive role with mining giant BHP. However, another former premier – Mike Baird – told a crowd on Tuesday that he hoped the BHP gig was only a “secondment” and predicted Perrottet would eventually find himself in Canberra. “Dom Perrottet will be coming back, and to federal politics – there’s no doubt about it,” Baird said. “Prime minister Perrottet has a very good ring to it.”

Whatever he does in the future, I will always have great respect for Perrottet due to his stance on three issues.

First, he reformed stamp duty – a staggeringly bad tax – by giving first homebuyers the option of paying an annual levy instead of a crippling upfront payment. Expert after expert has warned for years that stamp duty is an inefficient tax and Perrottet finally did something about it. The changes proved more popular than Treasury estimated, but Labor regrettably rolled back the Coalition scheme after it won last year’s state election.

“Originally, [stamp duty] was a little admin fee to get some documents stamped,” Perrottet told parliament during his valedictory speech. “Today it is a dead weight on the Australian dream, stamping out any chance of owning a home.

“To prove this point, imagine if the situation was reversed. Imagine if the status quo today was paying a small levy each year to help fund state services, but then the government proposed to replace that small annual amount with a hefty upfront tax, on average, of $75,000. That government would probably lose every single seat in this parliament.” Fair point.

Second, Perrottet helped drag the state – and the country – out of the COVID-19 era. He copped a lot of criticism for it (he earned the nickname “Domicron”, a portmanteau of Dominic and the Omicron variant) but Perrottet’s determination to bring about a new post-COVID normal was a huge achievement. In his speech on Tuesday, Perrottet said the state Coalition government did not get everything right during the pandemic but it “got more right than wrong”. One thing he nominated as a failure was the strict policing of vaccine mandates.

“Health officials and governments were acting with the right intentions to stop the spread, but if the impact of vaccines on transmission was limited at best, as it is now mostly accepted, the law should have left more room for respect of freedom,” he said.

“Vaccines saved lives but, ultimately, mandates were wrong. People’s personal choices should not have cost them their jobs. When I became premier, we removed them — or the ones we could — but this should have happened faster. If a pandemic comes again, we need to get a better balance, encouraging people to take action whilst at the same time protecting people’s fundamental liberty.”

Readers will have differing views on that observation, but it is refreshing to see a politician talk honestly about the good and bad of the pandemic. Most have run for cover in the years since, afraid of scrutiny and accountability.

My final source of respect for Perrottet is probably obvious to regular readers, given the Herald spent much of late 2022 and all of 2023 campaigning for the introduction of cashless gaming to the state’s 90,000 poker machines.

After much to-ing and fro-ing – including within the Coalition party room, which was deeply divided on the issue – Perrottet pledged to remove cash from all machines in a five-year window between the start of 2024 and the end of 2028. The package was perhaps not as ambitious as reform advocates had wanted. But it was an unprecedented leap forward and, on any measure, a much stronger policy than that proposed by NSW Labor.

Perrottet lost the March 2023 election, so the policy could not be implemented. But he is confident change is inevitable. “When it comes to new ideas, I have learnt that sometimes it is not your place to finish big reforms but only to start the journey,” he told parliament.

“For example, John Hewson started the GST and John Howard finished it. That is why I know the days of problem gambling in this state are numbered. It is now a matter of when, not if. I look forward to the day those machines of misery, in their factories of despair, are no longer feeding off some of the most vulnerable people in our state.”

That would indeed be quite a legacy.