Great NSW election win, but can Labor’s Chris Minns walk his talk as premier?

Chris Minns’ most glaring difficulty is in health. Picture: Gaye Gerard

The NSW election win for Labor is better than many inside the party predicted.

Premier-elect Chris Minns could lead a government with an outright majority at 47 seats.

Expectations are running high for NSW Labor to improve the lot of dissatisfied voters who turned its way.

Yet Minns has a morning-after problem: What now?

His party’s campaign was based on broad-sketch policy promises.

These were essentially motherhood statements that voters wanted to hear about boosting hospital services and education standards and easing the cost-of-living ­pressures.

Missing was the detail: time­frames for implementation, costings, where funds would be found to cover expensive promises.

Labor’s most glaring difficulty is in health. Minns pledged to ­introduce “minimum and enforceable safe staffing levels” in the public hospital system. When pushed late in the campaign, he guaranteed “staff-patient hospital ratios”.

These words are music to the ears of overstressed health professionals, let alone patients left unattended or on long waiting lists.

How to practically find 1200 extra nurses in a reasonable time is another matter. They are just not available. Nor are extra doctors. Or paramedics. Adding 600 more hospital beds in Sydney’s west, as promised, is not a short-term proposition either.

In schools, Minns promised to hire many more teachers, reduce class sizes and lift education standards. This is another long-range exercise, way beyond the current four-year term. Labor is also committed to better public transport, though it’s not clear how.

Paying nurses, teachers and other public servants more – by abolishing outgoing Premier Dominic Perrottet’s 3.5 per cent wage cap – is meant to retain and attract more people in those jobs.

Yet finding the staff needed, apart from hiring some overseas, is pie-in-the-sky politics. Also ridiculous is the notion that cost savings – to pay for more frontline workers and an inflated government wages bill – will come from sacking a significant number of Senior Executive Service public servants.

First, sacking SES public servants would deny the new government, with all its expanded services, the people who drive the public service.

Second, there are not enough SES people to sack to cover bigger pay rises for many thousands of public servants.

Third, Minns would find it costly to fire a stack of SES people because they would score big redundancy payouts.

Minns said Labor would revive manufacturing in NSW, starting with building new buses and Tangara trains in the state. Again, long lead times are an issue, but it would be a building program limited to body assembly. Engines would still be imported from overseas.

This does not sound like a manufacturing revival.

The new government’s immediate problem for NSW will be energy supply, with the Liddell coal-fired power station slated for closure next month, and Eraring in 2025. Minns supports approved gas projects and is open to other new ones. He has promised a $1bn state-owned energy security company to drive investment in renewable energy projects. With long lead times, there is much uncertainty in the interim.

Minns said Labor would not permit further privatisation of government assets, which seemed to strike a chord with voters. It also means new infrastructure would come from increased state debt. A big expansion of services and higher wages for public servants would have to come from continuing and higher state budget deficits.

Voters wanting better services might not care about deficits and debt right now but they will want evidence over time that Labor has a plan and a timetable and is not just throwing out the lines people want to hear.

No one on Minns’s frontbench, except for Michael Daley, has any ministerial experience. There is internal party unease about the depth of talent beyond the six on his executive team.

The victory speech Minns gave on Saturday night did not inspire much confidence. One Labor insider from his generation said: “It just seemed obvious to me that the guy is hollow, mouthing platitudes and mostly interested in the trappings of power. The best we can hope for is competent managerialism.”

The main election take-out is that it was a Coalition loss, ahead of a Labor win. Perrottet’s government was out of puff. He couldn’t persuade voters to re-elect his side after 12 years, four premiers, a lot of scandals and ministers retiring.

While a bad defeat for the NSW Coalition, it is nothing like the shambles of the 2011 election when Labor was left with a rump of 20 seats, a position from which it took all these years to claw back in a state the party believes belongs to it. Labor did best on Saturday where it needed to win, reclaiming western Sydney heartland seats.

There were some other remarkable swings, above 10 per cent. If NSW Labor can maintain the trust of voters, it has an election buffer for next time.

Incoming NSW premier Chris Minns heads out with wife Anna and sons Joe, Nick and George for a Sunday morning coffee at a local cafe. Picture: AAP