It’s Chris Minns’s moment but he has a mammoth task ahead as he leads Labor back into power

Labor leader Chris Minns thanks his supporters during his victory speech. Picture: Sam Ruttyn

This is Chris Minns’ moment – and he shows all the signs of being ready to seize it with both hands.

The new premier will rightly celebrate this historic victory with Labor’s true believers but he has a mammoth task ahead.

He has led the party out of 12 years in the political wilderness, but NSW is not the promised land.

The 43-year-old has achieved his long-held ambition at a perilous moment for the state.

A cost-of-living crisis, an overstretched health system and a looming energy shortfall all need to be tackled head-on.

Minns came to power by making himself a small target and letting the electorate’s weariness with an ageing government do its work. Now he has to transform into a leader with bold ideas and the grit to push them through.

That hasn’t always been his forte.

Those who knew him in his younger days say he was always the charming, good-looking bloke who cruised through life; things fell into place without too much effort.

A potent mix of charm and ambition saw him win the NSW Labor leadership in June 2021.

To his credit, Minns knew he had to change if he was ever going to go the next step.

To become premier, he had to sharpen his focus.

That began when he gave up alcohol a year ago.

“I just wanted to have a clearer head,” he told The Australian recently. “You get your mornings back, you get energy during the day.”

Getting off the booze marked a turning point for Minns: a recognition that he needed to be at the top of his game, in a state where the political agenda of the day is often set by the breakfast radio broadcasters.

“If you sleep in to seven or eight o’clock a lot of the shape of the next 24 hours is gone.”

That means 5am starts, every day. Minns is candid: “That didn’t come naturally to me.”

Despite criticism – much of it justified – that he was slow to release his own policies on the big issues, the opposition leader has been relentlessly focused on the bread-and-butter issues, refusing to be sidetracked.

Chris Minns arrives at Carlton South Public School with his wife Anna and children to cast his vote in the NSW State Election. Picture: NCA NewsWire / David Swift

This campaign was going to be about road tolls, not poker machines.

Minns realised early that while pokies are an emotional issue, voters did not see them as a key issue in this election, despite the best efforts of the Sydney Morning Herald, which led a six-month campaign for cashless gaming cards that culminating in the paper declaring it could not endorse Minns and instead would back Perrottet.

Challenging Minns in his own seat, anti-pokies campaigner Troy Stoltz, got less than 5 per cent of the vote.

In the end, the gaming question was a character issue – just not in the way the Herald and The Liberal Party tried to spin it.

Minns could have swung aboard – this election was littered with policy thefts by both sides – but chose to tough it out, genuinely distrustful of introducing a largely untested gaming card system that may have unintended consequences for both gamblers and the 100,000 employees who work in the state’s clubs.

He stuck to his guns and now the system will now have a trial run in 500 clubs. If it works, Minns must be held to his word to introduce it across the state.

He has plenty of electoral capital to spend. Barring any of the unforeseen scandals that plague NSW political life, it will be March 2027 before he faces the polls again.

But the big challenges won’t be around poker machines.

They will be making sure nurses and teachers get pay rises without breaking the budget, ensuring energy security even if it means extending the life of coal-fired power stations, and making sure young people are able to rent a place to live even if they may never be able to afford to buy a house.

Minns is a pragmatist. He doesn’t carry the ideological baggage of the left.

Minns had the focus needed to win an election.

Now he needs to show the same drive to put the state back on its feet.