NSW election between Perrottet and Minns a contest of the underwhelming
In Australia’s largest state, the Coalition government is being dragged down by scandal while Labor’s alternative is a vague policy agenda and inexperience.
NSW voters face a dilemma, arguably a dreadful choice. In just three weeks, on March 25, they go to the polls to choose the next government of the nation’s largest state.
The winning side will control billions of dollars of taxpayer funds to deliver services that matter most to voters across NSW: health, education, transport and housing. Decisions in these areas will have implications far beyond the next four-year term.
Sadly, this election boils down to a contest of the underwhelming.
On one side is Premier Dominic Perrottet, leading a Coalition government dragged down by scandals and showing unmistakable signs of ill-discipline and disunity. On the other is Chris Minns, leading Labor with a vague policy agenda and an inexperienced team, and still trying to shrug off memories of the shambles left behind when the party last lost office in 2011.
Is there a powerful enough reason for voters to keep this Coalition government – or toss it out? Does the Labor opposition offer a sufficient alternative – or is it capitalising on a time-for-change factor?
Neither side takes comfort from opinion polls this week that suggest the winner will be unable to form a government majority in its own right. Gaining 47 out of 93 seats in the lower house needed for a majority is likely to depend on the Coalition or Labor securing additional support from independents and others on the crossbench. Under this scenario Labor looks favoured to emerge triumphant. But the likely dance partners – three Greens MPs and one or more ex-Shooters, Fishers and Farmers Party independents – will want to extract promises first. It could get messy.
Perrottet’s difficulty is not that he’s unpopular. He took over 17 months ago, midterm, following the abrupt resignation of Gladys Berejiklian. Approval ratings for this almost accidental Premier might never match those for Berejiklian – her voter-support levels soared during the worst of the Covid-19 pandemic. But opinion polls indicate Perrottet has established himself in a short time as earnest and dedicated to the job. Dislike for him is nothing like the loathing directed at Scott Morrison before last year’s federal election.
As he tries to persuade the NSW electorate that his government deserves another go, Perrottet boasts a record of achievement to back his case. Top of the list is motorway and rail infrastructure development that has occurred on this government’s watch to help Greater Sydney, bursting at the seams, cope with the future. No other NSW government in a generation has demonstrated the foresight to think big and tackle what was needed with a grand plan.
Another big plus promoted by Perrottet is how his government has managed the Covid crisis, keeping people safe and the NSW economy in good shape for the recovery phase afterwards.
Unfortunately, there are pieces missing from this upbeat narrative. The fact is Perrottet is the fourth premier of a government that is really 12 years old. It looks old and tired. There are structural problems in the core areas of health and education. The state’s hospitals are struggling, short of beds, staff and equipment, unable to meet patient demand. There has been a spree of Perrottet election announcements heralding new health hubs, hospital building works and diagnostic services. Why now, after so long in office?
Falling schooling standards are constantly in the news with criticism of the quality of teaching and student results. In the past fortnight Perrottet has proposed paying better teachers more, to reward excellence and stop an exodus from the profession. He also has committed to a “bigger and better than ever” school building program. Again, why now?
Even Perrottet’s proudest achievements are open to question because most can be attributed to his predecessors. Mike Baird kick-started the infrastructure boom. Perrottet was new and junior in the scheme of things until April 2014 when Baird, the infrastructure maestro, succeeded Barry O’Farrell and made Perrottet his finance minister.
When Covid hit, it was Berejiklian as premier, day after day, strategising with her cabinet and a team of experts, and then fronting up to the cameras with chief health officer Kerry Chant to tell the NSW public what was going on. He might not broadcast it now but Perrottet as Berejiklian’s treasurer was a sceptic. He opposed extending the lockdown in mid-2021 and even suggested that Chant should take a pay cut if Sydney suburbs were “unnecessarily locked down”.
The high number of government MPs quitting at this election only fuels the notion of rats leaving a ship they know is sinking. Four current ministers are retiring – Brad Hazzard, Rob Stokes, Victor Dominello and Geoff Lee.
Others are going or gone for different reasons. Transport Minister David Elliott has lost his seat after an electoral boundary change and will not return. Stuart Ayres resigned from his ministry over his role in appointing former deputy premier John Barilaro to a $500,000 New York trade commissioner’s job. Now recontesting his seat of Penrith with a 0.6 per cent margin, Ayres looks headed for defeat. John Sidoti fell on his sword as a minister over a development scandal and is bowing out. Eleni Petinos was sacked by Perrottet over allegations she “seriously bullied staff”. She looks set to be re-elected in Miranda, but her ministerial days are over.
Gareth Ward, banned from parliament as he faces court over sexual abuse charges he denies, is recontesting his seat of Kiama but not as an endorsed Liberal. Last month, Damien Tudehope resigned as finance minister when it was discovered his self-managed super fund had a longstanding shareholding in toll road owner Transurban. Peter Poulos, while not a minister, has added to the government’s tales of woe, denied upper house preselection for sharing nude photos of a female colleague who once appeared in Australian Penthouse.
Perrottet, meanwhile, appears to have lost control. Despite remaining in Perrottet’s cabinet, Elliott has been a regular political bomb thrower, spatting in public with deputy Liberal leader and Treasurer Matt Kean. More recently Elliott sided with NSW clubs against Perrottet’s plan for cashless gaming machines. Perrottet and Kean have contradicted each other at times, too.
Inside the NSW Liberal Party, Perrottet’s authority has been undermined: so toxic is the infighting in his right faction that it appears some would rather be in opposition. As one wry political insider remarks: “Perrottet’s government is exhibiting all the hallmarks of the last days of the Roman Empire. Everything has been going wrong.”
Undoubtedly the heaviest weight for the Perrottet government has been Barilaro and the scandal over his New York trade post. Last year we learned that, as trade minister in 2021, Barilaro effectively blocked a senior bureaucrat as the successful candidate by changing the selection process. Then he quit politics, applied for the job and took it himself.
Barilaro ended up not taking the post, agreeing it was untenable. But Perrottet and Ayres looked ridiculous with their repeated assertions that “no suitable candidate” was found during the first recruitment round and Barilaro was “the best” on merit after a global search. The keen interest Ayres apparently took in Barilaro’s appointment cost him his ministry. The lingering damage of this sorry affair has been the wind knocked out of the government’s sails.
Perrottet had hoped a big-spending budget last year would refresh his government and provide momentum all the way to the election. Few remember that budget now.
Perrottet has had troubles in his own backyard. He weathered a brief storm (sparked by dissidents from his own faction) over the embarrassing revelation he wore a Nazi costume at his 21st birthday.
Potentially much more damaging, rattling voter faith his judgment and claims to govern for all, is how, as revealed last month, millions of dollars of Black Summer bushfire grants were denied to Labor electorates when Perrottet was NSW treasurer and chairman of cabinet’s economic review committee that oversaw the funds.
Questions also linger from Perrottet’s time as NSW treasurer over his then department’s alleged mismanagement of iCare, the state workers compensation scheme. Perrottet was lucky to survive as a minister when it emerged the scheme was close to collapse and 52,000 injured workers were underpaid. There was more: a former US Republican political staffer was hired by iCare and placed in Perrottet’s ministerial office at a cost of $700,000. The wife of a former iCare chief executive was paid $800,000 after being awarded a contract without a tender.
The picture on Labor’s side is hardly more inspiring. While Minns presents as urbane and confident, he is an unknown to most voters. A former Labor staffer and party apparatchik, he entered parliament in 2015 with virtually no outside experience. No one on Minns’s frontbench, apart from Michael Daley, has ever served as a minister.
If elected, Minns has pledged to employ more teachers and health workers, make transport more accessible and improve housing affordability. There are some specifics: he says Labor would turn 10,000 casual teaching jobs into permanent positions, start a state-owned clean energy company, revive local manufacturing by building Tangara trains in the state and end the privatisation of government assets. The rest is short on detail.
Interviewed by The Australian’s Stephen Rice earlier this week, Minns seemed to offer a buy now, pay later model. “What can I say?” he said. “We’re going to have to be judged in office about what kind of government we run.”
Indeed, Minns seems a chameleon who will do whatever it takes. He used his first speech to parliament in 2015 to call for a reduction of union control inside NSW Labor, and for compulsory Chinese language classes in the state’s schools. He has retreated from both. Minns made peace with angry unions: he needed their support to unseat his Labor predecessor Jodi McKay. He now says his view on compulsory Mandarin in schools was a mistake.
Minns demonstrated restraint over Perrottet’s Nazi uniform gaffe. He accepted the Premier’s apology was genuine and said the issue should not turn the tide of a state election with bigger issues to debate. But Minns was also likely sensitive to the door he could have opened on his own background if he’d chosen to get personal with Perrottet.
Most problematic for Minns is his former close association with influential pro-Beijing figures in Sydney’s Chinese community, in particular property developer Huang Xiangmo, since refused re-entry to Australia on security grounds and now living somewhere in China.
Minns seems to have cut off such ties. But in 2015 he was flown to China with his federal Labor MP friend Chris Bowen as a guest of the Chinese Communist Party and the Australian Guangdong Association, one of several pro-Beijing organisations then headed by Huang. A theme started emerging of Minns and others potentially swayed by Chinese “soft power”.
In 2017, it was confirmed that Minns’s pro-Beijing links reached directly into his electorate. James Zhou, a Chinese-born Sydney man with high-level connections to one of the organisations controlled by Huang, was employed full-time in Minns’s electorate office. Zhou also ran a Chinese export business with Minns’s wife called NoBorders Trading. It was also based in Minns’s electorate.
Later, during a 2019 inquiry the NSW Independent Commission Against Corruption called into state Labor’s receipt of political donations from Huang and others, Minns was alleged to have received $10,000 in bogus cheques. He was also reported as receiving $900 donations in the names of people who signed cheques while really giving nothing because they were reimbursed in cash. Through a spokesman, Minns said at the time he would “forfeit” any such funds. ICAC made no adverse findings against Minns but the circumstances behind these donations, and exactly how much was handed back to whom, remain blurry.
NSW Labor must win nine seats to rule in its own right at the NSW election, a tough target because the Coalition holds many with margins of 6 per cent or more. This week’s Newspoll, published in The Australian, showed the game might not be over for Perrottet’s government. The Coalition’s primary vote was up two points to 37 per cent, compared with Labor down four points to 36 per cent. A Resolve poll, published two days later in Nine newspapers, was more encouraging for Labor, showing the ALP’s primary vote at 38 per cent and the Coalition’s at 32 per cent. The Resolve poll still suggested Labor would not win a clean majority, needing support from the Greens and independents to reach the magic 47 seats.
Another factor not helpful to Labor’s cause is optional preferential voting in NSW elections. NSW Labor cannot rely on scooping up 11 per cent of Greens preference votes, as it does federally, because voters only have to mark their ballot paper with a “1”. At this stage, Labor is confident of winning East Hills and Penrith. Other hopefuls are Upper Hunter, Goulburn, Tweed and Winston Hills.
“Neither side is turning people on,” says a Labor number-cruncher. “The Resolve poll was interesting. If there was a uniform 7 per swing, Labor would get there, but only just. It’s more likely that Labor will get six seats and end up a minority government. People forget the Coalition has been a minority government for four years and still able to operate.”
There are many quirks with this election. If the Coalition loses, Perrottet would probably be replaced in opposition by Kean. Some Liberals dislike Kean more than their Labor opponents. Another quirk is the view of senior Liberals that the Coalition would romp to victory if Berejiklian was still in charge, despite a corruption inquiry that killed her premiership.
The ultimate irony relates to Minns, who holds Kogarah in Sydney’s south with a 0.1 per cent margin, the smallest in the state. Minns’s profile and party leader status should get him re-elected, but his Liberal opponent, businessman Craig Chung, has ties to the Chinese community in local Hurstville.
If Minns lost his seat but Labor won the election, Daley, the man who led his party to the 2019 election, could end up premier.
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