NSW election: Labor calculates a path to minority power
The reason for NSW Labor’s confidence, perversely, is that the party seems to think it can’t lose. There are a number of pathways for Labor to win office, but few if any for the Coalition’s re-election.
Labor is increasingly confident it will win the NSW election next Saturday, reclaiming power in the nation’s most populous state after 12 years of opposition doldrums.
NSW party leader Chris Minns is pumped up, despite publicly playing down Labor’s chances. Victory seems so close he can smell it. A win for Minns’s party in NSW also would cement wall-to-wall Labor governments, state and federal, across mainland Australia. Surely a celebration time for the true believers.
How odd, then, that political pundits predict NSW Labor will not win enough seats next week.
The NSW Labor opposition needs nine additional seats to form an outright government majority of 47 in the state’s lower house of parliament.
Achieving that target is possible but still looks elusive.
The Coalition government led by Premier Dominic Perrottet is tired: dragged down by age, scandals, internal disunity, a revolving door of leaders and voter dissatisfaction with the cost of living, hospital services and education standards.
A complete shutdown of Sydney’s rail network during evening peak hour last week because of a digital communications failure, while not directly the government’s fault, has raised questions about its competence.
The timing was terrible, and blame was put down to obsolete equipment marked for replacement a while ago. Many angry commuters stranded by the outage come from western Sydney seats the Coalition cannot afford to lose.
Yet there is also the pervading sense, from opinion polls, that voters don’t dislike Perrottet and don’t necessarily want to punish his government.
The reason for NSW Labor’s confidence, perversely, is that the party seems to think it can’t lose.
That’s because there are a number of pathways for Labor to win office, but few if any for the Coalition’s re-election.
NSW Labor’s preferred pathway is winning the nine extra seats needed for a majority while losing none.
This is a touch-and-go scenario. Labor thinks it has six seats in the bag, but securing the last three or more is problematic. It depends on swings to the NSW ALP exceeding 6 per cent.
Labor is banking on picking up Coalition-held seats East Hills (on a 0.1 per cent margin), Upper Hunter (0.5 per cent), Penrith (0.6 per cent), Goulburn (3.1 per cent), Winston Hills (5.7 per cent) and Holsworthy (6 per cent). That’s six. Labor thinks Riverstone (6.2 per cent) and Parramatta (6.5 per cent) are doable to make eight.
The magic ninth to win office outright would be Tweed on the state’s north coast, held by the Nationals with a 5 per cent margin.
Tweed is doubtful because of NSW ALP head office inattention and local party squabbling, mainly over the all-in-the-family optics of Labor candidate Craig Elliot being the husband of the serving local federal Labor MP, Justine Elliot.
If Labor fails in Tweed and then does not win government because of that result, there will be a lot of internal finger-pointing at party head office boss Bob Nanva, who incidentally is leaving his post for a cushy seat in the NSW upper house.
The next scenario for Minns Labor – short of an outright majority – is to win six seats from the Coalition, maybe seven. This is NSW Labor’s “we can’t lose” pathway to power.
As one senior Labor insider says: “This election is about who wins more seats, not necessarily a majority.
“The Coalition won 48 at the last election, Labor won 36. The Coalition slipped back to minority government (fewer than 47) with by-elections that didn’t go its way. But it survived quite well because independents who won by-elections or left their party continued to support it.”
This is precisely NSW Labor’s fallback position now to win government.
All Minns and his Labor team want, short of a straight-up majority, is to gain more seats than Perrottet’s Coalition. Such an outcome is almost assured because the Coalition stands to lose seats, not win new ones or enough to compensate for losses.
Under this scenario, there could be no result on election night. Minns would then tell the NSW Governor, Margaret Beazley, that he is able to form a government with a parliamentary majority and the other side could not.
How? Minns would rely on guaranteed support from three elected NSW Greens MPs, for a start. The Greens would never help the Coalition to a majority, if put to the test.
If Minns needed more numbers, he could look further to the crossbench where up to three independent former Shooters, Fishers and Farmers Party MPs, if re-elected, would also support NSW Labor.
Why? Because their distaste for the NSW Liberals’ Coalition partner, the Nationals, outweighs their concerns about Minns Labor.
It’s no wonder the NSW Greens believe they could end up with political leverage in this election. Minns says Labor will do “no crossbench deals” to win office, but that would not stop the Greens making demands as a condition of backing a Labor government.
The Greens would demand first that a NSW Labor government end reliance on coal and gas energy, consistent with the Greens’ policy of transitioning to renewables by 2030. Also on the bargaining table would be a ban on corporate donations to political parties, and mandatory cashless card gaming machines across the state.
None of these is consistent with Labor’s election platform, and though Minns has been derided by critics as a flim-flam man, he will not bow to Greens conditions for support.
The reason is that Minns doesn’t need to. He certainly wouldn’t reprise Julia Gillard’s signed deals with crossbenchers after the 2010 federal election, when Labor was a minority and one seat behind the Coalition.
Minns knows that if NSW Labor ends up ahead of the Liberal-Nationals seats tally, the Greens and one or more of the former Shooters independents would give enduring support to his party on two key existential matters on the floor of parliament, votes of confidence and passing budgets.
Not supporting NSW Labor on these could be political suicide for the Greens and other crossbenchers, prompting a dissolution of parliament, and a fresh election. Recalcitrant MPs would be at high risk of losing their seats for disrupting the operation of government.
That’s not to say life would be rosy if NSW Labor ruled with Greens and other support. The NSW government’s biggest looming problem is energy policy with the state’s Liddell and Eraring coal-fired power stations slated for closure.
These imminent closures will take significant capacity out of the NSW electricity grid. Despite a commitment to renewable energy as part of Labor’s climate change policy, reliability of supply would be the priority of any NSW Labor government. Unless it had a political death wish.
NSW Labor could try palming off the energy problem as one for Canberra but would nonetheless support new gas projects, putting it on a collision course with the Greens, who oppose new fossil fuel projects point blank.
Another area of likely dispute would be how to tackle problem gambling in NSW. Perrottet has shown unflinching courage, pushing for cashless gaming. He is at one with the Greens, at least on this policy.
Minns, meanwhile, has been attacked as allegedly beholden to Clubs NSW and is vague about what Labor would do. The furthest he will go is to endorse a small “trial” of cashless poker machines in clubs. The Greens want much more.
At its essence, this NSW election is a choice between a Coalition government that has been handing out big-spending campaign promises like confetti as it desperately tries to cling to office; and a Labor alternative that has spelled out little of what it plans to do if elected.
A re-elected Coalition would deliver more of the same; Labor would probably keep the state chugging along while favouring its traditional constituency and pursuing no reform of any consequence.
In the Victorian state election in November last year, teal independent candidates failed to replicate the successes of the federal election last May. The same is likely in NSW next Saturday.
If there is one clear sign of Labor’s confidence, it is how a dedicated team of party campaigners in Minns’s seat of Kogarah, which he holds with a margin of just 0.1 per cent, has shifted its efforts to neighbouring Oatley. Labor is behaving like it’s game on.
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