NSW Election 2023: Labor leader Chris Minns is facing a make or break moment
Just a few months ago, Chris Minns’ colleagues said his work ethic was ‘shocking’. But a looming election seems to have flicked a switch.
In a packed hall in the heart of his southern Sydney electorate of Kogarah, surrounded by wildly exuberant supporters, NSW Labor’s almost-premier is looking like a winner. The true believers jamming this $100-a-head trivia night fundraiser can smell victory.
But Chris Minns is not celebrating. Not yet. Not by a long way. He’s not drinking either, politely knocking back offers of beers from mates and wellwishers.
He hasn’t touched alcohol in almost a year.
“I just wanted to have a clearer head,” he says. “It’s amazing, like it’s a real regenerative thing – not that I was drinking loads before that – but you become really clear. You get your mornings back, you get more energy during the day.”
Getting off the booze seems to have marked a point in the road for Minns: a necessary decision by a man who needed to sharpen his focus if he was serious about leading Labor out of its 12 years in the wilderness. In Bexley’s Ilion Hermes club on this night, where souvlaki, red wine and unbridled optimism are in abundant supply, no one has any doubt Minns is the man to do it.
He’s wearing jeans and sneakers and he’s in his element. This is a night for family and friends. Wife Anna, who’s organised the event, is at the back of the hall selling campaign T-shirts and raffle tickets for a dinner with Bob Carr.
Minns’ dad, John, and mum Cara are here too, at a front table, and eldest son Joe, 14, is running errands. There are several past and present politicians, including close ally Steve Kamper from neighbouring Rockdale, and former premier Morris Iemma, whom Minns regards as a mentor.
There’s an edge to Iemma’s presence: he was the last person to win an election in NSW for Labor. That was 16 years ago.
Minns gets to his feet and thanks Anna for organising the event. There’s an easy banter between the two as he ribs her for wearing a Bruce Lee T-shirt: “It’s got a long joke associated with it, so if you’ve got 20 minutes she’ll explain the significance of it.”
The couple have been married for 18 years and live not far away in a house they’re renovating, which Minns describes, again to much laughter, as “the most expensive renovation in Australia … every time she looks at it, it just gets bigger and bigger”.
It’s a well-oiled routine, but the crowd is up for it. “I love you, honey, you’ve done such an amazing job,” Minns says, to cheers.
After that there’s a passing swipe at the Liberals’ astonishing delay in finding a candidate for Kogarah (“So if anyone knows anyone, preferably with a criminal history …”) but then a blunt acknowledgment that Minns holds the seat on a knife-edge margin of just 0.1 per cent, the narrowest in NSW.
Just 40 votes might win or lose it, he points out – a career hanging on a single busload of swinging voters heading to a polling booth.
It’s going to be tough, both here and in the rest of the state, he says.
No one in this jubilant crowd believes him. But they should.
In September, Minns was on a roll. Six months out from the March 25 election, Labor held an eight-point, two-party-preferred lead over the Coalition, according to Newspoll. That lead has now halved, with Labor still ahead 52 to 48, and trending in the wrong direction.
In September Dominic Perrottet led Minns by 39 to 35 as preferred premier. Minns needed to make up ground. Instead, Perrottet’s numbers have gone up, and Minns’ down: 43 to 33.
Some of those voters, asked if Minns was doing a good job, have moved from the “uncommitted” to the “dissatisfied” column, ominously suggesting the more they know about him, the less impressed they are. Can he turn it around with only four weeks to go?
Last year a group of NSW Labor MPs told The Australian Minns’ work ethic before he became leader was “shocking”, questioning his attention to detail and pointing to poor attendance even at the one committee he sat on.
“He was just biding his time to become leader,” one colleague said. Wanting to go places fast without putting in the work, says another. Not enough discipline. Or maybe just too laid back for his own good. But a looming election seems to have done the trick.
At the Laughing Goat Cafe, a regular Minns haunt in Kogarah, where we’re catching up late one afternoon after an intense day on the campaign trail, I put this to Minns as tactfully as I can.
There’s criticism that you were a – slacker may be too strong a word for it – but that you were not somebody who spent every hour of the day working.
Minns laughs. “I mean, I reckon I was one of the few politicians who didn’t go around talking about how tough my life is,” he said. “There’s tougher jobs, you know, like working in a coalmine, digging ditches, more difficult jobs than being a politician.
“But I’m certainly working my arse off at the moment. There’s more demands on your time, there’s more decisions you have to make in a shorter period of time; we’ve got one-tenth of the resources of the government. So I haven’t heard that criticism for a while, but people are going to have to say something about you, right?”
Getting up at 5am daily is a job description for the leader of the opposition in a state where the political agenda is often set before breakfast by the likes of radio broadcasters Ben Fordham and Ray Hadley, and for Minns it came as a shock.
“If you sleep in to seven or eight o’clock a lot of the shape of the next 24 hours is gone. And that didn’t come naturally to me, but after I became leader I realised that Sydney gets up really early,” the 43-year-old says.
He needed to be on his A-game. “Exactly. It just takes one slip.”
Minns had a typically impatient entry into the world, born several weeks early in an emergency caesarean when his mother began to bleed. His parents thought they were going to lose him. “It was all very dramatic,” he says.
His father was a school principal, his mother a lawyer. The family was – and is – close. He attended four schools in the area, finishing at Kogarah’s Marist Catholic College.
Minns has essentially been a professional politician his whole working life. After early stints as a ministerial adviser and a Labor member of Hurstville City Council, he was elected member for Kogarah in 2015.
He met wife Anna, a lawyer, on the 1999 state Labor campaign. Love at first sight? “Pretty much. We were a very good match, and we’re still a really good match. We’ve been together longer than we’ve been apart, which is pretty unusual for people in their early 40s. We’ve kind of grown up together, really.”
The couple have three sons, Joe, 14, Nick, 12, and George, 6.
As with his Liberal rival, Catholicism remains an integral part of his family life.
“I wouldn’t say it defines me but it’s a big part of my life. We went to mass every week. We still try and get there as much as we can.
“Anna and I have three boys. It’s hard to find something, hard to find some organisation other than just us telling them what to do, that has them aspire to live their life not just for themselves.
“Everything else is just so consumerist, just telling them to buy and spend, and there’s not many institutions that are saying, well, it’s not just personally about you. So we take it seriously, yes.”
Asked what kind of dad he is, there’s a long pause.
“I dunno, probably just a pretty standard suburban dad with teenage kids and one who’s a bit younger. I feel like we learn as much as we impart with the kids. It takes a lot of time and I probably don’t devote as much to it as I should. Anna has to take a lot more of the load than we’d both like.”
He’s begun taking Joe surfing on days he can get away. “It’s only 20 minutes from Kogarah to Wanda Beach early in the morning. We’ve got some friends we surf with. They like better-quality waves, so we’ll go down to the National Park or further south, but more and more I’ve been getting out with my oldest boy.
“And now the 12-year-old is thinking about it.”
Being married to a politician isn’t easy - but somehow Anna makes it all work, so we sat down with @7NewsSydney to chat about it! pic.twitter.com/tT0l4QX2H3
— Chris Minns (@ChrisMinnsMP) February 20, 2023
He and Anna worry about the amount of time he’ll have to spend away from the kids if he becomes premier.
“It’s a big worry for both of us, we talk about it a lot,” he says. “You want to be there as much as possible, for all three of them, to lean on you. It’s a really hard one. I probably rationalise it a little bit by saying I would never go federal.
“At least I’m home pretty much every night, even if it’s really late at night, and I get to see the kids in the morning, and if there’s something urgent, we’re face-to-face and we can talk.
“We’ve got a lot of friends who went down the Canberra road over the years and a lot of those marriages don’t make it. That distance matters after a while.”
Who does the domestic stuff at home?
“During Covid I cooked a lot. I like cooking. But if I put in that I’m a cook I’d be in serious, serious, serious trouble (laughing) so there’s no gilding the lily on that one. If I know I have to cook Saturday night, I’ll put a slow cook on.”
Housework?
“Oh mate, this is terrible, this is a complete stitch-up,” he says, laughing again, burying his head in his hands. “I’m hopeless, completely hopeless. I do my own ironing. I don’t lift my weight. Mea culpa. It’s a confession.”
Anna has a stellar career of her own, moving on from life as a union lawyer and prosecutor for the DPP, becoming co-founder and CEO of Boomerang Labs, “an accelerator for the circular economy”, an offspring of recycling, designed to ensure products don’t go into landfill if they need not.
Will she be able to continue that if her husband becomes premier?
Minns is coy.
“We don’t know. We have to see what the impact would be on the kids. What impact it will have on her professional life. She’s genuinely at a crossroads.”
At first glance, Minns and Perrottet have much in common.
Both in their early 40s, raised as Catholics, married with kids, smart and likeable.
Their personal styles are different: Perrottet sometimes stiff and seemingly uncomfortable in his public persona; Minns with an easy going, self-effacing charm and probably one of the cool kids at school.
Asked to identify the differences between himself and his rival, Minns hesitates. He’s made it a point of pride not to engage in personal attacks during the campaign and refused to buy into the controversy that erupted over Perrottet’s confession he’d worn a Nazi costume to his 21st birthday party.
“I mean, probably the easiest way of approaching that is on the votes,” Minns says, reluctantly. “I was a big supporter of same-sex marriage. I lent my voice publicly to the Yes campaign even though, interestingly, this community (Kogarah) voted against it. I voted for decriminalising abortion in NSW, and he didn’t. I’m not trying to draw a fine distinction between us, but you’re asking.
“On economic issues he seems to be a lot more doctrinaire – his faith in rigid economic rationalism – and my sense is, particularly when it comes to privatisations, it just seems that the burden hits working people a lot harder than he perhaps gives it credit for.”
Prompted to name a political hero, Minns – perhaps unsurprisingly – nominates former prime minister Paul Keating.
“That period in my formative life was really the spark that made me go ‘this is such an exciting profession’. When he won in ’93 it was the most exciting thing ever and it really left a big imprint on me.
“It was a real rejection of Hewson’s doctrinaire approach to economics in particular.”
Yet Minns’ small-target approach to policy in this campaign has hardly been the stuff of Keating’s swashbuckling take-no-prisoners style.
“You have to be prepared to move so fast you burn up the road behind you,” Keating once said. Will Minns be a transformative leader?
“What can I say?” he replies. “We’re going to have to be judged in office about what kind of government we run.”
One thing he won’t be is sidetracked. Minns is keenly focused on bread-and-butter issues in the election: cost of living, housing, education, health.
In recent weeks The Sydney Morning Herald has run an almost daily campaign backing Perrottet’s cashless gaming card solution to end problem gambling.
Minns has a more modest policy based around banning political donations from the clubs sector and a trial of cashless gaming cards on 500 machines around the state.
But he doesn’t think it’s a first-order issue for many voters.
“I mean, it is to some people, right. But my sense is that it’s got to be seen in the context of a whole bunch of other things going on in New South Wales, in particular – 7 to 8 per cent inflation and a lack of labour, a skills shortage right across the economy. Massive, massive problems and, in many respects, we haven’t faced the kind of economic headwinds like that for decades.”
But Perrottet has won plaudits for taking a tough stand against the state’s most powerful lobby group, ClubsNSW, and anti-gambling crusader Tim Costello has tried to pitch it as a character issue: that Minns is unwilling to confront powerful vested interests.
“I don’t (think it’s about character), not at all,” says Minns, visibly riled for the first time. “Costello is running a candidate against me in Kogarah. It’s political hyperbole from him, but he just seems to get more ostentatious with his denunciations, as the weeks go by. I’m not going to hurl abuse back at him. I’m going to focus on the public, the voters, and I think we’ve got a good plan.”
Back at the Ilion Hermes club, the party is in full swing, but Minns is slowly making his way towards the exit, shaking hands, patting backs, asking after kids and sharing whispered jokes. Not so long ago, you suspect, he’d have been one of the stayers.
But tonight he’s heading home early to prep for the next day, leaving Anna to fly the flag for Team Minns.
There are plenty of ways he could still lose this election. Discipline won’t be one of them.
