NSW Coalition is certain to win, but that doesn't mean it should play so timid

WITH the NSW election only two weeks away, one thing is certain: Barry O'Farrell will be the next premier.

Political predictions can be a dangerous business, but even the most cautious of commentators should be prepared to chance their arm on this result. The only uncertainty left concerns the margin of the Coalition's victory. But even that question is looking more certain: a landslide is in the offing.

Knowing that O'Farrell will be the next NSW premier leads to the obvious question: what sort of government will he lead?

And has a Coalition that has been largely dysfunctional for much of the past 16 years, during its dense political wilderness, got what it takes to run the largest state in the commonwealth?

There are two key factors that give cause for concern about the core competency of the incoming Coalition government: political inexperience and factional divisions. The key component to overcoming these concerns will be strong leadership by O'Farrell. But there are signs he may not exert the early authority that conservative leaders usually have after landslide election victories, which would be a major mistake.

Whether it's the need to spell out tough decisions ahead of polling day to secure a mandate for implementing them after the election, or establishing a clear plan to transition to government, the Coalition is more focused on polling day itself. Winning has becomes the means and the ends.

O'Farrell has denied he intends to cut the bloated public service, with one of his spokesmen making the extraordinary claim last week that "we will need more public servants, not less to fix NSW". Given that public servant wages erode nearly half the state budget, O'Farrell's unwillingness to embrace public sector staffing reform will limit other pressing reforms needed because the money simply won't be available.

It has been left to O'Farrell's treasury spokesman Mike Baird to start championing nuanced ideas for fixing the state, such as moving to a profits-based mining tax rather than the antiquated royalties scheme of the present. But such statements hardly qualify as public sector reform.

Reports in recent weeks have claimed that O'Farrell is being advised by two experts on how new governments can slash expenditure: John Howard's former head of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, Max "the Axe" Moore-Wilton, and Nick Greiner's top adviser who slashed 50,000 public sector jobs, Gary Sturgess. But rather than proudly confirming O'Farrell was referring to such experience, he refused to confirm the veracity of the reports. Public servants would have been delighted. Hardly the Liberal Party's natural constituency.

Because the Liberal and Nationals parties have spent a generation in the political wilderness, attaining power has become more important than knowing what to do with it. That, at least, is the impression the conservatives are giving off as polling day looms.

Howard used a similar strategy when he seized power from Paul Keating in 1996, but quickly did what was needed after gaining access to the full circumstances of the budget. The federal Coalition was able to argue that it wasn't given an adequate picture of the state of the budget, and used "Beazley's black hole", as the $10bn budget blowout in Labor's final year became known, to justify cuts not flagged ahead of polling day. Then he championed a GST.

But transparency in public accounts has been sharpened up since the mid 1990s, especially in NSW, which removes O'Farrell's capacity to claim what he inherits was worse than the pre-election picture he was given. And championing major reforms such as the GST is harder in today's media age than it was in the late 1990s.

That is why critics of the Coalition's timid approach to this year's state election worry that O'Farrell has lost a golden opportunity to spell out exactly what he believes needs to be done.

Rather than simplistic platitudes, as are hitting the airwaves in the form of paid advertising at the moment, O'Farrell should be clearly stating what he will do after the unloseable election is won.

The mandate for change, the critics say, could be lost.

If O'Farrell doesn't lead from the front in reshaping NSW with tough decision-making, he hasn't got an experienced team behind him who will.

Aside from a handful of senior shadow ministers whose core competence is widely accepted -- names such as transport spokeswoman Gladys Berejiklian and Baird, who spent nearly 20 years in merchant banking -- many of O'Farrell's front bench don't have impressive pre-parliamentary CVs, and few have experience in government because the Coalition has spent so long on the wrong side of the treasury benches.

Aside from challenges in what to do about public policy once the Coalition forms government later this month, overcoming the long-term factional divides in NSW will also be important. O'Farrell's government risks being immersed in factional infighting if the differences that have long existed between the party's hard Right and the new soft Right and moderate alliance aren't addressed.

The spoils of government will see a massive inflow of political staffers on the conservative side of the parliament, and that leaves room for factional appointments in the offices of ministers who are more concerned about maintaining their fiefdoms than the affairs of state.

Former Victorian premier Jeff Kennett offered O'Farrell some advice in the pages of a newspaper last month, telling the premier in waiting to "go hard and go early". Kennett was popularising a long-held view about electoral cycles: new governments need to use their political capital early while they still have it, before longevity in office inevitably leads to energy being more directed towards staying in power.

O'Farrell's capacity to mandate change may be hampered by a lack of detail released before polling day highlighting exactly how he intends to "fix NSW", but there are factors in his favour.

He will be helped along by the diminished state of the defeated Labor Party, at least for the first few years. Labor will need to go through a period of soul-searching, directing its energy at rediscovering what it stands for. That should give O'Farrell room to move that he might not have had, adding weight to Kennett's suggestion to get on with things.

Rarely has an election presented itself where the result is more pre-determined than this one. Even elections across various states in the past decade where powerful Labor incumbents squared off against damaged conservative oppositions didn't have the air of certainty the NSW poll does. Which makes it all the more disappointing that O'Farrell hasn't taken more risks leading up to polling day.