Humiliating defeat exposes Labor’s policies exhaustion

Spare a thought for Craig Elliot, the hapless Labor bunny standing for Tweed who must return to the burrow from whence he came.

His fate in what was thought to be a winnable seat in the state election serves to illustrate the unimaginative and tedious campaign that condemned NSW Labor to its longest period in opposition since 1910.

Four years ago, Labor tried to win the seat by promising a $211 million upgrade of Tweed Hospital. Geoff Provest was returned comfortably with a primary vote margin of 11 per cent.

This time Labor decided to pick a fight on hospitals again, a brave move since the government set aside $573m two years ago for a new hospital at Kingscliff.

Elliot griped it was in the wrong place. “This election will be a referendum on where they get their hospital delivered,” he declared, a matter of hours before counting confirmed Provest would again return to Macquarie Street. Yesterday, with absentee and postal votes still to be counted, Provest’s primary vote margin was 15 per cent.

The cry for better schools and hospitals, recited like a sacred utterance by budding Labor premiers for decades, was never going to make Michael Daley premier. How could it, when the Coalition has spent or committed $18 billion to health?

The NSW government spends more per person on the day-to-day running of hospitals than its Labor counterpart in Victoria. A patient reporting to an emergency department in NSW has an 80 per cent chance of being attended to on time, compared with 71 per cent under the socialists south of the border.

The Coalition government insulated itself on education when it became the first state to sign up for Julia Gillard’s Gonski funding deal.

Labor’s policy exhaustion was on display in the NSW election as it faced the most accomplished state government of the modern era. You have to look back to the days of Playford, Askin, Bolte, Court and Bjelke-Petersen to find state administrations on the centre-right with such manifest achievements. It may be too early to add the name Gladys Berejiklian to that distinguished list, but it is tempting after her victory on Saturday. However close the count, Berejiklian has been returned with a moral and intellectual landslide from which NSW Labor will not easily recover.

Fixed four-year terms condemn Labor to at least 12 years in the wilderness. Let’s hope for the sake of a healthy contest that the party finds a leader with a little more imagination and humility than Daley showed on Saturday night when he struggled to grasp the magnitude of his defeat.

Berejiklian’s victory, in substance and in style, repudiates almost every idea the Centre Left has adopted in the past 10 years. It has destroyed Labor’s assumed advantage in service delivery and highlighted the shallowness of the party’s pet progressive causes.

Under the rules of identity politics, Berejiklian should have spent Saturday night trapped under the jackboot of patriarchal oppression staring up with a broken heart at the glass ceiling. Instead she found herself on the podium at the Sofitel reflecting on her good fortune at being elected to office in “a state in which someone with a long surname, and a woman, can be the premier”.

The Liberals’ infrastructure program, made possible by a strong economy and the shrewd sale of government assets, is widening the arteries of economic growth, equipping NSW to continue to be the engine room of the national economy.

In an ominous sign for the federal election, Saturday’s result shows the Liberal Party as firmly in control of western Sydney as it was in the 1990s when John Howard’s battlers turned in their droves away from Labor.

Labor’s petulant campaign against the decision to rebuild the Allianz and ANZ stadiums barely registered in the heartland of rugby league. Nor did the campaign for the right to carry on drinking in licensed premises until dawn that was supposed to have energised the Twitter vote. Paul Murray, Sky News’ No 1 West Tigers fan, summarised succinctly: “Twitter? You can stick it up your jumper. No one cares about stadiums and no one cares about lock-out laws.”

Labor’s campaign against road tolls in seats such as Penrith hardly seemed to register. Perhaps the Westies have factored in the rewards of bypassing 22 sets of lights on the truck-choked, pot-holed, passageway of pain Sydneysiders refer to as Parramatta Road.

Berejiklian now gets to cut ribbons on the $89.7 billion worth of infrastructure commissioned during eight years of Liberal government.

She will be there next year to open the tunnel running 60m below northern Sydney that will open up a corridor between Newcastle and Melbourne without a single traffic light.

Berejiklian’s sotto voce on these projects before the election was in sharp contrast with Daniel Andrews, who spent tens of millions of dollars of taxpayers’ cash to boast of much lesser achievements.

Trumpet blowing is clearly something her government needs to practise. It needs to do so without destroying the diffident, understated charm that blesses Berejiklian with a rare authenticity.

It must do so, too, without losing the spirit that prompted Harold Holt to answer the critics who ask: “Where are the great memorials to all the years of Liberal rule?”

“My answer,” said Holt, “is that the nation itself, and the shape it is in, is the finest memorial of all.”

Nick Cater is executive director of Menzies Research Centre.