Chris Minns and Labor in box seat for second term
A few months after I first worked in the NSW parliament, nearly a decade ago, a Labor official in a rumpled shirt walked into my office, sank into a chair and sighed deeply. Glancing at the stained orange carpet in the shoebox-sized closet where I worked in the back of the press gallery, he asked: “How many people do you think work in this building wake up every morning and say, ‘F—, what did I do?’ What does he think?
These were dark days for Labor in NSW. The then Liberal prime minister, Mike Baird, was riding high in the polls and the Coalition government, led by a core of seemingly sensible, competent ministers, was enjoying the riches of asset privatizations and record low interest rates. It felt like a new major infrastructure project was being announced every two weeks.
Long years of opposition lay ahead and behind the disorganized, corruption-tainted ALP.
A lot has changed. First, my office is much nicer today (we have a window) and Labor staff wear better suits and seem less gripped by existential dread.
Crucially, with the next election less than a year away, the Liberal Party emerging from their own psychodrama and a massive One Nation vote very likely to give Labor more seats, the only real question seems to be how large a majority Prime Minister Chris Minns will return with after March next year.
But you have to wonder about the Labor types who have toiled in the wilderness for so many years and whether they question whether it’s all worth it. The most persistent criticism I have heard of this government from within and without is that it relates to its lack of ambition. Pro-tenant reforms are being watered down at the 11th hour to favor landlords. The promise of protecting injured workers turned out, well, look, maybe not in the way they expected.
This doesn’t mean Labor did nothing. The removal of the public sector pay cap has meant that wages for many (though not all) essential service workers have increased. His willingness to at least attempt to confront the housing crisis was clearly appreciated.
But many of these reforms have been overshadowed by reality.
This government came to power at around the same time that a decade of global disintegration turned into the economic, political and social horror show we are currently experiencing. We don’t need to be told that the rules-based order is dead; We were wandering around in it. While a wage increase is nice, it means less in a creeping neo-feudal society where your salary is completely disconnected from your capacity to buy, say, a house. A market-based approach to stabilizing housing supply only works when the cost of building materials is not so high that it undermines construction feasibility.
Frankly, no one trusts the state government to solve these problems. When you think of state politicians, you often want them to be competent enough to consider getting enough diesel to keep buses running on Parramatta Road.
This government is pretty good at adequacy, or at least it projects that. But when you define yourself with a kind of cautious pragmatism, that context of choice has broader implications.
When I interviewed Minns a few months before the 2023 election, I asked him about his impression of leading an uninspiring opposition. He disputed this accusation but defended his cautious agenda. “Who wants this?” he said. “This is not like the ’90s. We’ve had major economic shocks to the economy, shock waves to people’s jobs and livelihoods… people want a serious demonstration.”
“A serious demonstration” is a phrase used by many ministers. And it is true to some extent. But while a steady hand is a good strategy when voters want stability, it will perhaps be less effective if you see yourself as the party of a status quo that works for fewer and fewer people.
The government is unaware of this and, to be fair, would probably argue that its ambition is constrained by both economic conditions and the electoral reality (it rules in a minority).
It’s not that important right now anyway. In my opinion, you’d be hard-pressed to find a large body of people enthusiastic about this government, but Minns itself remains popular, and the frictions caused by the rise of One Nation on the conservative side of politics, combined with the absence of a similar emerging insurgency on the left, mean there are probably enough centrist votes to keep Labor going.
But as we enter election mode in the coming months, Labor will have to start talking about why it wants to stay in government – if for no other reason than to justify years of election forgetting.
