[Theme Music Starts]

RUBY:

From Schwartz Media, I’m Ruby Jones. This is 7am.

In recent years, Labor governments have swept power in most states across the country, with the big exception of New South Wales.

But that might be about to change.

Chris Minns, the leader of the opposition, is the first Labor leader since 2007 who looks likely to lead the party to victory in the state – but many voters still don’t know much about him.

Today, the national correspondent for The Saturday Paper, Mike Seccombe, on who Chris Minns really is, and why he ditched brashness for caution.

It’s Wednesday, February 22.

[Theme Music Ends]

RUBY:

Mike, in a matter of weeks, New South Wales will go to an election and, this vote, it seems like it's going to be more exciting than any that we've seen in New South Wales for a long time. We've got the current Premier, Dom Perrottet, versus Labor's choice, the Opposition Leader, Chris Minns. Could we start by talking about Minns? Because he's a bit of an unknown in New South Wales at the moment, but you've been speaking to him. So tell me about what you learnt about Minns.

MIKE:

Well, first thing to say is you're right, he is a bit of an unknown. If you look at the polling, the party polling shows Labor likely to romp it in way ahead, you know, ten points ahead. But if you have a look at the leader's ratings, Minns’ approval rating is like 38%, and there's another 37% of people who say they don't know anything about him. So that was why I wanted to speak to him.

So I rang him up. We had a bit of a chat.

CHRIS:

Hello.

MIKE:

Is that Chris?

CHRIS:

Hey, how's it going?

MIKE:

Oh, it's going alright with me…

MIKE:

And I would say that he was… what would you say? He was earnest. He was thoughtful. He's clearly very bright, but pretty bland. Frankly, not very colourful. Actually, at one point in desperation to try and get some colour about him, I said “actually, tell us something colourful about you.”

MIKE:

I don't know how to put this. Tell me something colourful about yourself. I mean, you know, we've had some colourful politicians, you know, we had Hawkey, the beer drinker, we now have Albo, the DJ, you know…

MIKE:

And we had at one stage in his life he was a firefighter. So I would have thought maybe there had been stories there. You know, I thought there may be something else that would come out. But in fact, after a significant pause…

MIKE:

What's colourful about Chris Minns? Even if we want to go to, you know, what good books you've read lately, you know, I don't know. I'm just…

CHRIS:

Sure. I mean, look, I mean, in many respects Mike I’m more reflective of someone my age from the suburbs in Sydney. You know, I've got three boys. I spend a lot of time with them.

MIKE:

He just said, “Well, you know, I go surfing with my kids, I play the guitar a bit.” And I said, “What do you play on the guitar?” He said, “Oh, all sorts”, you know, essentially he's not a very colourful human being, is the fact of the matter.

And maybe that will go to his advantage, I don't know. Dominic Perrottet, the Premier, is kind of widely perceived as a bit of an oddball, you know, very much of the religious right, whereas perhaps Minns has taken the calculation that it's a good thing to just look like an average suburban bloke.

RUBY:

And the fact that Minns, according to some polls, is likely to win is pretty extraordinary, really, because it's been such a long time since Labor has held power in New South Wales, because back in 2011, the party was decimated. And that defeat, it was pretty brutal, wasn't it? It was so bad that Labor hasn't been able to recover for more than a decade. So tell me about what happened.

MIKE:

Well, you're absolutely right. It was a massacre, It really was, in 2011. It was the largest swing we've ever seen in New South Wales government history. Up to that point, for more than a decade, Labor had looked pretty good, and had been in power in New South Wales for a long time. And of course the New South Wales branch — particularly the New South Wales right — was hugely influential in federal Labor. You know, Paul Keating, for example, was one of theirs. So they were considered to be electoral wizards for a long time, and you know, their tactics and their strategy were imported into the federal sphere. But then everything went off the rails around 2010.

Archival tape – ABC Reporter:

“Labor feared the worst, and it doesn't get much worse than this. The State Government is facing a history making defeat in March, according to the first opinion poll of the campaign. If Nielsen's polling is reflected at the ballot box, the party could be left with just 13 MPs, a loss of more than two thirds of its parliamentary numbers.”

MIKE:

And then in 2011 they suffered this devastating loss. There was a swing to the Coalition of almost 14% and they picked up 34 seats. So it's huge.

Archival tape – Natasha Belling:

“Well NSW is waking up to a new era. The toxic Labor government has been tossed out of office in a landslide loss of a size never before seen.”

MIKE:

Kristina Keneally was Premier at the time, but you know, you can't really pin it on her. The election was widely seen as unwinnable, due to factors outside her control. Principally ICAC's — the Independent Commission Against Corruption – which at that stage was engaged in looking into the affairs of Eddie Obeid and Ian MacDonald.

Archival tape – Edie Obeid:

“It was a sham inquiry. The conclusion was expected from their opening statement…”

MIKE:

I'll spare the details because I can talk about them for hours. But bottom line, corruption on a grand scale. So Labor was perceived to be deeply corrupt, lost the election, and has been in the wilderness ever since. They've cycled through, I think it's five different leaders in that time, none of whom has made much of an impact.

Archival tape – Channel 10 Reporter:

“Labor is floundering against the strong and popular leadership of the premier, but the party’s problems run much deeper than Jodie McKay’s leadership. It has for a decade now struggled to define itself and the next leader will need to confront that.”

MIKE:

Despite the fact that along the way we've also lost two Liberal premiers to ICAC, that being Barry O'Farrell — over a bottle of wine — and Gladys Berejiklian. So no Labor leader has made a particular impact, but Minns looks like he's going to. This looks like the first election in a long time where Labor are clear favourites to win.

RUBY:

Right. And so why is it then that that's the case that this moment, this election, seems to be the one that Labor might be able to win? What is it about Chris Minns?

MIKE:

Well, it's not so much about Chris Minns, to be frank. I mean he's reasonably saleable and everything. But it's really about, you know, the old saying, oppositions don't win elections, governments lose them.

You know, we have members of the Perrottet government — including several of its most senior members — rushing for the exits. They're all retiring, at or before the election, because they can see the writing on the wall.

We've got the Infrastructure Minister Rob Stokes, is leaving Parliament. Damien Tudehope, another senior minister, the finance Minister, has just resigned after it was found that he held shares in Transurban, at a time when he was considering affairs to do with Transurban. Another parliamentary secretary, Peter Poulos, resigned about a week ago over a texting scandal where he texted explicit photos of a colleague. Among those who remain in the cabinet, there have been a bunch of very public fights. Perrottet and his Treasurer, Matt Kean, have not actually had fights, but they've delivered contradictory messages on a range of issues as varied as privatisation of government assets and gay conversion therapy. There've been scandals relating to the politicisation of bushfire relief funds and other pork barrelling. They’ve been scandals over jobs for the boys. The Anti-Corruption Commission investigation of Daryl Maguire, which turned up the fact that Daryl Maguire’s secret lover, was Gladys Berejiklian. Maguire is now facing criminal charges and of course Berejiklian quit the leadership over that. We've got internecine warfare over candidate selection between the factions, allegations of branch stacking. We've got at least two police investigations into sexual misconduct. And then of course, there's the… I wouldn't call it a scandal, but there was the revelation a month or so back that Dominic Perrottet, at his 18th birthday, had dressed up as a Nazi. So, there's been a lot going wrong for the Coalition in summary. And Minns actually has not made that much of a lot of it.

RUBY:

So there's a lot going wrong for the Liberals and for Perrottet at the moment, Mike. How has Chris Minns been capitalising on that?

MIKE:

I guess on the basis of the old political maxim that, you know, when your opponents are in deep trouble, you don't distract from it. So, you know, he's sat back and watched it unfold.

CHRIS:

A number of times where the media and, you know, for understandable reasons, contact our office and say, “We need a comment from you about the latest outrage from the government” means that you're always sort of seen in a negative light. You don't look like you're trying to solve problems. You really do sort of picking the wings of flies.

MIKE:

The interesting thing here is that through all of this, Minns hasn't sought much of a profile.

CHRIS:

That hasn't necessarily been our strategy, and not my style either. But that means that you've got to be. I think we've probably got a bit of a slower, more winding route towards the state election campaign. But, you know…

MIKE:

He's let a lot of those things go through to the keeper. For example, when the allegation that Perrottet had posed as a Nazi at his birthday party, various people came forward and said, “Well, that's it, he should resign”. You know, election’s done. Minns were silent for about two days. And when he did speak, he said that he believed that Perrottet had made a sincere apology, and he didn't think it would affect the election, and that was the end of it as far as he was concerned. So he's been very judicious in choosing the fights to have. And if that means that his profile is not as high as it might otherwise be. Well, as far as he's concerned, so be it.

CHRIS:

I'm comfortable with the position we're in, and hopefully we're making the point in the final kind of closing stages before polling day.

MIKE:

The interesting thing about this, though, is that this very cautious approach that Minns is taking is in pretty dramatic contrast, I think, to his early parliamentary career when he was widely seen as as as pretty brash, you know, as a man in a hurry, and more than a little incautious, frankly.

RUBY:

We'll be back after this.

[Advertisement]

RUBY:

Mike, you've been speaking to Chris Minns, who's the man who's hoping to lead New South Wales Labor out of the political wilderness in the state elections in a couple of weeks. And it sounds like he's been approaching this election campaign quite cautiously in terms of the things that he's been willing to say, and the criticism that he's been willing to wield at the current Liberal Party. So if we look to his history, to what extent is that approach in line with how he has operated as a politician in the past?

MIKE:

It's a little different, actually. Minns’ background is pretty much Labor right, of central casting. I mean, he grew up in a suburban Catholic family, fell in love with the Labor Party early. Paul Keating was his hero, and the person who inspired him to become a politician, he tells me. And he recalled watching the election night 1993, you know, which Keating called this the sweetest victory of all.

CHRIS:

That 1993 election. I was 13 years old. And yeah, I mean, it was just so exciting. You know, I love sport as well, but for me, there are so many analogies or metaphors in politics and sport. It's just, it is high stakes, there’s winners and losers. But I just thought that that victory was so exciting, and it probably was the animating spirit that I…It came at probably an impressionable age and I was hooked. I was completely hooked from that night onwards.

MIKE:

And so having determined his course, he pursued it single mindedly, through young Labor, eventually became president of Young Labor. Then he served in a couple of roles as a staffer to different ministers. He served in the party head office. Even his education was directed towards a life in politics. He went off and got a master's of public policy from Princeton in the United States. So Labor right pedigree, very determined to get there.

RUBY:

So he's made the sort of political calculation that now is the time to play it safe. But you said that that wasn't always the case during Minns’ career. So what are some of the more controversial, or confrontational things that he's been involved in?

Archival tape – Chris Minns:

“It is a true privilege to be elected to serve the people of St George in the electorate of Kogarah. I would like to pay my respects to the Dharawal people, who were the first Indigenous people to meet Captain James Cook's Endeavour just 500 metres from the edge of my electorate.”

MIKE:

Probably the one that's haunted him the most, was in his very first speech to parliament where he said that the Labor Party should be, quote, “taking steps to reduce union control in party conferences” and, quote, “increasing the representation of ordinary members so that we would have more diverse voices.”

Archival tape – Chris Minns:

“Madam Speaker, there are exceptional trade unionists fighting every day for working people, but sometimes, particularly at the conclusion of Labor's last term in office, they have been shackled by an association with our tribe.”

MIKE:

And this did not go down at all well with some of the unions, and with some of the factions. And so it was a big factor, when Minns’ took his first shot at the leadership three years later. On that occasion, he lost the caucus ballot, 33 to 12. So pretty comprehensive failure, to Michael Daley. And it hadn't been forgotten either when he had another shot in 2019. When, to quote one of the unions that opposed him, the Newcastle and northern branch of the meat workers union had this to say about him, and I'm quoting, “If Mr. Minns wants to lead the party of out-of-touch elitists who have no idea what life is like for regular Australians, he can go and have a crack at the leadership of the Liberal Party.” They said “the AMIEU has well-honed knife skills for dealing with rogues.” So, you know, he got some pretty stern blowback for years after that first speech to parliament.

RUBY:

So he's a Senate opposition leader. It's clearly been bumpy at times and he's made some enemies along the way. But regardless, this is his moment, isn't it? This is his election to win or to lose for Labor. So what is it that he's actually promising to voters?

MIKE:

Well, you're absolutely right. It has been bumpy at times. As to what he’s proposing. He's proposing to fix the health system, to fix the education system. A lot of the promises are fairly nebulous, I have to say. He's slightly perhaps incrementally better on climate change matters than the government is. But along the way, they've also been some clever small announcements that some observers see as being very appealing to bread and butter voters. For example, he announced that drivers with good records could get a demerit point back on their licence after one year of good driving instead of three, for low rating speeding offences. Now, these are small things, but as one long time observer, and former party staffer said, these things are really smart because they're the kind of bread and butter issues that get through to people. The one big issue that has worked against them, of course, was Perrotet, the Premier's promise to introduce cashless gaming cards into pubs and clubs, which is an effort to address both problem gambling, and also money laundering, which is a huge problem. Minns would only commit to a trial, a limited trial in a limited number of venues. And he's been very roundly criticised for his timidity on that front. Anyway, when I asked Minns to nominate his top priority after the election, he said it would be public education. In fact, you know, he said it three times.

CHRIS:

For me it is public education, public education, public education. We've really got a crisis there.

MIKE:

He pointed to some of the stats, that there are 3000 teaching vacancies in New South Wales at the moment. And that the results of students compared with international achievement, are going backwards and have been for quite some time.

CHRIS:

We're now in a situation where we were ranked 3rd in the world when it comes to science. We're now 23rd. 6th when it comes to our reading, now we're at 24th. I mean, major declines in what used to be standout results amongst the OECD for educational results for our kids.

MIKE:

So something has to be done. Clearly, he makes the solution sound pretty simple. You know, pay teachers more.

CHRIS:

We have to make sure that we make an investment there. And my view, Mike, is that there's no machine that you can chuck up at the front of the classroom. There's no substitute for fantastic teachers. And if you look at, you know, successful economies and societies, they've all got teachers at the core of their community.

MIKE:

But he won't put a figure on exactly how much more. He only says that after the election they will, quote, “sit down and work that through.” But one thing he has promised, that is pretty cast iron, is greater job security for teachers.

CHRIS:

There's also this phenomenon in New South Wales where much of the profession has been put on temporary or casual contracts, a deliberate decision going back ten years. We're approaching 40% of teachers in New South Wales are on temporary contracts, despite the fact that there's 3000 vacancies.

MIKE:

Which he described as insane. So they're going to convert roughly 10,000 teachers from temporary to permanent positions. So, you know, that at least is one firm promise. But for much of the rest that he's promising, I think, you know, you could describe the pitch as, you know, vote for a fresh start. Vote for me now. We'll deal with the details later.

RUBY:

So it sounds like on the whole, Minns has been selecting policies with fairly wide appeal. And he's also been successful at seeing the opportunity to wedge the government on other issues. But is that going to be enough, Mike? When you think about how long it's been for the Labor Party, how emphatic that defeat was for them in 2011, and how much Minns still is this kind of unknown figure in New South Wales. Can Labor really win this election? Are Perrottet and his government really unpopular enough to open the door to Chris Minns and to Labor after all this time?

MIKE:

Well, when I was talking to Minns about this, he described himself as a natural pessimist.

CHRIS:

I am a natural pessimist, Mike, and I'm always, you know, people say, “What are you worried about?” in an election context there’s everything to worry about. We have lost the last three elections on the trot. So we're definitely not going into this counting chickens. We're really humble about our prospects.

MIKE:

But despite this pessimism, the harbingers of political change are everywhere, pointing to a Labor win on March 25. And I'm not going to make a prediction here, but when you look at how far behind the Coalition is in the polls and you look at the historical record, governments typically do not come back from a position like that. So assuming no great catastrophe for Labor between now and the election, you'd have to say they’re pretty close to sure things to win.

RUBY:

Mike, thank you so much for your time.

MIKE:

Thank you.

[Advertisement]

[Theme Music Starts]

RUBY:

Also in news today,

Another earthquake has hit Türkiye and Syria. This latest earthquake is smaller than the enormous quake that struck two weeks ago, but has still killed several people and injured hundreds.

Meanwhile, the death toll from the earlier quake continues to climb. Over forty-seven thousand fatalities have been reported, according to the latest figures.

And,

A UN body working on the prevention of torture has cancelled a trip to Australia, in a mark against Australia’s international human rights reputation.

The trip was cancelled because the UN body was not guaranteed unrestricted access to prisons in Queensland and New South Wales.

Australia joins Rwanda as the only two countries to have an inspection by the body cancelled.

I’m Ruby Jones, this is 7am, see you tomorrow.

[Theme Music Ends]