‘He’s not Bambi’: How the Liberals lost NSW

Matt Kean was not at all surprised when his government lost last Saturday’s New South Wales election. His assessment is brief and direct: “We knew from December.”

The published polls had been very bad for a very long time – way beyond margin-of-error bad, double-digit bad at some points over the past six months.

While the internal tracking polls showed some narrowing through the campaign, Kean says, the Coalition never got closer than four points behind Labor. In the final week, coinciding with the revelation that then premier Dominic Perrottet called his Health minister in February when his wife required an ambulance, and Brad Hazzard spoke to the head of NSW Ambulance about sending a vehicle, the numbers “started breaking heavily again to Labor”.

In the end, the swing against the Coalition was about 6 per cent.

Arguably the biggest surprise of the election came from Kean himself. The near-universal expectation was that he would be the next leader of the opposition. When Perrottet stepped down from the leadership, however, Kean did not step up.

Instead, the former treasurer says he will spend more time with his family – “to be, you know, a dad and all that kind of stuff”.

In politics, “spending more time with family” is usually interpreted as the excuse of those with no political future. That is not the case with Kean. Yes, his side lost, but he is credited by many across all factions of the party with having been instrumental in limiting the size of that defeat. There is little doubt he could have been leader if he wanted to.

He is stepping back not just for his family but also for his own sake. He needs a little time, he tells The Saturday Paper, to “decompress” and recover “from all the beating I got from News Corp, the Minerals Council et cetera. That stuff that takes its toll.”

The plan is for a family trip to Western Plains Zoo in Dubbo and then to hit the theme parks on the Gold Coast. He’s not quitting. He is open to taking a shadow ministry, if one is offered. He intends to play a “constructive role” in negotiating who will be the next Coalition leader.

You can’t really blame him for wanting to keep his head down for a while, given the recent attacks on him.

As leader of the dominant moderate faction in NSW, Kean has long been a target for those who would have the Liberal Party move sharply to the right. In the latter part of the election campaign, that abuse went to another level. He believes “absolutely” that the intent was to set him up as the fall guy for the government’s defeat.

It was, he says, the “full court press”. “For the last two weeks of the campaign, I had News Corp, GB [Radio 2GB, owned by Nine Entertainment] and One Nation basically bombing me relentlessly and making it very personal. And what was my crime? Taking action on climate change.”

Kean cites an example: four days before the election, the political editor of Murdoch’s Sky News, Andrew Clennell, went to air with details of a new opinion poll – provided by an unnamed “industry group” – that found Kean was in trouble in his seat of Hornsby. It forecast a swing against him of 16 per cent, with most of the lost votes going to far-right-wing parties the Liberal Democrats and Pauline Hanson’s One Nation.

Kean believes this “dodgy push poll” was planted by the NSW Minerals Council – although the council will not confirm or deny – to damage him and boost the chances of pro-coal minor parties.

“They were saying my net favourable was like negative 30 in Western Sydney and negative all over the place, which is just crazy,” he says. “I’d seen our internal polling, which was like net negative one or two, hardly a drag on the vote and no different to any other treasurer in the state’s history.”

The poll proved wildly inaccurate. There was a big swing against Kean – some 11 per cent – but the Greens picked up far more votes than the two far-right parties combined.

To cite just a couple of other examples: On March 15, One Nation’s NSW leader, Mark Latham, went on Sky News and alleged Kean had “destroyed” the Liberal Party’s chances by driving up power prices through policies to limit climate change. The day before the election, Latham was again on Sky, declaring that Kean had strayed so far from “traditional Liberal values” that voters don’t “recognise their party under Matt Kean”.

“Matt Kean is green everything: green energy, green preferences, green woke politics.”

Latham’s attacks were picked up and amplified by Murdoch’s Sydney tabloid, The Daily Telegraph, and right-wing talkback radio. 

The agenda here was pretty clear to party strategists, and it wasn’t just about Matt Kean, although he was the designated whipping boy. It was about pumping up Latham and One Nation in an effort to show the Liberals that there was electoral advantage in moving further to the right.

A coalition of forces – fossil fuel companies, gambling companies, small government ideologues, social and religious conservatives, and populist media that see commercial value in stirring division – were fighting for vested interests and against a changing society.

The campaign was relentless and damaging, says long-time Liberal powerbroker Michael Photios.

“For the last week in particular, Sky after dark and the like were pumping out this magic dust theory about Mark Latham putting Matt Kean at risk and eroding our position across a whole host of seats.”

One Nation’s campaign was, says Photios, “a flop”, in that the party won none of the 17 lower house seats it contested. Yet it still managed to do significant damage to the Liberals, particularly because Latham discouraged his supporters from allocating preferences. A senior campaign official blames One Nation for the loss of at least three and possibly four seats.

In Camden, which the Liberal Party lost by about 5 per cent to Labor, One Nation took almost 14 per cent of the primary vote. In Wollondilly, which the Liberals lost by 3 per cent to an independent, One Nation took 12.3 per cent. And in Penrith, lost by less than 2 per cent to Labor, One Nation took 8 per cent.

“So here was Latham railing against the so-called lefty, woke approach to government, and he’s effectively helped deliver a Greens–Labor government,” Photios says. “Tell me that’s not irony.” 

Yet the reactionaries continue to claim the Liberals lost because they were too progressive.

After the election, Tony Abbott’s former chief of staff, Peta Credlin, blamed the defeat on the former government’s “hand-out mentality”, its failure “to get the politically correct brainwashing out of our schools” and preference for renewables over coal and gas power generation.

“Go woke, go broke,” she said.

Such views amount to denial of political reality, says Photios. “They don’t appreciate the electorate itself has changed, particularly in a secular state like NSW. We lost votes to Labor and the Greens. We lost them to the left, not to the right.”

He and other party professionals cite a variety of other reasons for the election loss.

First and foremost, says Photios, was what might be called the “It’s time” factor. A 12-year-old government wanted to extend its life to 16 years. Very few governments manage such longevity.

Kean thinks the ambulance incident involving Perrottet’s wife played to the perception that it was time for a change. “It just sort of summed up in voters’ minds that they were a bit old and sort of a bit self-indulgent.” 

Kean lists a few other contributing factors. The party’s “brand was still a bit on the nose” due to the failings of the Morrison federal government. “And Albo is doing well.”

“And we had the Barilaro debacle that just went on and on,” says Kean, referring to the shameless pork-barrelling by the former deputy premier John Barilaro, and the scandal over his abortive appointment to a lucrative trade job in New York.

Head office operatives point to another factor: a dozen Coalition MPs did not recontest at this election, compared with just two Labor MPs and one Green.

“In those seats where there was a retiring member, the swing was more than twice the average,” said an official.

And they were up against a tough opponent in Chris Minns. As Photios puts it: “Minns is likeable, Minns is competent. Minns was small target.” 

The Coalition was relieved that teal independents did not create the upset they did at the federal election. Only two got up – partly due to the difference of optional preferential voting and tighter caps on funding, and partly due to the fact that electors were not nearly as hostile to the relatively moderate and competent Perrottet government as they were to the Morrison regime.

Some credit also goes to Matt Kean.

“You can’t take it away from Matt, he fought hard … to stem the tide of the teals,” says political consultant John Macgowan.

“If Matt wasn’t there, or if they had to put Matt in his box, we might have lost Lane Cove, Pittwater, even Manly. We probably would have lost Willoughby. So you’ve got this ironic situation where two of the biggest right-wingers in the party room, Anthony Roberts [Lane Cove] and Tim James [Willoughby], owe their careers to Matt Kean.”

Macgowan is a long-time factional opponent of Kean’s, who is now working to marshal support for Roberts to become the new party leader. Macgowan no longer works formally for the party, but when he did, one of his main jobs was digging dirt on political opponents. 

He is critical of the way the election campaign was run. It was too nice. “I guess when you’re a hammer, everything looks like a nail, but my view is you should always go negative, because it works.” 

Even Gladys Berejiklian, who was publicly perceived as “squeaky clean”, was something else behind closed doors. “She was ruthless,” says Macgowan.

“I don’t know why they didn’t do it this time … I knew it was going to happen, three months ago, when I didn’t get a phone call. I don’t know if it was a strategic decision or a personal one. My feeling is that this was something Dom didn’t want to do.”

Kean also thinks the party should have gone negative and attacked Minns personally.

“I think we needed to cast doubt in voters’ minds about Minns. He’s not Bambi. He’s come up through the Labor machine. He was second in charge of Sussex Street,” Kean says. “I was aware of information, which I shared with Perrottet, that I thought could be really damaging to Minns, and it just never went anywhere.” 

It is highly questionable whether going negative would have helped the Coalition cause. It didn’t help the Morrison government. It didn’t help the Liberals in Victoria, who showered Premier Daniel Andrews with all manner of dirt and still crashed to overwhelming defeat at the last election there.

The Liberal Party’s fundamental problem is the one alluded to by Photios: the electorate has changed and is becoming ineluctably more progressive.

Tasmanian federal MP Bridget Archer finds it frustrating that so many on her side of politics still think they can win by becoming more conservative.

“There is no evidence that substantiates that,” she tells The Saturday Paper. “In the federal election, for example, moderate Liberal members who lost their seats did not … lose them to people who were more right-wing than them. That’s not what’s happening.”

Archer made a name for herself by defying the conservative leadership of her party. In 2021 she supported a motion by community independent Helen Haines calling for a debate on a national anti-corruption commission. Last year she was one of four moderate Liberals who supported the protection of transgender students under the Sex Discrimination Act. She crossed the floor to vote for Labor’s 43 per cent emissions reduction target. She voted to censure Scott Morrison for his secret self-appointment to several extra ministries.

She is proud that her state – the last in the country with a Liberal government – “is leading the way in relation to anti-discrimination legislation and protections for LGBTIQ community members, for example … [and is] seeking to ban conversion therapy, for example”.

She sings from the same song sheet as Matt Kean. In government, he says, he and Perrottet sought to apply liberal values to “issues that we haven’t traditionally dealt with. Not because we’re mad lefties or anything, but because we think that liberal values can provide solutions to things like climate and women’s economic opportunity and a whole range of areas that the party hadn’t really engaged on before.”

The election highlighted other policy areas where Kean’s liberal values did not, and maybe cannot, adjust – for instance, the demand of working people for a bigger share of the economic pie.

Kos Samaras, director of the strategic consultancy RedBridge Group and a former deputy campaign director for Victorian Labor, points to the Perrottet government’s cap on public sector wages, which he reckons played a significant part in its defeat.

“If you’re going to declare war on 400,000 public servants in New South Wales, then you probably should check where they live,” he says.

The new working class, he says, “is two groups of people, basically: lower-income professionals, mainly nurses, teachers, emergency personnel, women largely working in the health sector, and low-income migrant workers in diverse communities, who work in the precariat.

“But unlike previous working-class communities, they actually don’t just live in particularly safe Labor seats. They actually live in middle-urban, cosmopolitan Sydney and Melbourne.”

They worked hard during the pandemic, Samaras says, but “the only message that that government was prepared to leave them with is that they weren’t going to lift the [wages] cap”.

No wonder, he says, there were big anti-Coalition swings in seats such as Camden, Parramatta, Riverstone, Penrith and East Hills – that is where those public sector workers live.

There is a bigger demographic reckoning coming for the Liberal Party, too, unless it comes to grips with changing social attitudes.

“Almost all the growth from an enrolment perspective, and from a migration perspective, is happening on the left side of politics. So young Gen Z kids are jumping on the [electoral] roll,” Samaras says.

“And they’ve got a very different view about themselves and their position in life. One in five, for example, identify as gay or lesbian.” 

The older cohort is also increasingly problematic for parties of the right, Samaras says.

“The Millennials didn’t become more conservative as they got older. So the oldest Millennials are now turning 40 and they’re still very progressive and still voting Labor, Green or teal.

“Forty-nine per cent of Millennials in Sydney have got a bachelor’s degree or above. They are the most-educated generation in history. They’re a globalist generation. They’ve grown up with the internet at their fingertips. They consume news differently.” 

The main reason the state election did not have a worse result, says Samaras, was that the NSW Liberal Party was relatively “modern” compared with most other jurisdictions.

“It’s the brand they need to double-down on. The socially progressive, economically prudent model will work one day. But if you go to the electorate, you know, trying to pitch to Utah, like the Victorian Liberals did, you’re going to get rejected.”

It’s a funny thing: the Coalition lost government in NSW because more people voted for the parties of the left. But it has lost its best leadership prospect at least in part because of a long, outrageous campaign by the forces of the far right.

Samaras has a lot of time for Matt Kean and none at all for the reactionary culture warriors determined to take the Liberal Party further right. 

But he has to admit: “The biased part of me – I’m trying to remain objective, but the biased part me, speaking with my Labor hat on – says, ‘Great, keep it up, keep losing.’ ”