The Minns interview: Is this NSW’s next premier?

Chris Minns claims to be “a natural pessimist”. He is inclined to expect something will go wrong. But sitting there in his shirtsleeves, chatting amiably, handsome and tanned, hair perfect as ever, the New South Wales Labor leader doesn’t look ill at ease. He presents a picture of relaxed confidence.

Certainly, political experience has encouraged Minns to worry. His party has not won a state election for 16 years, long before he was even in parliament. In that time, five other Labor leaders have tried to lift the party’s fortunes. In about five weeks, Minns will try again.

“People say ‘What are you worried about?’ In an election context, there’s everything to worry about,” he says. “We have lost the last three on the trot, so we’re definitely not going into this counting our chickens. We’re really humble about our prospects.”

Despite this pessimism, the harbingers of political change are everywhere, pointing to a Labor win on March 25. Members of the Perrottet government, including several of its most senior members, are rushing for the exits. Among those who remain there have been very public fights. Perrottet and his treasurer, Matt Kean, have delivered contradictory messaging on issues as varied as privatisation of government assets and gay conversion therapy.

Then there are the scandals that have mired the Coalition parties: the politicisation of bushfire relief funds and other pork-barrelling; jobs for the boys; the resignation of various ministers; the anti-corruption investigation of two premiers; at least two police investigations into sexual misconduct; internecine wars over candidate selection and allegations of branch stacking; both nude and Nazi photo scandals; et cetera, et cetera.

In contrast, state Labor is, for once, generally united and scandal-free. It has been way, way ahead in the polls for a long time. Last September, a Newspoll had Labor up by eight points in the two-party preferred. According to a YouGov poll a couple of weeks ago, the gap had blown out to 12 points.

Of course, as Minns says, things could still go wrong. Yet history shows that when an opposition has such a big, consistent lead, the government does not claw its way back.

It seems more than likely that in about five weeks, NSW will have a new premier. Funny thing is, despite that fact, a significant number of voters don’t really know who he is. When asked what they think of Minns, almost four in 10 respondents – 37 per cent – answered “don’t know”.

Minns, the self-claimed worrier, is unconcerned. He puts his low profile down partly to circumstance, partly to strategy. He took over the leadership in June 2021, “between the Omicron and Delta outbreaks” of Covid-19. “It was,” he says, “a very un-ideological period.”

Had he been running the Covid-19 response, he says, he would have taken the same advice from the chief health officer and done the same things as the government.

“So we kind of put politics to one side … We worked hard to get messages out, particularly to diverse cultural communities, which were mainly in our electorates.”

This approach of “not being purely negative, more often than not agreeing if we thought they’d done the right thing and offering alternatives wherever we can” proved wise during the initial waves of Covid. Look at what happened in other states, where oppositions went on the attack over what Minns calls the “understandable screw-ups” in dealing with a pandemic. In Western Australia the Liberals were all but wiped out. They were soundly beaten, too, in Victoria and Queensland.

No doubt NSW voters would have a more clearly formed view of the man had he been more aggressive. But that, he says, “is not my style”.

It’s true that Labor under Minns has a track record of not opposing for opposition’s sake, or going in hard on missteps. Perhaps the clearest example came in January, after it was revealed that Perrottet had worn a Nazi uniform at his 21st birthday. Amid the ensuing chorus of criticism, including demands from former premier Bob Carr that Perrottet step down, one voice was silent for two days. When Minns did speak, after Perrottet’s abject apology, he said: “I thought the apology was sincere and I don’t think it will affect the election on March 25.”

Likewise, when then premier Gladys Berejiklian was caught up in an investigation of her former secret lover, the Liberal MP Daryl Maguire, by the state’s Independent Commission Against Corruption, Minns was restrained. He urged Berejiklian to respect the ICAC process and focus on the health crisis.

The point is, Minns has been careful about choosing when to engage in political combat. If that has made him a bit of an unknown quantity with the electorate, goes the logic, so be it.

It has not always been the case. Early in his parliamentary career, he was widely seen as brash, a man in a hurry, more than a little incautious. In his first speech to parliament, in May 2015, he advocated “taking steps to reduce union control” in party conferences and “increasing the representation of ordinary members of our party to have more diverse voices”.

It did not go down well and was a factor when Minns took his first shot at the leadership three years later. He lost the Caucus ballot 33-12 to Michael Daley.

Barely four months after that, the revolving door of Labor leadership spun again. The final week of the 2019 election campaign was dominated by criticism of Daley for the incendiary claim that Asians with PhDs were taking jobs from young Australians. Minns was again a contender, up against a fellow member of Labor’s right faction, Jodi McKay.

It was an ugly fight, splitting the factions, the party organisation and Labor’s union supporters. A May 23 statement by the Newcastle and Northern branch of the Meat Workers Union gives some idea of the heat: it condemned Minns as unfit to lead the party.

“If Mr. Minns wants to lead a 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,” it said. “The AMIEU has well-honed knife skills for dealing with rogues.”

Minns was pretty blunt, too, telling The Sydney Morning Herald: “I have shown a propensity to buck the system, upend the table, take chances – I think that speaks well to my character. I am upsetting the apple cart, and people get unhappy about that. But I just think we need to change.”

In the ensuing vote, the first conducted under new rules that gave MPs and the rank-and-file membership equal say in choosing the leader, Minns lost again. McKay won the caucus vote 29-21 and also won 63 per cent of the votes of party members.

When McKay resigned in May 2021, after two undistinguished years as opposition leader, Minns had a third run at the leadership. This time he won, unopposed. Quite suddenly, the risk taker became risk-averse.

Minns tells The Saturday Paper he hasn’t changed, the circumstances have. “At that time, when I ran for leader … we’d been out of power for eight years. I felt that I was playing the role to say ‘I think we’re on the wrong track, I think we need to right the ship’,” he says.

“But now when you get close to an election campaign, and you are the leader of a political party, and inflation is at 7.8 per cent, and the health system is crumbling under its own weight, it’s pretty indulgent to kind of jump up and go, ‘I’ve got a great idea about party reform’.”

John Robertson, another former, unsuccessful Labor leader, for whom Minns worked as chief-of-staff in 2009-10, says Minns has changed, particularly in his relationship with the unions and party organisation.

“Some of those views that he expressed, I don’t think he necessarily holds those views anymore. I understand he’s conveyed that to some of the union leaders,” Robertson says.

Minns has dropped other big ideas of his early days, too. In his inaugural speech he advocated for the mandatory teaching of Mandarin to all NSW schoolchildren from kindergarten to year 12. He doesn’t anymore.

Since he made the statement, ICAC began investigating secret donations from sources linked to the Chinese Communist Party, some of which flowed to Minns’ campaign. It was revealed he had taken a trip in 2015 to China, funded by the now-exiled Chinese billionaire property developer Huang Xiangmo, the subject of the ICAC inquiry.

There was never any suggestion Minns did anything corrupt, but he was moved last year to apologise for calling for compulsory Mandarin classes: “It was a mistake on my part, one I regret.”

In Robertson’s view, it stands to Minns’ credit that he is willing to admit past errors and change his mind when circumstances change. More importantly, he says, Minns is very bright.

Robertson references The West Wing to describe his former chief of staff. “There’s a line where the president says to his chief-of-staff, ‘You know, you always employ someone who’s smarter than you to be your chief-of-staff.’ And that was Chris. He’s smart. He’s methodical. He’s logical. That’s the thing about him.”

He is also a Labor man through and through, built in the familiar right-wing mould, as Minns himself attests.

He grew up in a Catholic household. His parents were, and are, “passionate members of the Labor Party …. cheering on Paul Keating when he was on TV and booing John Howard”.

Keating was Minns’ hero, the person who inspired him to become a politician. He recalls the against-the-odds Labor election win of 1993, Keating’s sweetest victory of all.

“I was 13 years old,” he says. “And yeah, I mean, it was just so exciting. It probably was, like the animating spirit … It came at probably an impressionable age. And I was hooked. I was completely hooked from that moment on. And I still am.”

Having determined his course, he pursued it single-mindedly, through Young Labor, where he met his wife, Anna, to the Young Labor presidency, to becoming a local councillor, then a staffer to Robertson and to Carl Scully, to becoming assistant secretary in the Sussex Street party machine and ultimately to parliament.

The criticism of Minns has been that he is the ultimate apparatchik. Apart from very brief stints working for a charity, as a firefighter and about nine months as carer for his kids, his whole professional life has been politics.

He is eminently qualified, academically. He holds a Master in Public Policy from Princeton University. Despite this, he insists his life is “reflective of someone my age from the suburbs in Sydney”.

“You know, I’ve got three boys,” he says. “I spent a lot of time with them. I go surfing with them. We listen to a lot of music. I play guitar with my brother and my kids.”

Pressed for any colourful anecdotes about his life outside politics – one might think he could talk about the fires he fought, or something – he offers nothing more. His ordinariness, says one long-time Labor operative, may be a plus.

The operative says that while Perrottet has not been the hard-right religious ideologue people suspected he would be, the public still see him as “caring but a bit weird”. On television, he appears younger than he is, and his faith is extreme by community standards.

“Chris is obviously better looking and more normal,” the operative says. “And he is actually quite conservative. He voted against voluntary assisted dying legislation, for example, conveniently knowing it was going to get through anyway. It was a bit of virtue signalling to conservative-land, which, in Sydney, is basically ethnic community-land.”

Minns’ electorate of Kogarah, which he holds after an unfavourable redistribution by a margin of just 0.1 per cent, is particularly ethnically diverse. Some 60 per cent of people speak a language other than English at home.

The political professionals give Minns credit for running a clever campaign. They note, for example, his promise to ban gay conversion therapy has wedged the government. Treasurer Matt Kean, a moderate, has endorsed the idea. The deeply religious Perrottet would not.

There have been other small announcements, too, which observers see as very appealing to bread-and-butter voters. For example, the announcement that drivers with good records could get a demerit point back after one year of good driving, instead of three, for low-range speeding offences. One observer said this was “really smart”.

The one big issue that has worked against Labor, of course, has been Perrottet’s promise to introduce cashless gaming cards in pubs and clubs, in an effort to address both problem gambling and money-laundering. Minns will commit only to a trial in a limited number of venues. He has been roundly criticised for his timidity.

This has served to highlight two things: Labor’s close relationship with the clubs lobby, and Minns’ caution.

Likewise, when it comes to gay conversion therapy, Minns has promised a ban, but only after further consideration, through a joint working group of NSW Health and the NSW Department of Justice.

This is despite the fact independent MP Alex Greenwich has a bill drafted and ready to go. It would provide jail terms for people convicted of changing or suppressing another person’s sexuality. Greenwich says it would bring NSW in line with Victorian, Queensland and ACT legislation.

Minns begs to differ, and his defence of his position speaks to his preoccupation with detail. He notes that other states – Victoria and Western Australia – have different definitions of what is, and is not, conversion therapy. He notes the Australian Medical Association has expressed some concern.

“Given there isn’t a uniform standard across all jurisdictions in the country, other than, in most other jurisdictions, either law or a movement towards banning the practice, the finer points needed to be worked out,” he says. “And I think that that’s reasonable.”

Others see this as cunning politics: wedging his opponents while fobbing off actual action. As one Greens strategist says: “I mean, Labor’s never seen any reform, despite an overwhelming amount of evidence, where they didn’t think a summit would add value.”

It’s an exaggeration, of course, but there is a list of issues including drug law liberalisation and proposed legislation that would require magistrates to presume an inherent harm in removing Aboriginal children from their families, among others, where Labor appears to have slow-walked reform.

In other areas, like the Perrottet government’s recent draconian anti-protest laws, Minns and Labor have enthusiastically backed the conservative line.

For most voters, of course, such things are not big issues. Thus the focus of Labor is on healthcare, the run-down hospital system, declining standards of education, costs of living, particularly as they relate to power prices, tolls and the ever growing hip-pocket hits arising from the Liberal government’s sale of assets.

One thing about which Minns has been absolutely consistent, right from his first speech, is his opposition to privatisation.

“If you sell an asset that generates $2 billion a year in dividends for the state, then okay, you get upfront capital for the sale, but you lose the dividend stream,” he said. “So can somebody explain to me how losing that dividend stream … makes any difference in terms of building infrastructure for the state?”

By Labor’s calculation, the Coalition government has sold off $83 billion worth of assets since it came to power.

“So,” says Minns, “you know, fast forward eight years, 12 years down the line, and we’ve got $180 billion worth of debt in part because the dividends that state was due from these corporations have gone.

“Most of the infrastructure pipeline over the next four years will be funded by debt borrowing, not privatisation. So I think there’s intellectual dishonesty there.”

In many cases, the assets have been sold cheaply as well. He cites examples: the Vales Point power station was sold by the NSW Liberals for $1 million. “The private owner on-sold that company a couple of months ago, for $200 million,” he says. “Eraring sold for $50 million. We found last year that the government put in a $250 million bid to buy it back for a limited period just to keep the lights on.”

The funny thing is, Minns’ hero, Paul Keating, was a big advocate of privatisation. In 2014, when Liberal premier Mike Baird proposed to sell more of the state’s electricity system, Keating not only endorsed the sale but savaged Minns’ former boss, Robertson, for opposing it.

Asked to nominate his top priority, Minns names public education. It’s in crisis, he says. “There’s 3000 vacancies for teaching positions across the state,” he says. “The results are going backwards.”

The consequences are there in the comparisons with other developed countries. Children in NSW used to rank “like third in the world when it comes to science. We’re now 23rd. Sixth, when it comes to reading. Now, we’re 24th.”

He makes the solution sound simple: pay teachers more. He won’t put a figure on how much more, only to “sit down and work that through”.

Minns is also promising greater job security for teachers. “We’re approaching 40 per cent of teachers in NSW are on temporary contracts … which is insane. So we’re going to convert 10,000 of them from temporary positions to permanent positions.”

That, at least, is a firm promise. For much else, however, the pitch is “Vote for a fresh start, details to come later”.

The signs are that will be enough. Even if the public is not sure who, exactly, it is voting for.