Can Perrottet revive the right? Saint Dom shines his post-Gladys halo

Well, NSW sure has put on a show in the last days of the election with a typically cheeky and rambunctious, verrrrrry Sydney (checks notes) brutal and frightening assault on peaceful LGBTQIA+ protesters by hard right religious thugs outside a Mark Latham One Nation event.

Actually, verrrrrry Sydney is right. Just not Sydney as it wants to be known now: Pride, rainbow, all that. It’s more thug war, New Guard stuff — an older Sydney. 

Though Premier Dominic Perrottet was fortunate that no Liberal state MPs attended this festival of ressentiment, he must be cursing his luck. During this election campaign, this personally conservative Opus Dei Roman Catholic, from one of the party’s several “rights”, has managed to take the fight to a Labor opposition that had the election as its to win. 

Of course, Perrottet is lucky to be facing a New South Wales Labor opposition, a party that remains far from fully reformed and is still a warlordist, clientalist, cynical outfit, whose machine chews up and spits out any leader that tries to change it from the top.

But Perrottet has been willing to be lucky. By doing an end run round Labor and to the “left” on gambling, he has further distanced the party from any notion that it must stand up for “personal choice” over any other conception of social good. With his $400-a-year grant to children as a capital fund available when they’re 18 to blow immediately at schoolies, he’s managed to present an individual pork-barrel blast as a commitment to self-reliance, and against the dominance of the state.

The result has been that Labor has failed to seal the deal on what should have been a virtually certain return to power. Twelve years after what was little more than a top-shelf Rum Corps was thrown out of power, it has failed to come out unequivocally against the mass psychological predation of the gambling industry, completely obscuring its ability to present a new program for a state where lack of investment and big state stuff are causing social and physical infrastructure to crumble.

That doesn’t mean there is much chance of the Perrottet government getting back, as a minority government. But there’s not no chance, nor even very little chance. Perrottet and his team have transformed what the Liberal Party is and how it presents itself — and in a manner that offers an alternative philosophy of managing contemporary society that remains in line with Liberal principles (and that indispensable oxymoron, National Party principles), while recognising changing ideas of what society is and what the state should do.

Perrottet’s team has established the notion of a distinctive centre-right approach to the “enabling state”, which allows it to avoid the trap into which other state Liberal parties have fallen — that when the Thatcher/Howard formulation of “social conservatism” falls apart, all a party is left with is a mix of unsynthesised laissez-faire and cultural reaction. 

Any party that wants power in Australia’s type of service-delivery states has to recognise that people now expect the state to be dynamic, proactive and constantly involved in social life, and making more of it available to more people. The failures of social democracy in the 1970s — which more than anything made Thatcher and the New Right possible — are now history; no one under 70 remembers, as an adulthood memory, Christmas strikes or Telecom taking three weeks to give you a phone line.

So Perrottet has turned the guns around on such matters, promising a renewal of investment and a curb on pernicious private sector activity. The $400 annual child grants are the same, drawn from notions of a “stakeholder society” and the distribution of social power. In the form Perrottet has imposed them — with parents able to get matching funds for a top-up of a modest amount — it will further entrench inequality of the bottom 30% or so, especially as regards those one level above them. 

So it’s a lower-middle-class bung/legal bribe, but it’s disguised within Catholic social doctrine of enabled self-reliance and subsidiarity. That’s crucial in terms of a political narrative, and it’s why Perrottet, as a conservative Catholic, has been able to sell this renewed form of liberalism as a credible, unified approach. You can’t imagine Matty “Sleeps-with-the-crayfish” Guy, or whoever runs the SA or WA opposition — who would know the names of such people? How would one possibly find out? — being able to even begin to sell it. 

Details of the doctrine itself aren’t crucial. Which is lucky in a polity so braindead, so absolutely moronic that a TV debate asks each candidate to list the names of their children. You don’t need to know your Chesterton from your Belloc to feel that there is a consistent approach at work, that it is a synthesised strategy for modern government. It not only has an air of command, but it has allowed Perrottet and his candidates to distance themselves from the Gladys era. Remember that? The era when the best government in Australia couldn’t build a tram system with a consistent gauge? Grand days, grand days. 

Das numbers

The reason this strategy may get Perrottet through is the NSW Legislative Assembly is now so complicated — its optional preferential system has yielded a crossbench of 12 in a 93-seat house — that there are about half a dozen ways things could go. The Coalition has 45 seats (33 Liberal, 12 National), Labor 36, and of the crossbench: three Greens, three ex-Shooters (now independents), two progressive independents, one local independent, one One Nation (resigned her seat), and two independents who are sin-binned Libs.

OK, now it gets complicated. Labor has 36, the Coalition 45. Labor will take back the One Nation seat, Bankstown, which was a defection from Labor. The Liberals will take back Drummoyne, where one sin-binned “independent” is not standing. So that’s 37 to 46, with a 10-member crossbench. Progressive independents in Sydney and Port Macquarie are safe. 

Then there’s Wagga Wagga, where Joe McGirr, the independent who replaced Daryl “Squirer” Maguire, is a four-way contest. The three ex-Shooters (they resigned when upper house Shooters Leader Robert Borsak said the Shooters member for Murray, Helen Dalton, should’ve been “clocked”) are running hard as local independents — and no one knows what’s going to happen. In Kiama, south of Wollongong, sin-binned Liberal Gareth Ward is running as an independent, with the tacit support of local Libs. Realistically, Labor could pick up one seat from these seats. But the Coalition could pick up more, up to all five. 

Let’s park that and return to the main parties. There are five Coalition seats that need a Labor swing of 5% or under. Yes, yes, non-uniform swings, etc. That would nudge it ahead, ceteris paribus, to a 42-41 plurality. But it could also gain a plurality through Coalition losses to an independent in Dubbo (2% swing required), Willoughby (3.3%), Wollondilly (6%), or North Shore (11%). (All figures are from the excellent Tally Room of Mr Ben Raue, to whose Patreon I’m pleased to announce Crikey will be making a generous contribution. All misinterpretations, of which there will surely be some, are my own, as the comments string will no doubt let me know.) 

To get to the magic 47, Labor will need at the very least to get to about 7.5% swing on the pendulum, or grab a couple of outliers such as South Coast or Monaro (both on 10%+). Or it could take back Balmain from the Greens (where the local member is retiring).

But actually, it might need more gains than that, since it could lose a couple of its own: Leader Chris Minns’ seat of Kogarah, which is on a razor-thin 0.3% and has ex-ClubsNSW operative, anti-gambling independent Troy Stolz running to shame him. Lismore is a three-way contest, including the Greens, with Labor on 1.8%. There may be outlier independents in the mix, beyond my FIFO knowledge. So, a fair few things have to go right. 

What’s the Coalition’s path to victory, presuming some sort of swing against it? Well, if the Nationals were to gain two or all three ex-Shooter seats back, and take Ballina back from the Greens with a 5% swing, if the Libs take Kogarah and the new seat of Leppington, with the Greens taking Lismore from Labor, then the Coalition could hold a narrow plurality on anything less than a 7% uniform swing. More likely, even with some of these gains, it’d have to hold Labor down to a 3% swing. But it’s quite possible that some dark-horse independents will make it more complex than that.

This, I would like to remind non-NSW readers, is the lower house. The Legislative Council? There be dragons. Negotiations in a hung parliament? I can’t even.

The upshot is that Perrottet will probably lose his plurality, and the governor will ask Minns, or his deputy, or Eddie Obeid, to form government. But if Perrottet can keep Labor from a majority, he will gain status as a Thermopylaen hero on the right. If he can win a plurality and stay in power, he will be a god, simply a god. And he will have shown other state Liberal parties a path to the future. They won’t be able to take it, but if it comes to pass, it will be verrrrrrrry interesting, verrrrrrrry Sydney.