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NSW Liberal leader Kellie Sloane’s new-look frontbench will not win her the next state election. The task is too big. There is too little time, too many seats to seize.
Kellie Sloane laid flowers with Chris Minns at the Bondi Pavilion after the shootings. Credit: AP
But what the opposition leader has managed to do in her shadow cabinet reshuffle is future-proof the Liberals. Sloane will not admit it but her senior operatives do. The NSW Liberals, along with their National partners, are playing the long game and laying the groundwork for a 2031 win.
When the Coalition lost the 2023 election, after 12 years in power, there was a silver lining. Out with the old, in with the new. While plenty of wise heads – ex-planning minister Rob Stokes, then health minister Brad Hazzard, former customer services minister Victor Dominello and ex-transport minister David Elliott – bowed out, their exits allowed for generational renewal.
After that election, there were five Liberals aged under 35, and several other Millennials in the Coalition team. Since then, two more have been added in byelections. James Wallace replaced former environment minister Matt Kean as the MP for Hornsby and Monica Tudehope took her boss Dominic Perrottet’s Epping seat. Wallace and Tudehope are now frontbenchers.
It is a young team, although experience has not been wiped out. Damien Tudehope, soon to be a grandfather of 16 – thanks to his expectant daughter and fellow MP Monica – remains in Sloane’s shadow cabinet. Father of the house and right-wing powerbroker Anthony Roberts has been returned to the frontbench as police spokesman and Sloane’s predecessor Mark Speakman has been given responsibility for the critical portfolio of education.
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Labor, of course, is not only made up of greyheads. It, too, has young talent in Housing Minister Rose Jackson, Finance Minister Courtney Houssos and Summer Hill MP Jo Haylen, who has been temporarily sidelined thanks to her ill-advised decision to use her taxpayer-funded driver to ferry her to a boozy Hunter Valley lunch. She will serve out her time and return to the frontbench.
But significantly, Sloane’s new line-up – unveiled belatedly on Tuesday after the Bondi terror attack put it on the backburner – exposes a hole in Labor stocks. It highlights a major problem that must have Sussex Street hardheads sweating. What happens when, as he must eventually, Premier Chris Minns pulls up stumps?
The Liberals have obvious future leadership options (energy spokesman James Griffin, Monica Tudehope and Wallace to name just three) while Labor has fewer clear-cut choices, and none who would match Minns, the one-man band holding the show together.
Health Minister Ryan Park or Planning Minister Paul Scully could do the job, and Education Minister Prue Car would also be an option if she wanted it after her recovery from breast cancer. Haylen was once seen a possible premier, too, but her judgment may have cruelled that.
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Minns is not driving an aggressive policy agenda, other than to build more homes, and the state has significant financial pressures, which means Labor can cut ribbons on projects already under way but does not have the means to embark on much new. Ambition is expensive and Minns only tells us what we can’t have (more metros, for example) rather than what we can.
For now, that does not seem to be harming him.
Minns has further cemented his leadership and standing with voters with his handling of the Bondi massacre and its aftermath. He has appeared strong and decisive, largely because of his swift action around gun laws and protests and promising a state royal commission, while his federal counterpart Anthony Albanese has faltered.
Minns has struck the right tone, attended nine funerals and has the trust of the Jewish community. Albanese, in stark contrast, appears weak and lost.
Sloane, whose electorate covers Bondi, has proven herself in a baptism of fire no leader would ever want to face. She, like Minns, is very likeable but Sloane’s main hurdle as she heads into the final 14 months of this term is inexperience. That, and the sheer number of ultra-marginal seats her side must hold not to go backwards, makes her task impossible for 2027.
But do not expect a nasty battle. A Liberal senior source anticipated the looming election campaign to play out like this: “It will be the two coolest kids in school going up against each other.” Sloane can play a long game, but the problem for Labor will be: what happens when their cool kid no longer wants to be in the gang?
Alexandra Smith is the Herald’s state political editor.
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