4 hours ago
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April 9, 2026 — 5:00am
A few months into my first stint working in NSW parliament, about a decade ago, a Labor staffer in a crumpled shirt came into my office, slumped in a chair and let out a deep sigh. Staring down at the stained orange carpet in the shoebox-sized cupboard I worked in at the back of the press gallery, he asked: “How many people who work in this building do you reckon wake up every morning and think, ‘F---, what have I done?’”
Those were dark days for the Labor Party in NSW. The then Liberal premier, Mike Baird, was riding high in the polls and his Coalition government – led by a core of apparently sensible, competent ministers – was basking in the riches of asset privatisations and record-low interest rates. It felt like a new major infrastructure project was being announced every second week.
Long years of opposition stretched ahead and behind the bedraggled, corruption-stained ALP.
Much has changed. My office today is a lot nicer, for one (we have a window), and the Labor staffers wear better suits and seem less consumed by existential dread.
Most significantly, with less than a year until the next election, the Liberal Party, emerging from its own psychodramas, and the very real possibility that a large One Nation vote could actually deliver more seats to Labor, the only real question seems to be how big of a majority Premier Chris Minns will return with after March next year.
But you have to wonder about those Labor types who slogged it out through the long years in the wilderness, and if they ever question whether it was all worth it. The most persistent criticism I hear of this government – from inside and outside – is about its perceived lack of ambition. Pro-renter reforms are watered down at the 11th hour to be more favourable to landlords. A promise to protect injured workers turned out to be, well, ah, look, maybe not in the way they expected.
That’s not to suggest Labor hasn’t done anything. The removal of the public sector wage cap has meant salary increases for many (though not all) essential-service workers. A willingness to at least attempt to confront the housing crisis has been roundly credited.
But many of those reforms have been overtaken by reality.
This government came to power at about the same time as a decade’s worth of global unmooring coalesced into the economic, political and social horror show we are all now living through. We don’t need to be told the rules-based order is dead; we’ve been scrolling through it. A wage increase, while nice, means less in a creeping neo-feudal society where your salary feels completely disconnected from your capacity to, let’s say, buy a house. And a market-based approach to fixing housing supply only works when the cost of building materials isn’t so prohibitively high as to undermine construction feasibility.
No one really looks to a state government to solve those issues, obviously. And in so far as you think about state politicians at all, you mostly just want them to be competent enough to think to buy enough diesel to keep the buses running down Parramatta Road.
This government is fairly good at competence, or at least projecting it. But that electoral context has broader implications when you’ve defined yourself by a sort of cautious pragmatism.
When I interviewed Minns a few months before the 2023 election, I asked him about the impression that he’d overseen an uninspiring opposition. He pushed back against that charge but defended his cautious agenda. “Who’s asking for that?” he said. “This isn’t like the ’90s. We’ve had major economic shocks to the economy, there’s been shockwaves through large sections of people’s jobs and livelihoods … people want a serious show.”
“A serious show” is a phrase a lot of the ministers use. And it’s true, to an extent. But while a steady hand is a fine strategy when voters want stability, it is perhaps less effective if you find yourself the party of a status quo that works for fewer and fewer people.
The government is not unaware of this, and to be fair, it would probably argue that its ambition has been limited both by economic circumstance and electoral reality (it governs in minority).
Right now, it doesn’t matter too much, anyway. While my sense is you’d be hard-pressed to find a large cohort of people who are enthusiastic about this government, Minns himself remains popular, and the ructions on the conservative side of politics brought on by the rise of One Nation, combined with the absence of any similar nascent rising on the left, means there is probably enough of a centrist vote to sustain Labor.
But as we build into election mode over the coming months, Labor is going to have to start talking about why it wants to stay in government – if for no other reason than to justify the years of electoral oblivion.
