Al-anwar Newspaper English news in Australia
There will be a changing of the guard in the Perrottet Government’s ministry, and they mustn’t succumb to bad habit if they are to win the next election, writes James O’Doherty.
Would the last NSW minister jumping ship ahead of the March election please turn out the lights?
They might need to if only to save on skyrocketing electricity bills.
With the government losing another two ministers to looming retirements this week, there is a perception that Premier Dominic Perrottet’s team is jumping ship before the Coalition sinks.
He risks voters losing confidence in a government whose members appear to have had enough. The Premier insists the resignations are a good thing. And in part, he’s right.
If he has any hope of winning a historic fourth term for the Coalition, he needs to counter attacks from Labor’s Chris Minns that the “best years” of the government are behind it. Perrottet has long been planning a reshuffle before the election.
But the looming reshuffle will only happen after the Liberal party finalises more of its candidates for the upcoming election.
I can reveal Perrottet will look further than the backbench when considering who to promote.
With some strong contenders running for preselection, Perrottet is open to drafting candidates straight into the ministry
after the election.
That could include preselection hopeful Kellie Sloane, if she wins the right to contest the seat of Vaucluse in a party member ballot. There is still a long way to run in the Liberal party’s preselection process.
There is no guarantee that upper house MPs Natalie Ward and Natasha McLaren-Jones will be successful in their bids to jump into lower house seats. Despite an internal party push to get more women into parliament, both could end up being beaten by men.
And transport minister David Elliott has continued to throw spears at the man who looks set to win Castle Hill preselection. On Wednesday, he said former Young Liberals president and lawyer Noel McCoy did not have the “character” to be an MP.
For all the pain the Liberals endured around preselection before the federal election, it appears the party’s factions have not learned their lesson. As one Liberal complained to me yesterday: “We never learn, we just continue to f**k it up.” Another lesson that politicians never seem to learn from is the danger of over-promising and underdelivering.
In warning of a massive spike in power prices over the next two years, Federal Treasurer Jim Chalmers’ first budget all but confirmed that a pre-election promise to reduce electricity bills by $275 is dead. State Treasurer Matt Kean seized on the budget — which failed to deliver any extra bill relief — as proof that federal Labor is “leaving families to fend for themselves”. He was also quick to crunch the numbers, declaring that this year’s state budget delivered $7.2 billion in cost of living relief for NSW, while the federal budget had just $7.5 billion in assistance nationwide.
But Kean is now facing accusations he has broken his own power price promise after he said that his renewable energy roadmap would save families $130 a year, on average, from 2023. Kean will release the state’s half-year economic update in February. The more Perrottet and Kean argue that families have been dudded, the louder calls will grow for the state government to provide its own support.
