‘He’s not Bambi’: How the Liberals lost NSW

As the NSW Liberal Party reels from its loss last weekend, party insiders worry the debate is being framed in a way that will push them to the right and further from electability.

Matt Kean was not at all surprised when his government lost last Saturday’s New South Wales election. His assessment is brief and direct: “We knew from December.”

The published polls had been very bad for a very long time – way beyond margin-oferror bad, double-digit bad at some points over the past six months.

While the internal tracking polls showed some narrowing through the campaign,

Kean says, the Coalition never got closer than four points behind Labor. In the final week, coinciding with the revelation that then premier Dominic Perrottet called his Health minister in February when his wife required an ambulance, and Brad Hazzard spoke to the head of NSW Ambulance about sending a vehicle, the numbers “started breaking heavily again to Labor”.

In the end, the swing against the Coalition was about 6 per cent.

Arguably the biggest surprise of the election came from Kean himself. The nearuniversal expectation was that he would be the next leader of the opposition. When Perrottet stepped down from the leadership, however, Kean did not step up.

Instead, the former treasurer says he will spend more time with his family – “to be, you know, a dad and all that kind of stuff ”.

In politics, “spending more time with family” is usually interpreted as the excuse of those with no political future. That is not the case with Kean. Yes, his side lost, but he is credited by many across all factions of the party with having been instrumental in limiting the size of that defeat. There is little doubt he could have been leader if he wanted to.

He is stepping back not just for his family but also for his own sake. He needs a little time, he tells The Saturday Paper, to