Nothing good for Liberals, but Labor cannot take such victories for granted

On paper, Labor candidate Katelin McInerney’s thumping win in the Kiama byelection is a ringing endorsement for Chris Minns and his government.

No incumbent government had flipped a seat at a byelection in NSW since 1996, and Labor ended the night with 60 per cent of the vote on a two-party basis in a seat it has not held since 2011. It’s another big win for a party that has gotten used to them recently.

But as Minns was at pains to point out on Sunday, the government should not read too much into a result that flatters to deceive.

Forget the usual caveats about byelections being fought on local issues; that the incumbent Gareth Ward is in jail after being found guilty of rape gives this contest an ugly context which warns against wider interpretation.

Ward, a former Liberal Party minister, held a peculiar appeal in the electorate and was re-elected in 2023 despite facing the charges he is now convicted of. That result suggested voters in Kiama were much more loyal to the man than the party he once represented. Indeed, his personal pull – confounding as it may seem – was such that, even in the lead-up to Saturday’s vote, the Climate 200-backed independent Kate Dezarnaulds was describing Ward as “responsive … independently minded [and] hard-working”.

Those circumstances will not be repeated, and well past the halfway mark of its first term, many of the problems Labor came to government promising to fix remain stark. Pragmatic and cautious to a fault, Minns has defined his government as a steady hand on the tiller. That works to a point, but voters may punish a government they feel is not dealing with the material issues they are facing.

Minns said as much on Sunday. The result was “not a pat on the back”, he said, but “an invitation to work harder”.

“My sense is the voters of NSW expect us to make major inroads and real progress at the challenges that they’re facing in their community, and if we don’t make real progress, then we will not win the 2027 election campaign,” Minns said.

The premier identified the reliability of the heavy rail network as a key issue, but you could add to that the state’s groaning public health system, the ever-present issue of housing affordability and Labor’s obvious unwillingness to tackle serious gambling reform.