(Image: Tom Red/Private Media)

No one saw the decapitation coming. Four dramatic days have left the people of New South Wales with a very different government from the one they elected in 2019. First Gladys Berejiklian resigned, another premier felled by ICAC. Transport Minister Andrew Constance followed, hoping to make the switch to Canberra.

Then, before 9am on a public holiday, Deputy Premier John Barilaro called it quits. 

Amid all that, some swift factional manoeuvring has made Dominic Perrottet, a fresh-faced conservative Catholic with a touch of culture war in his blood, all but certain to secure the top job at tomorrow’s party room meeting. 

When the dust settles, he will lead a government with a one-seat majority which faces three byelections in the coming months. And as the first MP from the NSW right to lead the party in over a decade, Perrottet has a blank slate to stamp his authority over the premiership, if he so chooses. 

The right man 

Once upon a time, the hard right faction of the NSW Liberals was derisively referred to as the “Taliban”, a reference to its deep religious conservatism. The faction’s leading powerbroker was conservative Catholic MLC David Clarke, whose patronage helped Perrottet win a messy preselection battle for Castle Hill, in Sydney’s bible belt, back in 2010.

Perrottet, like Clarke, has links to Opus Dei, a shadowy conservative Catholic sect. Like Clarke, the father of six has been public about the centrality of faith to his politics. Unlike Clarke, whose views on social issues like abortion and gay rights were viewed as too extreme, Perrottet has managed to cast himself as the more reasonable face of the Christian right, a treasurer who focused on boring, wonky stuff like stamp duty reform rather than the low-hanging fruit of culture wars.

Occasionally though the culture war stuff peaks out. Within hours of Berejiklian’s demise, Perrottet’s 2016 Facebook post after Donald Trump’s election win, where he gloated about a “conservative spring”, had been widely shared.

“If you support stronger borders, you are not a racist. If you want a plebiscite on same-sex marriage, you are not a homophobe,” he said.

A year earlier, he’d argued welfare led to family breakdown and childlessness. And while such outbursts have been toned down since becoming treasurer in 2017, there’s plenty more about Perrottet which is already giving Labor, totally bereft six months ago, a new sense of hope. 

There’s the trickle of stories about financial mismanagement at icare, the workers’ compensation scheme he set up. And there’s the fact that Perrottet voted against the decriminalisation of abortion in 2019.

How he governs

As Treasurer, Perrottet toned down those hard right impulses, and as premier there’s every chance he’ll tone them down even further. The success of the NSW Liberals has been due to personally popular moderates like Berejiklian and Mike Baird putting a presentable face on a party with its fair share of reactionaries.

Over the coming months we’ll get a good sense of whether Perrottet governs like a conservative Christian. A voluntary assisted dying law — set to be introduced next month with bipartisan support — will be an early test. Then there are two bills proposed by One Nation Leader Mark Latham — on religious discrimination, and an anti-trans bill which seeks to ban any discussion of gender fluidity in classrooms. Conservative Coalition MPs were disappointed with Berejiklian’s draft foetal personhood laws because they felt they didn’t go far enough. How he handles all this will give us an insight into the type of government NSW will have. 

But with Sydney’s lockdown to end in just seven days, it’s Perrottet’s handling of this phase of the pandemic which will be his biggest test. In early July, with Sydney facing COVID case numbers in the 20s, Perrottet bitterly opposed an extension to the city’s lockdown. He reportedly pressured chief health officer Kerry Chant to keep Sydney open.

The NSW pandemic response has always been a balancing act between a libertarian-hued Coalition government desperate to keep the country’s economic powerhouse open, and a Health Department desperate to save lives. 

Berejiklian’s popularity soared through the pandemic, in part because many voters saw her as a moderate technocrat and a steady pair of hands during difficult times who managed to strike that balance more often than not.

On lockdowns, COVID, and all things, Perrottet is far more of an ideologue. The big question is whether he governs as one.