There’s a little irony in Matt Kean, former NSW treasurer and energy minister, announcing he was leaving politics for the private energy sector the day NSW Labor announced a string of deficits in its 2024 budget, and as Peter Dutton was finalising his harebrained scheme to build a fleet of nuclear power plants by 2050 — or, as the Coalition has now admitted, keep and even expand coal-fired power and bring an end to Australia’s transition to renewable energy.
In the last NSW Coalition budget in 2022, Kean had forecast the state would finally return to surplus in the coming year — and today his successors actually have more revenue available than was expected back then. As for going nuclear, Kean had made his views clear when he bailed out of the “Coalition for Conservation” back in April.
For years, commentators have lamented the dearth of reforming politicians, with the Hawke-Keating governments (Hawke-Keating-Howard governments if you were a right-wing commentator) held up as the model by nostalgics who missed politicians actually changing things rather than merely managing. Kean was there underneath their noses, the real deal.
It’s an article of faith that the climate wars were an intractable feature of Australian politics through the long, lost years of inaction and reversal under the Rudd and Gillard governments and the Coalition. They weren’t intractable in NSW. It’s true that the NSW Nationals are not quite as apeshit insane as federal Nationals and the LNP, but the same dynamic that plagued the federal Coalition was at work in NSW: the Liberals depended on a rump of climate denialists and rural populists to govern.
Kean sorted that out. He got the NSW Nationals to agree to a renewable energy plan that centred on renewable energy zones in regional areas, turning a government-funded renewables rollout into the kind of regional spending program the Nationals love. NSW had an emissions target of 50% by 2030 — twice as much as the hopeless federal target under the Coalition — and by late 2022, Kean was promising 70% by 2035, with thousands of new jobs in regional areas.
Under NSW Labor, the renewables rollout has since slowed considerably, with wind farm proponents complaining of outright hostility from Minns government bureaucrats, and Labor promising to pay a fossil fuel company $450 million to keep the ancient coal-fired Eraring power station going beyond its closure date. It’s an example of how climate solutions aren’t set-and-forget; they require active ministers to drive them forward.
For his success in achieving the allegedly impossible on climate, Kean was vilified by the Murdoch press and despised by Scott Morrison. Even in Kean’s retirement, his enemies outside the moderate faction he led are using Sky News to give him a serve.
His brief went well beyond climate. The 2022 NSW budget — which was rapidly overtaken by the John Barilaro scandal that dogged the Perrottet government for most of its remaining time in office — was an unusual example of a coherent economic vision made into fiscal reality. Kean had grasped, earlier than most of his counterparts on either side, that the Australian economy needed to accelerate female economic participation — not, or not merely, for any social benefits, but for clear economic and fiscal benefits.
The 2022 budget, the last the Coalition would get to deliver, placed women at the centre of NSW’s economic future with an array of initiatives designed to encourage female participation, including by expanding childcare and preschool funding and the workforces required for them. That saw Premier Perrottet joining Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews in a joint endeavour to add an extra year to free early childhood education.
It marked in Kean a politician whose understanding of economic and fiscal challenges was informed and thoughtful, coupled with a capacity to use the levers of power — cabinet processes, his factional power, the state budget — to deliver meaningful reform.
That knowledge of how to use power, coupled with a coherent reform agenda for which to use it, is a vanishingly rare thing anywhere in Australia, at the state or federal level. There are plenty who know how to use power, and there are some politicians with a coherent reformist vision, but the two are rarely found together. Now there’s one less, and maybe the last.
