Matt Kean wants to talk about women.
In the week leading up to his first budget as New South Wales treasurer, Kean, who perhaps more than any other figure has come to represent the struggle over the Liberal party’s ideological future, has set his sights on winning over the voters who abandoned the Coalition at last month’s federal election.
On the back of two landmark childcare funding announcements, totalling more than $10bn over the next decade, Kean wants next year’s state election to be all about women’s economic participation and gender pay equality.
It might seem strange ground for a Liberal government to tread, but it’s a fight Kean, a leading Liberal party moderate who saw close friends lose their seats, is spoiling to have.
“We’re going to fight the next election on our commitment to invest in our kids [and] to provide opportunities for women to thrive in our economy,” he told the Guardian this week.
“That’s a battle we welcome every day of the week. We’ve drawn the battle lines for the next election, and we want to fight this on women’s economic opportunity.”
To say there is a lot riding on this budget risks profound understatement. With the next state election due in March, it is one of the last opportunities for a government seeking a fourth term in power to convince voters that it deserves another chance.
Amid an energy crisis, industrial unrest, and in the wake of severe flooding, it is also an opportunity for relatively new premier Dominic Perrottet to win over voters who may have initially been alienated by his bull-at-the-gate approach to reopening the state after the Delta lockdown, and his own personal conservatism.
With unprecedented deficits, rising inflation and warnings that the state’s much-coveted triple A credit rating could be at risk, Kean has insisted that now is not the time for austerity. Instead, the government is pushing ahead with a number of ambitious reforms and spending commitments.
At the centre of the spend are women. Last week the government committed $5bn to create an extra 47,000 childcare places across NSW by funding private operators to expand or build new centres. It followed that up by announcing an additional $5.4bn over a decade to introduce pre-kindergarten learning for four-year-olds.
To Kean, the focus on childcare and women’s opportunity in the budget is a sign of “generational change” in the government, and, by extension, a signal that, although this will be a 12-year-old government by the time the election rolls around, there has been enough internal change to justify a fourth term.
“[Perrottet is] the youngest premier in the state’s history with seven kids [and] he’s married to a highly successful professional woman in her own right … You know, this guy clearly understands the difficulty of juggling family life with professional life,” Kean says.
“My partner is a professional in her own right. The education minister, Sarah Mitchell, she’s a successful professional woman juggling the challenges of career and family. So this is almost a generational thing.”
To Kean’s mind, this new generation of Liberals understands “the many parts of our lives built on assumptions about the past” that are no longer relevant.
“You know, my parents’ generation, my mum stayed at home and my dad worked. That was how Australian society was structured, around a family with a male breadwinner or a female homemaker,” he says.
“And Australia’s changed a lot since that time, and we represent a new generation, not just of Liberals, but of Australians [for whom] that’s just not the case any more.”
But coming, as it does, a month on from the decimation of a large chunk of the Liberal party’s moderate wing at the hands of the teal independents, who succeeded, in part, because of the perception the federal Coalition was out of touch with women voters, how much of this budget is also about the future of the Liberal party?
The NSW treasurer has forged a reputation as perhaps the most prominent figure among the moderate faction of his party nationally. His willingness to speak out on climate change, and his habit of criticising the former Morrison government, made him plenty of enemies on his own side of the aisle.
Kean bristles at the suggestion the budget is purely a response to the federal election, pointing out that the policies announced by the government were recommendations from an expert panel led by Sam Mostyn to advise the government on how to increase women’s economic engagement in NSW. That panel was put together four months before the federal election.
But there is no doubt the course laid out in this budget would be a boon for party moderates if it led to the re-election of the Coalition next year.
“The values that made the Liberal party great [are] freedom, enterprise and, most importantly, opportunity, opportunity for everyone regardless of where they come from, where they live, how much money they’ve got,” Kean says.
“And specifically, in this instance … what we’re saying is that 50% of the population still face enormous structural and social barriers to them getting ahead and this is our chance to break down those barriers and ensure that that we give everyone the opportunity to pursue their dreams.”
Kean has repeatedly pointed to the experiences of women like Brittany Higgins and the Women’s March 4 Justice as a catalyst for his decision to push for increased female representation.
“They unleashed a voice that had been for too long unheard in our public discourse,” he says.
And while he avoids any critique of the former Morrison government while speaking with the Guardian, there is an implicit suggestion that he wants his own government – which has largely managed to avoid the same issues that plague the Coalition federally – to chart a different course.
“The NSW Liberal party in transitioning from Gladys [Berejiklian] to Dom actually did generational change,” he says.
“That didn’t occur at the federal level. So I don’t necessarily think this is a federal v state branch of the Liberals thing. I don’t even think it’s a Liberal or Labor thing. It’s a generational thing.”
