A week ago, the New South Wales premier, Dominic Perrottet, was publicly calling on two of his most senior MPs – the treasurer, Matt Kean, and the transport minister, David Elliott – to stop taking public shots at one another.
Perrottet had, he said, counselled both MPs on the “importance of unity” in the wake of an ugly buildup to the election of a new deputy leader.
Ironically, the horror of the past two months for the government – which has seen two MPs resign from cabinet in the wake of separate controversies – had overshadowed an extraordinary series of salvoes which Elliott had aimed at Kean.
After first accusing him of “bullshit” during an interview on Sydney radio station 2GB, Elliott then suggested that if he were elected deputy leader he would strip Kean of his treasury portfolio.
Kean, for his part, stayed quiet during the episode, and ended up winning the deputy spot uncontested after Elliott, in his words, ate “humble pie” and withdrew.
The treasurer couldn’t help himself on Monday though. After Elliott launched another attack – this time appearing to blame Kean for a long-running industrial dispute with the state’s rail union by offering this line: “That’s what you get when you send a boy in to do a man’s job” – Kean hit back by labelling it an “embarrassing outburst”.
Leaving aside the minutiae of who is or isn’t to blame for a saga which has dragged on for the length of some industrial agreements, in political terms, the timing couldn’t have been worse.
For the first time in months, the attention on Monday should have been solely on the Labor party and leader Chris Minns’s handling of the bullying accusations levelled against his now former shadow police minister Walt Secord.
On Friday, Labor was saying it was not aware of any complaints made against Secord.
That changed over the weekend, Minns said on Monday, and Secord had decided to stand aside.
But while Minns continued to insist he had not previously received any “complaints” in relation to Secord’s behaviour, he also drew a careful distinction between what he classified as bullying and more general “bad behaviour or perceived bad behaviour”.
“I regard the definition of bullying to be abusive or coercive conduct towards someone in a vulnerable situation,” he said.
“There has potentially been a situation where people have complained about Mr Secord or other members of the parliamentary Labor party for bad behaviour [or] perceived bad behaviour, policy differences, argumentative style [but] I can’t specifically recollect them.”
In other words, people may have complained to him about Secord – or other MPs – but not in such a way that he felt compelled to intervene.
Minns has enjoyed a golden run recently, managing to portray his own party as a more disciplined, credible alternative to a government lurching from crisis to crisis. After 11 long years in opposition, confidence inside the party has rarely been higher.
But the truth is it that lately it hasn’t been that hard. Beyond a brief window after the budget, the opposition hasn’t had to answer too many hard questions about what exactly it would do if it wins government next year.
And there are plenty of questions.
Labor under Minns has been prosecuting the case against the Coalition over issues such as nurse-to-patient ratios in public hospitals, teacher shortages in public schools, and cost of living issues such a road tolling – without comprehensive alternative policies of its own.
As Minns often points out, it’s the government’s job to govern.
But as we get closer to the election, those questions will start to come, and, as the Coalition was eagerly pointing out, Monday shaped as an early test of his leadership.
If only its own ministers could get out of the way.
