Matt Kean was announced on Monday as the incoming chair of the Climate Change Authority. Who is he? Crikey has the answers.
Who is Matt Kean?
Kean, 42, is a career politician who joined the Liberal Party as a teenager and was appointed president of a local Young Liberal branch as a 20-year-old in 2002. Three years later he attained a Bachelor of Business from the University of Technology, Sydney, where he was elected to the student representative council. He worked as an adviser to the Liberal state opposition leader John Brogden in his early career, and also had a brief stint as an accountant at PwC.
He was elected to the safe Liberal state seat of Hornsby in 2011, the year the Coalition defeated the 16-year incumbent Labor government in a landslide, and quickly rose through the parliamentary ranks. Within four years, he had been appointed a parliamentary secretary, and in 2017, the state’s new premier Gladys Berejiklian made him minister for innovation and better regulation. But it was after 2019, when he was appointed minister for energy and environment, that he began amassing a greater political profile. In that role, he succeeded in getting cross-party support for a long-term plan to boost green electricity generation in the state, known as the NSW energy infrastructure road map.
Fight with Morrison
Kean, who has long been seen as a leader in the NSW Liberal Party’s moderate faction, has not been afraid of clashing with his Coalition colleagues over the politics of climate change. A public fight with then-prime minister Scott Morrison in 2021 over the latter’s “ridiculous” refusal to commit to net zero carbon emissions by 2050 helped boost his profile nationally.
But he’s been equally ferocious at opposing the Labor Party, both state and federal, hitting out at Energy Minister Chris Bowen last year for failing to deliver a promised power bill relief, and dismissing Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s jobs summit in 2022 by saying: “The Commonwealth doesn’t need to wait for a jobs summit, it doesn’t need to ask the unions for permission.”
Kean’s credentials as a climate crusader helped blunt attacks from the then-Labor opposition in NSW during last year’s election; green energy policy arguments that might have been effective against Morrison’s government couldn’t be credibly deployed against Kean’s team. Rather than oppose Kean’s energy roadmap, Labor leader Chris Minns had to settle for an election commitment to strengthen it.
‘Classic Liberal’
As a factional player closely aligned with Berejiklian, Kean was somewhat surprisingly named treasurer by his factional opponent Dominic Perrottet, a conservative, when the latter assumed the premiership in 2021. Rumours on Macquarie Street at the time indicated the pair had made a deal where Kean would support Perrottet in return for becoming his deputy and treasurer — “the yin to Perrottet’s yang”, as one party source put it to The Sydney Morning Herald. In the end, the party heavyweights worked out another solution for the deputy position, and Kean had to wait another year before becoming the state party’s second-in-command.
During the 2023 state campaign, Kean described himself as “a classic liberal in the Menzies tradition focused on small government, lower tax, economic rationalism, but also, social progress.”
Last week Kean announced he was leaving politics for the private energy sector.
