Opinion

October 28, 2026 — 7:00pm

When Premier Chris Minns stood up over the weekend and announced the government would reverse ferret on a planned overhaul of train timetables, he sounded like someone who had listened.

The planned changes to the T4, T8 and South Coast lines timetables, he conceded, had been unpopular. Rather than digging in, he was ditching them.

NSW Premier Chris Minns has every incentive to look and sound as little like his federal counterpart as possible.

“I’d rather apologise and backflip on a policy like this than implement a change that people don’t want,” he said.

He sounded, in other words, not at all like the prime minister.

Amid all the fear within the NSW Labor government over the potential for One Nation to derail their re-election, the person who looms largest is not Pauline Hanson, or her NSW leader Mike Newman. It’s Anthony Albanese. Over and over, in their internal polling, and when MPs go door-knocking or are out in their electorates, the overwhelming feedback is that voters have it out for federal Labor.

If bad and worsening economic conditions weren’t enough, the prime minister in his second term is living long enough to see himself become the villain, metamorphosing into a man tripping over the truth when it suits.

Of all things to repeatedly entangle yourself in, the saga of a $6 million grant to the Marrickville Golf Club must be the most ridiculous. Since the ABC first reported the grant, Albanese has seemed to reach for new and more absurd ways to continue giving the story oxygen, lurching Sideshow Bob-like from one rake to the next.

Most recently, the prime minister was forced to correct the record after claiming the grant was for sewage upgrades despite issuing a press release at the time stating the money would go to a series of improvements including a renovation of the clubhouse and other amenities.

Rather than own the grant — or, God forbid, concede that the kind of pork-barrelling Labor railed against while in opposition was not up to scratch — Albanese first went after the ABC for not reporting his (false) sewage claims before claiming he hadn’t been to the club “for many, many years”.

The saga is particularly funny for anyone who lives in Sydney’s inner west and frequents the club. In the general manager reports they sometimes send out to members, the $6 million grant has been referred to as the “Albanese upgrades” or “Albanese building works”, such was its connection – in their minds, at least – to the prime minister. (I should disclose that, like Albanese, I am also an honouree member, in so far as I last paid my $5 membership fees about five years ago but can still flash my expired card and get a discount on beers).

The club is also a significant source of pride for the local Labor fraternity because, in 2020, it was they who led the charge to successfully defeat a Greens-backed plan to cut the course down to nine holes.

Labor figures, including Albanese, fiercely resisted the proposal. Together with the then-MP for neighbouring Barton, Linda Burney, he said it risked undermining “the spirit of the inner west”. To now see Albanese acting as though he’s barely heard of it is a mammoth credulity-stretching exercise.

The point is not that Labor gave the club the grant — it really could use a reno — but Albanese’s strange, reflexive instinct to insist black is white (“I didn’t fall off the stage”), and continue bleeding on issues for no reason. From the Helen Haines “integrity sheet” to the ban on credit card surcharges, the government seems unable to either anticipate controversies or react normally to them when they arise.

Minns, then, has every incentive to look and sound as little like his federal counterpart as possible. On Thursday, the government changed tack again, stifling a growing backlash against changes to rules requiring cafes to have recyclable cups by agreeing to water down the most controversial aspects of the changes.

There is obviously nuance to this. Albanese is hunted by elements of the conservative press in ways Minns is not, and the premier has often been criticised by his own side for being too willing to abandon Labor principles in his eagerness to court the middle and centre-right of the electorate.

That same dynamic though means that while Minns is not loved by the base in the way the prime minister is, he is more appealing to socially conservative voters, or those who might be considering voting for One Nation.

MPs in seats believed to be at risk from One Nation consistently report that, when they are door-knocking, voters react far more positively once they make the distinction between the federal and state governments.

Much has been written about the testy relationship between the pair, and Minns has come under fire at times for being too quick to point criticism at Albanese and the federal government. But more than picking fights with the feds, Labor strategists believe Minns’ most vital task over the next five months is creating enough differentiation between the two governments that when voters go to the polls, they aren’t treating it as a referendum on Labor.

Michael McGowan is state political editor for The Sydney Morning Herald.

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Source: The Age · Michael McGowan

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