Last month, the Australian Labor Party (ALP) ended twelve years of conservative Coalition government in New South Wales (NSW), the nation’s most-populous state. The election result firmly repudiated the former government’s record of corruption, mass privatization, and public sector wage suppression. Nonetheless, one question remains: will the incoming Labor premier, Chris Minns, lead a progressive center-left government, or embrace the Blairite program of his federal Labor counterparts?

Minns’s rise to power, election campaign, and postelection maneuverings indicate that the government will embrace the latter option. Minns’s new government is already suggesting that budget cuts are inevitable in the context of mounting public debt and inflation. And although Australia’s cost-of-living and rental crises are profit driven, NSW Labor has dismissed policies that would limit corporate price gouging and extortionate rent increases. Instead, NSW’s new treasurer has foreshadowed spending cuts in the upcoming budget.

Indeed, in opposition, Minns’s leadership was always characterized by Labor’s fixation with neoliberal economics. After orchestrating a coup in May 2021 against NSW Labor’s former leader, Jodi McKay, Minns and his supporters swiftly dragged Labor to the right — for example, ditching key spending commitments including mandated nurse-to-patient ratios.