Victorian election Matthew Guy
Leader of the Victorian Liberal Party Matthew Guy (Image: AAP/David Crosling)

Victoria’s opposition has not showered itself in glory during the pandemic. It’s spent most of the past 18 months complaining about lockdowns, calling Premier Dan Andrews rude names, engaging in childish stunts, and indulging absurd conspiracy theories about Andrews’ fall earlier this year.

This morning Michael O’Brien’s listless leadership ended, and Matthew “lobster with an alleged mobster” Guy returned to the top job. 

Guy has his work cut out for him. Being in opposition during a pandemic is hard for any party. Voters in Australia have tended to favour incumbents, and it can be tough to strike a balance between criticising a government’s failures without appearing to undermine the united front needed to fight the virus. 

On this front, the Victorian Liberals have failed so far. For a lesson in how to be a better opposition during an outbreak, they’d do well to look north of the Murray to New South Wales Labor (yes, seriously).

The Minns moment

The NSW opposition had a pretty shocking start to the year. In May, former Labor leader Jodi McKay resigned after months of historically bad polling and deteriorating relationships with key unions and MPs. Her replacement, Chris Minns, was barely a month into the job when the current COVID outbreak began in Sydney’s eastern suburbs.

On the surface, Minns has been in lockstep with Premier Gladys Berejiklian on many key elements of the pandemic response. In late June, hours before the state went into lockdown, Minns maintained a lockdown wasn’t needed, deferring to the advice provided by chief health officer Kerry Chant. 

More recently, he’s endorsed the government’s plan to ease restrictions further once 70% of eligible people are vaccinated: “We can have a long debate and a reckoning about how we got to 1100 cases a day and COVID being in every sewage system in the state, but we’re not putting the genie back in the bottle.”

With a state election not due till 2023, Minns knows he can afford to appear helpful and constructive now and save the counterattack for later. 

Capitulate or counterattack?

While the NSW Labor approach has been far more deferential to the Berejiklian government, it’s also never come across as a juvenile sideshow. Instead it has picked its battles with care. 

One of those is over the way this outbreak has disproportionately hammered working-class communities in western Sydney, the kind of heartland Labor areas it needs to win. When it became clear south-west Sydney was the epicentre of the outbreak, Labor leaned hard on putting out reassuring, multilingual messages on getting tested and vaccinated. 

When it became apparent the Berejiklian government was responding to the escalating outbreak by sending in droves of police and putting those communities under more oppressive restrictions than anywhere in the country, Labor hit out. Lakemba MP Jihad Dib called the heightened police powers an example of “a tale of two cities”.

This is where Labor has succeeded — highlighting the inconsistency and punitiveness of the Berejiklian government. It criticised the confusing, shifting and often arbitrary LGA-based restrictions. In the past few days, Minns has come out hard against “arbitrary” curfews, only enforced in certain LGAs. It hit the government over its lack of transparency — suspending Parliament and failing to release modelling on projected hospitalisations over the next few months.

Minns has also firmly backed vaccine passports, drawing a sharp contrast with Berejiklian who must still deal with recalcitrant conservatives on her backbench. 

There’s a pragmatism to Labor’s approach. On easing lockdown restrictions, Minns is closer to Berejiklian than other Labor premiers who remain wedded to COVID-zero. But this support recognises that Sydneysiders are in their 10th week of lockdown, and need some light at the end of the tunnel. 

On the whole, it’s far harder for the Berejiklian government to wedge Labor as either undermining the health advice or supporting a forever lockdown.

It’s too early to tell whether Minns will get any long-term cut-through. But behaving like a relatively sensible opposition gives him a good platform to build on through to 2023. Highlighting the unfairness of the lockdown now will help Labor craft a message of Liberal abandonment in western Sydney, already targeted by Labor as the big battleground in the next election.

While it might come from the other side of the political aisle, there’s a pragmatism to Labor’s approach that the Victorian Liberals might well consider worth emulating.