The Neo-Technocrat

A hypothesis on the New South Wales premier Chris Minns political position

Not quite Thomas Sankara

Chris Minns grew up in Penshurst, in Sydney’s south-west. Went to the local Catholic school. Barracked for the Bulldogs. His father was a Labor man and a school principal. His mother was a lawyer. He joined the Labor Party at eighteen.

On the 28th of March 2023, he was sworn in as the 47th Premier of New South Wales, ending twelve years of Liberal rule. Standing before supporters in his electorate of Kogarah, he told them the people of New South Wales had voted for a government that would put people at the heart of all decision-making.

Since then, he has attempted to ban peaceful political protest, and censor political speech for what he has described as “social cohesion”.

In the early stages of his political career he managed his public profile almost perfectly, according to Bob Carr he possessed the ability to know “the bare minimum that he should say, and he ends at that point” It seems lately he may be crossing that point, but for what? What is the political capital in staunch Israel defence and some of the most anti-democratic legislation this state has ever seen in peace time

He holds a Master of Public Policy from Princeton University — in New Jersey, in the United States of America. He has described the microeconomics and econometrics he studied there as, and this is a direct quote, “important if you want to be Premier.” In 2003, before holding any elected office, he was taken on a fully funded trip to Israel by the Australia Israel Jewish Affairs Council as part of their inaugural Rambam program for rising political figures. Also on that trip: Bill Shorten. And Scott Morrison. And in his 2015 maiden speech to the NSW Parliament, this lifelong Labor man stood up and called for reducing union influence within the Australian Labor Party.

Call him comrade?

To understand Chris Minns you need to understand what Princeton’s School of Public and International Affairs actually teaches. This is not the economics of Keynes, concerned with employment, demand and the welfare of ordinary people. It is not the economics of inequality, asking who captures value and who gets left behind. It is microeconomics — the study of how rational actors behave within markets, how systems can be optimised, how efficiency can be maximised. It is, at its core, the intellectual language of markets. Not who markets serve but how they work.

Minns was explicit that he absorbed this not out of intellectual curiosity but as deliberate preparation for political power. That is a revealing thing to say. A politician shaped by labour economics, or development economics, or the economics of inequality, tends to emerge asking different questions — about power structures, about who wins and who loses, about the gap between how systems function and whether they function fairly. Minns emerged asking none of those questions. He emerged with a toolkit.

And a man with a toolkit and no blueprint will build whatever protects his position.

In financial markets, arbitrage means exploiting the gap between what something costs in one market and what it sells for in another. You identify the inefficiency, move into it, and extract the return without taking on ideological risk. It is, by design, commitment-free.

Applied to politics, the logic runs like this: the Labor brand carried enormous accumulated loyalty — twelve years of opposition had left it trading well below its potential value. The political centre was uncontested. A man trained in market logic would see that gap immediately. You don’t need to believe in anything to exploit it. You just need to move into the space before anyone else does.

Minns ran the 2023 campaign almost entirely in the negative. He was not privatisation. He was not twelve years of Liberal corruption. He was not scary. He won not by inspiring his base but by being sufficiently unthreatening to swinging voters in Western Sydney that they gave him a chance. That is political arbitrage — capturing the asset without paying the ideological cost.

This is not an original manoeuvre. In April 2023, writing in Jacobin, E.A. Halevi identified Minns’s program as Blairite — a reference to Tony Blair’s transformation of UK Labour in the 1990s. The comparison is apt as far as it goes. Blair inherited a brand with enormous working class loyalty, stripped out its ideological content — literally removing Clause IV, the party’s constitutional commitment to public ownership — repackaged it as electability and modernisation, and won a landslide in 1997 by being unthreatening to middle England.

But the Blair comparison actually understates the case. Blair at least had a stated philosophy — the Third Way, thin as it was. Anthony Giddens wrote books about it. Blair could articulate, however vaguely, what he believed and where he was trying to take the country.

The Third Way is an abstract sociological theory of “autonomy” and “reflexivity” that replaces the historical materialism of socialist movements with something that sounds like your daily horoscope mixed with a fintech startup slide deck. Made to sound like a transcendence of the political telos and thus appealing to the black tie cancer fundraiser/tax adjustment event MANGO individualist imagineers. The LinkedIn Dead Centrists

Can the premier even claim that? There is no Third Way. There is no way at all. Just positioning. Just instruments. Just the gap between the brand and the reality, quietly pocketed. This is the confusion and also the danger, if Chris Minns is projecting through the flames as the “non-ideological normal bloke in a pub” when really he is actually not, then we can see the Labor base climbing out of the cave and onto Teal or far-left options

This is not Blairism. That is something further along the same trajectory. This is the neo-technocrat.

It is worth being specific about what Chris Minns does not believe in, because the list is instructive.

He is not a socialist. He is not a democratic socialist. He is not, in any meaningful governing sense, a social democrat. He opposed legislation enabling voluntary assisted dying — a position more conservative than many members of the Liberal Party. He is only interested in appearing as passive as possible, and when he is making a stand he is making it only against the already marginalized.

He advocated for cannabis legalisation in 2019 and walked it back the moment he became a realistic contender for power. In his 2015 maiden speech he called for reducing union influence within the ALP — the single most foundational relationship in the party’s history — and was immediately condemned by the union movement he was supposedly there to represent.

This matters because the Labor Party was not founded as a vehicle for biographical residue. It was founded in 1891 to represent workers organising collectively to shift the balance of power away from capital. That is not an unrealistic ideological purity test imposed from outside — it is the party’s own founding rationale. A Labor Premier with no connection to that rationale is not a broad church. He is a rebranded Liberal in a red tie.

His defenders will reach immediately for the broad church argument — Labor has always accommodated everyone from socialists to centrists, the purity test is unrealistic, the party must be electable. This argument fails on its own terms. There is a meaningful difference between a Labor leader who governs pragmatically but maintains genuine sympathy for workers and collective action, and one who in his first parliamentary speech tried to reduce union influence within his own party. Minns did not drift from Labor values under the pressures of government. He arrived having already dispensed with them.

The original technocrats — the post-war Keynesian planners, the architects of Medicare and superannuation, even the Hawke-Keating economic rationalists for all their contradictions — had a theory of society they were trying to build. They had a direction. The neo-technocrat has dispensed even with that. Just competence without conviction. Management without meaning. A podium where a blueprint used to be.

Which brings us to the one area where Chris Minns does appear to have something resembling a conviction.

In 2003, a 23-year-old junior ministerial adviser was taken to Israel on a fully funded program run by the Australia Israel Jewish Affairs Council. The program’s explicit purpose, stated by AIJAC’s own executive director, was to ensure participants would become “more knowledgeable and more empathetic” about Israel before they held significant power. Also on that inaugural trip: Bill Shorten, who would go on to lead federal Labor. And Scott Morrison, who would go on to lead the Liberal Party and become Prime Minister.

Twenty years passed. The junior ministerial adviser became Premier. And when those relationships were threatened — when protesters took to the streets of Sydney against a visiting Israeli head of state — Minns endorsed the police response. A Labor Premier, using state power against citizens exercising political speech.

This episode has brought out a streak quite worrying and not yet seen. When challenged on the crackdown on pro-Palestinian demonstrations, Minns said there was a “tinderbox” in the community. He acknowledged that protest organisers may hold “sincerely held views” but insisted they were “unleashing forces that they can’t control.” He argued that his responsibility was “in Sydney” — a remarkable statement from a man who had taken a fully funded trip to another country’s conflict zone two decades earlier to build relationships that now appear to be shaping his domestic policy. Citizens can’t be trusted to handle their own social conscience and exercise their own democratic rights? This is despotic

This is the moment that distinguishes the neo-technocrat from mere centrism. A politician with genuine convictions — even conservative ones — has a framework for responding to dissent. They might disagree with the protesters. They might think the politics are complicated. But they have a principled position on civil liberties, on the role of police, on the right of citizens to demonstrate. Minns reached not for principle but for the instrument available to him to protect relationships formed two decades earlier.

He then sought to ban the phrase “globalise the intifada” from public use. His argument, delivered with a straight face, was that while he acknowledged the historic meaning of the word intifada — two periods of Palestinian resistance — its use in Sydney carried a different meaning. His meaning. The meaning he had decided it carried.

He defined what the phrase means. He declared his own definition inappropriate. He moved to ban it. Blatant autocracy

The circular logic didn’t just fail morally — it failed legally. The NSW Court of Appeal found that related laws introduced after the Bondi attack unconstitutionally burden the implied freedom of political communication. Even a member of the Jewish Council of Australia, Dr Naama Blatman, called the proposed reforms “anti-protest laws” that “would not make the community safer,” adding that they were “borne of political pressure, not a genuine consideration for the safety of our community.”

It is becoming clearer that our current generation of leaders with their disconnection from real people are insistent upon denying their electorate an inspiring vision for the future. To the premier, we are all just entities in a system.

Bibliography

Primary sources — Minns’s own words

Minns, C. (2015). Maiden speech to the NSW Legislative Assembly. Parliament of New South Wales.

Minns, C. (2023, March 26). Victory speech, Kogarah. Quoted in Malay Mail.

Minns, C. (2025, December 22). Media conference on proposed protest law reforms. Quoted in SBS News: ‘Tinderbox’ could set fire: Minns defends protest ban amid ‘kneejerk’ criticism. https://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/protest-laws-palestine-action-group/7aufdkhtt

Minns, C. (2025). Quoted in: The politics of protest: Minns faces a backlash over double standards and undermining free speech. New Politics Substack. https://newpolitics.substack.com/p/the-politics-of-protest-minns-faces

Journalism and analysis

Halevi, E.A. (2023, April). Chris Minns’s Victory in New South Wales Consolidates the Labor Right’s Hegemony. Jacobin. https://jacobin.com/2023/04/chris-minns-nsw-australian-labor-party-hard-left-right-neoliberalism

Scott, E., Di Iorio, O. & Proust, M. (2025, December 22). ‘Tinderbox’ could set fire: Minns defends protest ban amid ‘kneejerk’ criticism. SBS News. https://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/protest-laws-palestine-action-group/7aufdkhtt

Al Jazeera (2026, February 10). More Australia protests over police crackdown on rally against Herzog visit. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/2/10/more-australia-protests-over-police-crackdown-on-rally-against-herzog-visit

Green Left (2026, February 12). Minns orders police violence against Palestine movement. https://www.greenleft.org.au/2026/1447/analysis/minns-orders-police-violence-against-palestine-movement

Michael West Media (2026, March 30). Groomed, captured, deployed. How the Israel lobby runs Chris Minns. https://michaelwest.com.au/groomed-captured-deployed-how-the-israel-lobby-runs-chris-minns/

The Guardian (2026, March 5). Pro-Palestine protest organisers ‘communists’, NSW Premier Chris Minns says. https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2026/mar/05/pro-palestine-protest-organisers-communists-nsw-premier-chris-minns-ntwnfb

Background and context

Wikipedia. Chris Minns. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Minns

Wikipedia. 2025 Sydney Harbour Bridge protest. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Sydney_Harbour_Bridge_protest

JURIST (2025, March 19). Pro-Palestine group files legal challenge against Australia state’s anti-protest laws. https://www.jurist.org/news/2025/03/pro-palestine-group-files-legal-challenge-against-australia-states-anti-protest-laws/

Palestine Action Group Sydney (2026, February). Statement on Herzog visit and protest response. Quoted in Al Jazeera.

Blatman, N. (2025, December 22). Quoted in SBS News. Jewish Council of Australia executive member.

AI has been used in this article to design the diagram and bibliography