At the NSW election, Labor is poised for a clean sweep – but Perrottet’s gamble may pay off

Every election campaign, in its final days, stumbles into absurdity. It can’t be helped. It is the beast.

The final week of the New South Wales state campaign began with a Coalition promise to raise the WestConnex speed limit from 80 to 90km/h. The WestConnex is one of Sydney’s sprawling network of toll roads, linking the city’s approaches to the demographic heartland in the western suburbs.

But just the same: a single speed limit on a single road.

This news was duly dropped to The Daily Telegraph and splashed as the paper’s front-page lead. Readers learned the time commuters would save could be “as much as 18 minutes every week”.

Related: Everything you need to know about the NSW election: when is it, how to vote and who will win?

Two or three minutes a day. At best. On a single road.

So is this a political machine flailing like a fungus monster from The Last of Us or a highly professional election-winning operation ensuring not a single pebble is left unturned?

We’ll know on Saturday night.

The premier, Dominic Perrottet, believes this election will be decided in western Sydney, where commutes are exhausting and long. Many in the workforce not only drive to work, but drive for it. Two or three minutes a day? Maybe one vote in 100 won or held. Worth a shot for something that costs nothing to the budget.

In Labor’s trenches, Chris Minns is generally playing a steadier hand. But he’s offering less. No state-funded savings schemes for children from better-off homes. No high-risk challenge to the all-powerful pokies lobby (of which, more in a moment).

In Kogarah, his electorate. Minns holds the narrowest Labor margin in the state (0.1%). Conversely, he is well-placed to win the big show on 25 March, thereby completing Labor’s clean sweep of every mainland state and the commonwealth.

But it is not a sure thing. The latest Resolve polling in the Sydney Morning Herald suggests Labor has gained a 4.5% state-wide swing since the 2019 election. Labor needs a net gain of nine seats to govern in its own right. On a consistent swing it needs 6.5% to grab Parramatta and majority government.

But Resolve says voter mood is highly variable across the state. And 16% of the electorate is still undecided. Inside the Liberal machine, the assessment is that voters are still “soft”. They can still shift. The momentum is in their favour, they say. It’s not over.

That the Coalition remains in the race at all, after four premiers and 12 years in office, is almost entirely down to the leader himself.

A Catholic father of six (now seven), a member of the hard right, Perrottet came to the job with a biography bound to raise hackles in a state where Liberal premiers for decades have been moderates.

In office, he has subverted the stereotype. Voluntary assisted dying legislation passed on his watch. He didn’t vote for it, but nor did he direct parliamentary tacticians to blow it up.

In repeated flood emergencies, his response has been empathetic and sustained, winning praise from no less a judge than Anthony Albanese.

His principled stand against the pokies lobby has also demonstrated courage, not just against the incorrigible hardmen of a multibillion dollar addiction industry, but against the more pusillanimous in his own party room and his Coalition partner, the Nationals.

Related: Dominic Perrottet on poking the ClubsNSW beast: ‘I didn’t start with many friends’

Minns has demonstrated no such spine. While Perrottet is promising mandatory cashless gaming cards in his next term, Labor is offering another trial of the cards involving just 500 poker machines in a state awash with 90,000. It demonstrates, at best, a lack of seriousness.

Polling indicates poker machines and the harm they do are a lower order issue for voters grappling with a housing crisis, towering interest rates, household debt and the steepling cost of living.

But Perrottet’s stand produces a halo effect. Liberal party strategists believe voters see it as proof of leadership. And that’s showing in the polls. It says something about the grip of the gambling industry in NSW that supporting the key recommendation of the Crime Commission now counts as breathtaking courage. But these are the times.

The odds are Perrottet will still lose come Saturday. Many voters will be pleased to see the back of a government that may not have produced villains as odious as Ian Macdonald and Eddie Obeid, but which elevated pork-barrelling to a governing principle under John Barilaro, Daryl Maguire and – yes – Gladys Berejiklian.

Perrottet may finish with an honourable personal defeat; Minns a rather too calculating personal victory.

Minns will doubtless be happy to take it. But Perrottet doesn’t tire. And he hasn’t given up yet.

• Hugh Riminton is national affairs editor at 10 News First