By mid-2026, a paramedic finishing a night shift out of a Western Sydney ambulance station is being paid under a deal her union settled for increases of between 11 and 29 per cent over four years — arguably the single most concrete thing the Minns government has delivered since taking office (NSW Government ministerial release, Dec-2023). But she still commutes from a suburb the best part of an hour away, because the dedicated "essential worker housing" Labor promised at the 2023 election has, as of mid-2026, produced building sites rather than keys: construction on the first project is not due to start until early 2026, and key workers are not expected to move in until late 2027 — months after the next election (NSW Government/Landcom media releases, 2024-2025, approx.). Her drive in crosses at least one tolled motorway, now capped at $50 a week rather than $60 — cheaper than three years ago, but still priced under contracts her government has not renegotiated. Multiply her by the state's roughly 400,000 public sector workers, and the last three years look less like a single story than a ledger with several columns still open.
Chris Minns led NSW Labor to victory on 25 March 2023, ending twelve years of Coalition government, and was sworn in as the state's 47th Premier three days later (NSW Parliament; NSW Government, "Premier of NSW," Mar-2023). His platform rested on five specific, checkable commitments: end the public sector wages cap; commission an independent review of Sydney's toll system; use planning reform to lift housing supply; build dedicated housing for essential workers; and stop any further privatisation of state-owned assets. With the next election due under the state's fixed four-year term in March 2027, this is the mid-point ledger against each.
What the government did
On wages, the government moved fastest of all. It let the Coalition's wages-cap regulation lapse from 1 September 2023, funded a 4.5 per cent pay rise for more than 400,000 public sector workers in its first Budget on 19 September 2023, and formally repealed the cap by passing the Industrial Relations Amendment Act 2023 on 30 November 2023 — a change, and its ongoing cost to the budget, examined in depth in a companion piece on this site.
On tolls, it introduced a $60-a-week toll cap on 1 January 2024 and commissioned Professor Allan Fels AO and Dr David Cousins AM to review Sydney's wider tolling system. Their final report, delivered 16 July 2024, ran to 42 recommendations for a single, network-wide, distance-based pricing structure overseen by the pricing regulator IPART (NSW Treasury, Independent Toll Review, Final Report, 16-Jul-2024) — also covered in more depth elsewhere on this site.
On housing supply, it rezoned land around 31 well-located transport stations under the Transport Oriented Development program from 2024, introduced a Low and Mid-Rise Housing policy allowing terraces, dual occupancies and shop-top apartments as of right near centres and stations from 28 February 2025, and stood up a Housing Delivery Authority to fast-track large developments from January 2025 (NSW Department of Planning, Housing and Infrastructure, TOD and LMR policy documents, 2024-2025).
On essential-worker housing, the 2024-25 Budget committed $450 million to a Key Worker Build to Rent Program, intended to deliver more than 400 homes at a discount to market rent for nurses, paramedics, teachers, police and firefighters on surplus government land, led by the state developer Landcom, plus roughly 500 further places for regional health workers (NSW Government media releases, 2024; NSW Budget Paper No. 3, 2024-25). The first site, the former WestConnex construction compound at Camperdown, is due to begin building in early 2026, with the first key workers able to move in from late 2027 (NSW Government/Landcom media releases, 2024-2025, approx.).
And on privatisation, the government acted quickest of all: the Constitution Amendment (Sydney Water and Hunter Water) Bill, introduced 10 May 2023 and passed by both Houses on 1 June 2023, added a new provision to the NSW Constitution Act requiring both utilities to stay in public ownership unless a future Parliament passes a further Act to undo it (NSW Parliament, bill history; legislation.nsw.gov.au).
The strongest case
The promises it could keep by itself, it kept quickly — and it chose the hard version of the rest
On the commitments it could deliver through executive and legislative action alone, the government moved with real speed. The wages cap was gone within six months of taking office, and by the end of 2024 the flow-on pay deals for teachers, nurses, midwives and paramedics were locked in as signed industrial agreements, not announcements. The Sydney Water and Hunter Water protection passed within ten weeks of the election — the fastest of the five commitments to become law — closing off, by constitutional amendment rather than mere policy, a privatisation path both major parties had used repeatedly over the previous two decades.
On the two hardest promises, it also attempted the structurally difficult version of the policy rather than the popular-but-shallow one. Legislating housing density near transport as of right, rather than fighting it precinct by precinct through councils, is the first sustained attempt of its kind in NSW in a generation; commissioning Fels rather than simply capping tolls again produced the first comprehensive independent diagnosis of Sydney's tolling system since privatisation of the network began under a previous government. Much of what makes housing and tolling hard was inherited rather than caused: three decades of under-zoning, a toll network split across thirteen separately priced roads under contracts signed years before Minns took office, and a social-housing share of the state's housing stock that had been falling since the 1990s. A government cannot fairly be judged on problems that predate it by decades — only on whether it moved the levers that were actually its own to move.
The evidence
Set against that case, the state's own data gives a genuinely mixed scorecard once the numbers for each of the five commitments are lined up side by side.
All five commitments draw on the same limited resource: the state's own budget. The NSW Auditor-General's audited accounts show the general government sector's operating deficit narrowing from $10.7 billion in 2023-24 to $5.1 billion in 2024-25 (NSW Auditor-General, State Finances 2024 and State Finances 2025); the 2025-26 Budget projects a further narrowing to around $3.0 billion that year, before a first projected surplus of $1.1 billion in 2027-28 — the same year the next Parliament will hand down its own first Budget (NSW Budget Paper No. 1, 2025-26, forward estimates, approx.).
The critique
The toughest gap is between relief and reform. The $60, now $50, toll cap is real cash back in real pockets — but it is relief layered on top of a pricing structure the government's own reviewers called unfair, not a fix to that structure. In February 2026, Roads Minister John Graham confirmed the government would not adopt the network-wide, demand-based pricing model Fels recommended, after Investment NSW's own economic analysis had backed exactly that approach (media reporting, Feb-2026, approx.). Nineteen months after the Fels report, the softer half of the promise — cash relief — had been delivered years ahead of the harder half, and the harder half has now been explicitly shelved rather than merely delayed.
Housing supply tells a similar story of ambition outrunning delivery. NSW's share of the National Housing Accord is 377,000 new homes by July 2029, a run-rate of roughly 75,400 completions a year; actual completions came in at 45,552 dwellings in 2024, a shortfall on the order of 30,000 homes a year against the Accord's own arithmetic (ABS Building Activity, Australia; National Cabinet, National Housing Accord communiqué, Aug-2023, approx.). The Housing Delivery Authority's 12-month review reported a pipeline of more than 117,000 potential homes across 351 proposals by May 2026 — a measure of projects declared eligible for fast-tracking, not of homes approved, financed or built (NSW Government, HDA 12-Month Review, May-2026).
Essential-worker housing is smaller in scale than either. Four hundred discounted-rent homes, plus roughly 500 regional places, is a modest number against a Housing Register of 67,316 households (DCJ/Homes NSW, Dec-2025) and a public sector workforce numbering in the hundreds of thousands. It is also, on the government's own timeline, a promise that will not be tested at the ballot box: the first keys are not due to be handed over until late 2027, after voters have already returned to the polls on the government's broader record.
The wages settlement, meanwhile, has become the state's largest and fastest-growing cost. Employee-related expenses reached 43.5 per cent of total state operating expenses in 2024-25, the biggest single category in the budget and still rising (NSW Auditor-General, State Finances 2025) — a decade-old pay catch-up now permanently built into the budget's base, competing every year with the housing and toll programs above for the same limited room to spend.
The government has delivered the parts of its platform that cost a signature. The parts that cost a building, or a renegotiated contract, are still under way.
What remains undone toward 2027
Add the unfinished items together and a pattern emerges: the hardest, most structural pieces of the 2023 platform are the ones still outstanding as the government heads into an election year. The network-wide toll restructure Fels recommended has been explicitly ruled out in its original form. Housing completions remain well short of the Accord's own numbers, with the LMR and TOD rezonings still converting from paper capacity into finished homes rather than occupied ones. The social housing register has grown by almost 11,000 households in eighteen months even as the $6.6 billion Building Homes for NSW program delivers its first stock (DCJ/Homes NSW waiting list data, Jun-2024 and Dec-2025; NSW Budget Paper No. 3, 2024-25). And the flagship essential-worker housing promise will not produce a single occupied home before voters judge this term.
The risk to the future
A government asking to be re-elected on delivery dates that fall after the election
The specific risk for 2027 is timing. Three of the five commitments this government made in 2023 — network-wide toll reform, hitting the Accord's housing targets, and the essential-worker housing that gave the platform its most human face — are not scheduled to be tested by outcomes voters can see before they vote again. Essential workers who were promised discounted homes near their jobs will, on the government's own published timeline, still be renting or commuting when the 2027 campaign opens. A toll network the government's own review called unfair will still be charging under the old rules, because the minister has ruled out the fix Fels proposed. And a housing shortfall measured in tens of thousands of homes a year does not close on a three-year political cycle, however fast TOD and LMR approvals are moving by then.
The fiscal backdrop tightens the risk further. The path back to surplus the 2025-26 Budget projects — a $1.1 billion surplus in 2027-28 — is thin against a wages bill that is still the fastest-growing line in the budget, and against three housing and toll programs that all draw on the same pool of money (NSW Budget Paper No. 1, 2025-26; NSW Auditor-General, State Finances 2025). A downturn, a fall in stamp duty or GST revenue, or a construction-sector shock in the next eighteen months would not just delay one program — it would force a choice between the promises still outstanding, at the exact moment the government most needs to be seen finishing them.