‘He wanted to charge ahead and be the hero’: colleagues hope Dominic Perrottet has learned from backflips

In the second week of October, as New South Wales was emerging from a winter of stultifying Covid-19 lockdown, new premier Dominic Perrottet quickly set about positioning himself as the optimistic face of post-pandemic Australia.

Introducing himself to an electorate which had clung to the cautious leadership of Gladys Berejiklian like a security blanket during the Delta wave, the new premier did not seek to define himself as a business-as-usual replacement.

Instead, at a series of press conferences held in pubs across Sydney, Perrottet arrived as the beer drinking, freedom-loving leader determined to push Covid-19 off the front page by ushering in a new era of living with the virus.

The chief medical officer, Dr Kerry Chant, was notably sidelined, while the quarantine requirements for international arrivals, which had been a mainstay of Australia's Covid response, were quickly scrapped. In November, restrictions were further eased ahead of the scheduled roadmap set by Berejiklian before her departure.

"We can't live here in a hermit kingdom," Perrottet said on 15 October, announcing that NSW would re-open its borders.

"We've got to open up."

For a while, the cheerful crash-or-crash-through style worked. From the end of lockdown to early December, Covid cases remained stable in NSW, while the number of hospitalisations actually fell. On 8 December Perrottet gave a speech at the National Press Club in which he pushed for state and commonwealth reform "as we move beyond the pandemic".