Australian prime minister Anthony Albanese speaks to media after a parochial church service in Canberra on July 26, 2022. STR AFP SYDNEY - The Australian Labor PartyLabor Party in New South Wales claimed power in an election on Saturday night, with voters backing the centre-left party's pledges on anti-privatization and cost of living relief.
The election in Australia's most populous state had been touted as a tight race between the incumbent Liberal-National coalition and Labor, but the vote count showed Labor on Sunday that it needed 47 seats to form a majority government, after three terms in opposition.
The win marks the endorsement of Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, who joined his state counterpart Chris Minns in Sydney on the polling day.
A huge congratulations to ChrisMinnsMP and the whole NSW Labor team on your election victory, Albanese said on Saturday.
Labor's win in New South Wales means that the party now governs at state and federal level across Australia's mainland, leaving island state Tasmania as the conservative outlier.
After 12 years in opposition, the people of New South Wales have voted for a fresh start, Minns told supporters in Sydney late on Saturday.
The people of New South Wales voted to put in place a government that would put people at the heart of decision-making Labor's campaign in the state, which included a pledge to rule out further privatization of state assets and a promise to boost public sector wages amid cost-of-living concerns.
Stubborn inflation posed a challenge for the Reserve Bank of Australia, which lifted its cash rate this month to its highest level in more than a decade.
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Minns said Labor had commonsense initiatives that would help bring down the cost of living in the state. His government, once sworn in, would prepare laws to protect Sydney Water from a future sell-off, he said.
In the lead up to the election, the outgoing prime minister, Dominic Perrottet, a social conservative Catholic and former state treasurer, resigned in 2021 after a corruption watchdog probe into whether she was involved in conduct that constituted or involved a breach of public trust Albanese urged voters in his home state to back Labor, saying the coalition government was in shambles due to infighting.