New South Wales Liberal MP Matt Kean has announced his resignation from politics after 13 years in state parliament.
Kean made the surprise announcement in a snap press conference at NSW parliament on Tuesday, hours after the Minns Labor government handed down its second budget.
He ruled out running for federal parliament and said while he did not have a job lined up he would pursue a career in the private climate and energy sector.
“I don’t have anything finalised,” he said. “I’ve been thinking about this for some time and over the weekend I made up my mind.”
With his partner, Wendy Quinn, and their son, Tom, by his side, Kean thanked his family, staff and Liberal colleagues for their support.
“I’m firmly committed to the Liberal party. I always have been, I always will be,” he said.
“And I’ll continue to fight to ensure Liberal governments are elected at the local, state and federal level.”
A powerful figure in the NSW Liberals’ moderate faction, Kean was rumoured to have been considering a move to Canberra last year if the Perrottet government was defeated at the March 2023 election.
He stayed in NSW politics after the Coalition’s loss and had been acting as the opposition’s health spokesperson.
Kean has been the Hornsby MP since the 2011 election, when he entered state parliament in the Coalition’s landslide win.
He served as the energy and environment minister and treasurer under the former Coalition government.
Kean has been a leading, and sometimes lone, public voice within the Coalition on the threat of the climate crisis and the need for Australia to act more rapidly to address it.
In late 2019, as the black summer bushfires were burning and the Morrison government and rightwing media were dismissing claims that rising greenhouse gas emissions were exacerbating fire risk, Kean argued that the country was experiencing “exactly what the scientists have warned us would happen”.
In 2020, as energy and environment minister, he was the architect of laws to build 12GW of clean energy and 2GW of energy storage in the state over the next decade. The bill passed with near-unanimous parliamentary support, winning backing from the Labor opposition and the Greens.
He later oversaw the setting of a target for NSW to cut emissions by 70% by 2035 compared with 2005 levels, which the Coalition pushed Labor to include in its emissions reduction legislation.
His resignation comes at a time when the federal Coalition is divided over its own climate and energy policy and is debating whether Australia should use nuclear power.
Earlier this year, Kean spoke out against the government subsidising Origin Energy to keep the ageing Eraring coal-fired power station open beyond its scheduled closure date in 2025.
The energy and environment minister, Penny Sharpe, ultimately decided to extend Eraring’s life by two years until 2027.
Kean on Tuesday said he was proud of having delivered the electricity infrastructure roadmap, which outlines the state’s plan to transition to renewable energy.
“It’s the pathway to deliver cheaper, cleaner, reliable energy for NSW that will drive down electricity prices,” he said. “And there’s nothing divisive about that.”
Kean took a parting shot at the treasurer, Daniel Mookhey, describing the budget he delivered on Tuesday as “the worst budget in modern history”.
“He has left us with a decade of deficits. He has blamed everyone but himself,” he said.
Kean’s resignation will force a byelection in Hornsby, an electorate in northern Sydney which has never been held by the Labor party since its creation in 1973.
