Current online betting markets for the looming NSW election show the dreadfully difficult task all of the LNP’s public relations firms now face in getting the Perrottet government reelected.

This morning, Sportsbet and Ladbrokes both have Chris Minns’ Labor team at $1.35 to win the 25 March poll, compared with $3.15 for the government of Dominic Perrottet, hoping to win a fourth four-year term.

TAB has the contest at an even more daunting task for the government, with a Labor win at $1.30 and the LNP at $3.20.

“Those figures should ring alarm bells as they are disturbingly similar to Labor leads among the online betting firms ahead of the federal election in May last year and the Victorian state poll back in November,” a spokesperson for one of the LNP’s public relations firms based in Sydney told The Bug this morning.

“Imagine how far apart the two main parties are going to be if photos emerge from that 21st birthday party with Perrottet in full Nazi regalia and pretending to gas some party guests dressed as concentration camp Jews with a fake Zyklon B spray can.

“If these odds drift out any further, we’d be approaching payout time even before the election starting gun is even fired.

“But our PR team leader Bevan Shields (The Sydney Morning Herald‘s editor) is confident we can turn things around with a spirited and forceful campaign,” he said.

Those views were echoed by the other Sydney-based LNP public relations firms, including the Daily Telegraph and its sister Sunday, The Australian, Sky News Australia and Nine Entertainment Co’s 2GB.

A spokesperson for the publicly owned LNP public relations firm, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, was equally confident.

“We’ll naturally be following the lead of all the private LNP public relations firms and we’ll adopt their usual template and present virtually a mirror image of what they think are the campaign topics de jour, such as the daily Minns gaffe that ends his dream of ever being Premier, to ensure the right outcome is achieved on polling day,” a spokesperson for ABC chair Ita Buttrose said.

Several of the state’s mainstream media outlets, while praising the dedication and enthusiasm of all the LNP public relations outfits mentioned above in trying to achieve their goals, were skeptical of their chances.

“They’ve been unable to close a Labor-winning poll margin for quite some time now and I can’t see them achieving it this time round either,” a senior politics scribe at The Saturday Paper told us.

A senior hand at The Guardian Australia concurred, adding: “Don’t get me wrong. You really have to admire these PR firms for their zeal and their tenacity but the poor buggers just don’t get that at the moment it’s Labor’s time – and turn. It doesn’t come around all that often.

“They refuse to admit that the Liberal and National parties are more on the nose than Cardinal George Pell is at the moment.”