Do we like them?

Do we like Andrew Barr?

Our score: 7 out of 10. Nothing harmful turned up and he led real climate action, but the record we could check is thin and he has a prickly streak with the press.

Andrew Barr is the Labor politician who has run the ACT since late 2014, which makes him the longest-serving Chief Minister the territory has had. He came up through student politics and staff jobs before winning his own Assembly seat. After more than a decade in the top job, he is the face of Canberra politics, for better and worse.

His best-known stumble is a media one. In 2018 he was recorded telling an audience of communications specialists that he hated journalists and was over the mainstream media. The recording was leaked, and he later told the ABC he regretted it and apologised. It was a bad look, and it fits the thin-skinned streak his critics keep pointing to.

Then there was the Sofronoff inquiry, which looked into the ACT's top prosecutor after the Lehrmann trial. At a leaders' debate ahead of the 2024 election, Barr admitted that appointing Walter Sofronoff to run it was a mistake. He said he had acted on advice from the justice directorate and the Attorney-General. Owning it counts for something, but it was his government's call.

On the harm test, we found nothing nasty in his own words or acts. We should be upfront that we couldn't open the full articles this time, so we haven't checked his voting record line by line. What we did find is the opposite of harm: the ACT under Barr set a target of 100 per cent renewable electricity, announced in 2015, and later pushed electrification of homes and vehicles.

The recent story is about his future. Barr has insisted he isn't going anywhere, but Region Canberra reported that Labor had a rough 2025 and that his deputy, Rachel Stephen-Smith, is in the box seat to succeed him. He is steering what looks like a final term.

So would we back him? Mostly yes. He leads a government that has put climate action front and centre, and we found no slide into grievance or culture-war games. The marks are a snappy temper with the media and an inquiry appointment he admits was wrong. That's a pass on harm and a small asterisk on being nice, with the caveat that the record here is thinner than we'd normally like.