Ahead of the state’s election on March 8, Western Australia Premier Roger Cook will today visit the state’s governor to have the writs issued to place the state government into caretaker mode. Here’s why the poll could turn out to be deeply influential in the coming year.
The maths
Short of a miracle, 2025 will mark the start of a third term for Labor, which is coming off two stonking consecutive victories under Cook’s predecessor, Mark McGowan. In 2017, the ALP took 41 of the 59 lower house seats, in the process taking 19 seats from the Liberals and one from the Nationals. In 2021 McGowan — having peered deeply into the psyche of his state and locked out the eastern states (a move that might have been pretty popular regardless of COVID-19) — won a landslide that made any other government claiming that status look stupid. Under the state daddy, Labor took 53 lower house seats and reduced the Libs to a lower house presence that wouldn’t qualify for the carpool lane.
Further, Labor’s dominance allowed them to re-jig the voting system for the upper house, abolishing malapportionment, which gave greater weight to the largely conservative regional voting base.
In the teeth of that, Libby Mettam’s Liberals have essentially no chance of forming government. Meanwhile, Cook has been using his powerful position — not least because both federal parties need to win over WA to form government later this year — to dictate terms to Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, most notably in his lobbying on behalf of the fossil fuels industry against greater regulations.
The opposition
We don’t have time to go into all of the WA Liberals’ many, many gifts to fans of political dysfunction, but here are some of the key points:
The leadership of the party has changed five times since 2017, including every Liberal elected to the lower house in 2021 (all two of them). The fallout from that generational wipeout resulted in an internal review that shed light on the background dealings of the ominously named “Clan”, centred on the party’s right wing. The review was so scathing it resulted in defamation threats and was modified.
The most recent farce was the leaking of mysteriously sourced polling from an “unnamed businessman” that predicted a “wipeout” for the Liberals under Mettam (yep, they could lose *aaalllll this*) if she didn’t stand down in favour of Perth Lord Mayor and Liberal candidate Basil Zempilas. That this polling was run credulously in WA’s only daily newspaper, which in turn is owned by Zempilas’ employers at Seven West Media, just adds to the WA of it all.
The implications
The March 8 poll has the potential to have a big influence on the federal election. As we covered in 2022, the McGowan wipeout wasn’t just important due to his personal popularity boosting the Labor brand in a state where it’s traditionally struggled — it was about the base and resources it provided for an election campaign.
“Campaigns are effectively run by professional staffers in politician’s offices,” senior lecturer in politics and international relations at Notre Dame University Martin Drum told Crikey in 2022. “Paid staffers work on volunteer coordinating, media messaging, advertising strategy, social media. So that core of the campaign has been ripped out. The Liberal Party has two lower house MPs at state level — and one of those is in Busselton. So that’s one metropolitan seat where they would usually have, say, 30.”
A big swing back to the state Liberals in March puts a dent in that infrastructure.
Plus, any return to even a semblance of political normalcy — which, minus McGowan and COVID-19 one would expect — should result in an objectively huge swing back to the Liberals that still gets them nowhere near government. Demos AU’s poll from November 2024 predicted a 14% swing against the ALP which would net the Libs roughly a dozen seats — i.e. more or less what they had after the demolition in 2017. But one suspects the near-inevitability of a result that greatly improves the Liberals’ numbers won’t stop it from fuelling a lot of “WA voters send Anthony Albanese a message” talk in the media.
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