A Federal election is looming over the political horizon, but before then (probably) there is a Western Australian election to be held on March 8.
My guide to the WA election has just been published at this link by the ABC.
The guide has the usual features, a preview, a profile page for each electorate including historic and electoral background, past results and profiles of candidates. There’s the usual site indexes by candidate name, by electorate name and margin. A Legislative Council preview and candidate listing will follow in the next few days.
Tomorrow I should also publish guides for the Victorian by-elections to be held in Prahran and Werribee on 8 February. I’ll be doing a full results service that evening. I also hope to have a Federal guide up by the end of this month.
Inside the post there’s a teaser to the WA guide preview.
No election should ever, or can ever, be treated as a forgone conclusion. But it’s a principle that is hard to stick by when writing a preview for the 2025 Western Australian election.
The Labor Party was re-elected in 2021 after achieving the biggest landslide in Australian political history. That’s why it is impossible to preview where the election will be decided without revealing an underlying assumption that the Cook Labor government will be re-elected on March 8.
Or looking at the election from the Opposition’s viewpoint, it is hard to lay out a pathway for majority Liberal-led government when the Liberals won only two seats at the 2021 election. The Labor Party won 53 seats, the Nationals four, the Liberal Party further humiliated after the election when the National rather than the Liberal leader was officially recognised as Leader of the Opposition.
No other Australian election has seen a result as one-sided as the 2021 Western Australian election. In retrospect it was an election decided in early 2020 when Premier Mark McGowan closed the state’s borders as a Covid measure, and the move was initially opposed by the state and federal arms of the Liberal Party.
The Liberal position was a logical one based on the principles of federation, but was quickly abandoned as the political price became apparent. Western Australian is a state that joined federation late and grudgingly in 1900, and then voted to leave in 1933. If closing the border allowed locals to live a relatively normal life without the restrictions seen in other states, then Western Australians were unconcerned about the reaction elsewhere.
With the WA economy continuing to boom through Covid, border closures were viewed as a huge success by Western Australians. They rewarded Mark McGowan’s government as the architects of the closure and inflicted a massive defeat on the Liberal Party. The punishment continued at the May 2022 Federal election when Western Australia swung decisively against the federal Liberal Party, delivering majority status to the Albanese government.
What hope there is for an opposition revival draws on Labor’s narrow victory at the 2015 Queensland election. Labor had been smashed at the previous election in 2012, reduced to a rump of just seven members. The Liberal National Party (LNP) under leader Campbell Newman (who was not an MP before the election) won 78 of the 89 seats in Queensland’s single chamber parliament.
Over three years the Newman government seemed to go out of its way to pick a fight with every interest group in the state. In my preview for the 2015 Queensland election I began with “Three years after the most lop-sided election result in Australian history, the Liberal National Party government led by Premier Campbell Newman is bracing itself for a significant political correction as Queensland goes to the polls on January 31.”
In contrast, WA Labor’s period in office has attracted little controversy and there are no signs of the political acrimony that dogged and eventually defeated the Newman government.
Labor will be without Mark McGowan in 2025, the Premier having resigned in May 2023 after six years in office. This included two years during Covid when the Premier and his family received personal threats. McGowan’s firm stands during Covid created a strange cult of personality around a Premier previously seen as mild-mannered and perhaps a little dull. There were even reports of people having tattoos done to honour the ‘state daddy’.
With the bitterness of the Covid period passed, new Premier Cook has presided over a state economy whose biggest problems stem from a growth rate that is the envy of other states. At the end of two terms in government, the long period of planning and construction behind projects such as the Bunbury outer ring-road and Ellenbrook rail line are complete and voters seeing the benefits.
Roger Cook is no Mark McGowan, but nor is he a Campbell Newman. No-one will be honouring Cook by visiting a tattoo parlour, but nor will voters be lining up to birch the government on March 8.