Labor wins big in WA, but shouldn’t take state for granted

Antony Green has returned to the fae-folk. Annabel Crabb’s flesh-cravat has been tucked away. David Speers has been powered down. “Laboration Day” arrived and conservative pundits everywhere had the paper bags wrestled from their hands as they attempted the proverbial Budd Dwyer. But as the nation’s fever wrapped up late on election night, Western Australia was a step behind, as always: still counting votes, gazing into our mega-pit navels.

It was a massacre across the board. With Labor’s Trish Cook claiming the new seat of Bullwinkle on Saturday, Labor now holds 11 of 16 seats in WA. Coming off the back of a state election where the Liberal Party found itself completely gutted — for the second time in a row — these are deeply grim times for the state’s conservatives.

Curtin was one of the key battlegrounds, with teal Kate Chaney fighting off a challenge from Tom White. Curtin was one of the Coalition’s shock losses in 2022 — a classically safe Liberal seat solely comprising blue-bloods and people who lined up to have their copies of Lazarus Rising signed upon release. Losing it should have signalled a dire need for change within the Coalition’s top brass. They didn’t do that, but they did throw a wheelbarrow of money at the electorate, with Curtin being dubbed “the seven-figure seat” after Chaney and White spent more than $1 million each over the past month.

Curtin is a neat little allegory for the current state of the Liberal Party, in that it no longer exists. The party’s traditional base has evaporated, and as Chaney (and many others) has proven, it is not coming back. It was the archetypal vision of the Liberal base, as it has been for more than 50 years. But it’s hard to see it — both the base and the seat — ever returning.

If we look at the fate of WA’s state Liberals as an omen, the federal party will be in the wilderness for what may be more than a decade. The very infrastructure that makes any political party work has been decimated, and there is no easy path to rejuvenation without the fundamentals that attract new talent. The federal Liberals don’t seem to have a Basil Zempilas type keen to lead them, rabidly, into an uncertain future — lucky them, I suppose.

Elsewhere, former dolphin trainer and cop Sam Lim strengthened his lead over the Liberals in Tangney with a nearly 5% swing towards him (at time of writing). Tangney was once a very “Howard’s battlers” suburbanites safe seat for the Libs, and the fact it has only slipped further from their grasp says a lot about the loss of that voting bloc — as well as the traditional toffs and posh-os.

WA’s most exciting race was in Fremantle, where Labor’s Josh Wilson found himself in the fight of his life against teal candidate Kate Hullet. Hullet almost dethroned Simone McGurk in the state election, and brought the same energy and zeal to her battle with Wilson. Her community-focused campaign met some speed bumps when given national scrutiny — her vision suits that of someone running for mayor, faltering when it comes to explaining the hows and whys of federal policies.

Her inability to answer whether or not she would cooperate with a Dutton government at a recent “politics at the pub” debate also turned off some of her more progressive followers. But with the Greens — which a year ago could have waged a campaign to seriously threaten Josh Wilson — running a race like people who’ve already lost, Hullet was primed to steer Fremantle’s younger progressive demographic and new bougie-settlers into a win.

She came incredibly close. Although Wilson got 40% of the primary vote, Hullet was kept aloft by preferences, and the electorate spent what must have been five agonising days for Hullet and Wilson going over the numbers again and again until Wilson eked out a victory.

Ultimately, Hullet was hobbled by what seems to be a misunderstanding of the scope of the federal seat. Her campaign concentrated on, and was informed by, the inner-city living of Fremantle (and White Gum Valley’s) new bourgeois, less so the lower- and middle-income workers of its sprawling suburbs.

Still, Fremantle, the seat of John Curtin, has been a Labor seat literally forever. For Hullet to get as close as she did should make the ALP stop and think about how it takes certain aspects of WA for granted, and how the resulting resentment will build against the party in the years to come. Fremantle traditional demographics will only continue to shift as the old union rusted-ons continue to die off and gentrification continues to replace the “Fremantle character”.

If there’s any lesson to be gleaned from Western Australia’s key races, it’s that the sand is shifting beneath the major parties. As with elsewhere, it’s was less Labor’s unbridled brilliance than the Liberals’ comical incompetence that resulted in the latter’s electoral annihilation. Using the WA Liberals as a guiding star, their national equivalents appeared doomed to grope sand along the once-welcoming Cottesloe beach for years to come.