Your ultimate promise tracker for the 2025 WA election

The election writs will be issued today, triggering the formal start of the 2025 WA election, but the campaign has been steaming along for more than six months.

If you were a little bleary-eyed after the Christmas Holidays and still couldn’t stomach the thought of politics up to Australia Day, fear not – WAtoday has the tool for you.

WA Premier Roger Cook and Liberal leader Libby Mettam.Credit: WAtoday

We have compiled a list of the four major parties’ largest commitments so you can keep track of who’s promised what and with how much of your hard-earned taxpayer dollars.

It’s raining money

As of February 4, WAtoday has tracked more than 200 major promises dating as far back as February 2023 when the Liberals and Nationals agreed to a $300 million package for cost-of-living charities.

Collectively Labor, the Liberals, the Nationals, and the Greens have announced nearly $16 billion in promises.

The Liberals’ promises have reached $4.94 billion thanks in part to their commitment to cut an electricity service charge from every household account by 46.3 cents per day – costing $676 million over four years.

The Nationals came in third place with $4.1 billion thanks mostly to its pledge to lift the payroll tax threshold to $1.3million which would cost the budget $1.16 billion in forgone revenue.

Included in the Nationals’ tally is its pledge to establish a regional headworks fund to kickstart regional housing developments which was costed at $1 billion over 10 years.

Labor has promised the most individual pledges by far with their tally reaching a little more than $3 billion.

With a total of $2.4 billion, the Greens’s tally jumped on Monday with its intention to push whatever party wins government to fully fund schools – including a $1.6 billion four-year program to feed every public school student in the state.

The incumbent government’s biggest commitment so far is the $375 million southern suburbs road package which includes the Kwinana Freeway widening.

Despite the mountains of money piling up political analyst and executive dean at the University of Notre Dame Australia Martin Drum said it had done little to change the widely accepted view that Labor will win on March 8, but that Roger Cook hadn’t gained any ground either.

“I would say, broadly speaking, that we walked into this year with the expectation that Labor would win comfortably, and nothing’s changed,” he said.

“I wouldn’t say that Labor or Liberal have gained ground from this to date.”

One thing that is telling from the tracker is that Labor are worried about their seats in the regions.

“There’s been a fair bit of travel since the start of the year, and there are a lot of regional focused initiatives, I think that might show that they’re worried about how they’re travelling in the regions and might see themselves as vulnerable,” Drum said.

In addition to bigger regional commitments like the $250 million regional road fund, Labor has been sprinkling election sweeteners in Warren-Blackwood, Geraldton and Kalgoorlie.

Albany has also been given special attention.

Held on a margin of 11 per cent by Rebecca Stephens, Labor would love to keep that seat as an outpost in the regions.

It has so far made eight significant funding promises equalling more than $100 million specific to that seat including $50 million to upgrade South Coast Highway and $22 million for the expansion of a learning block at North Albany Senior High School.

The Liberals and Nationals are also targeting that area with promises to build 8500 homes and upgrade Albany Airport to the tune of $14 million respectively.

Under the hood

Unfortunately, millions of dollars of promises are missing from the Liberals and Labor’s columns because many small announcements as low as $5000 are not included on the parties’ websites and are announced in a low-key fashion on MP and candidate social media profiles.

Drum said these commitments were important for candidates because it gave them something to say to community members and fodder for their social media.

“Social media needs content, and they’ll be looking to post multiple times a day, and they’ll be reiterating some of those things,” he said.

“They’ll be sponsoring them so that they’re elevated in your algorithms and your feeds, and we’ll be bombarded with them more and more.”

The Nationals provided their full list of promises but WAtoday hit a brick wall asking Labor and the Liberals for a full list of its smaller commitments, with both saying they would provide those lists once their commitments had been independently verified.

Expect to see costings become more of a focus for Labor over the next month as it looks to sow doubt over the Liberals, who have refused to have their commitments costed by Treasury.

Liberal leader Libby Mettam doubled down on that on Tuesday.

“Unlike Labor, we’re focused on the right priorities and we will be providing our costings, as is a matter of course, in the lead-up to the election,” she said.

Mettam said Labor’s costings could not be trusted either pointing out blowouts in Labor’s Metronet projects.

Cook said his party’s commitments were based upon careful consideration of the cost to the West Australian taxpayer and its impact on the budget.

“You can’t say the same thing for the other side, they’re around about $7 billion mark and heading drastically fast towards deficit scenarios if they were in charge of the budget,” he said.

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