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Opinion
What McGowan’s Banksia Hill brawl says about his politics (and WA’s)
Gareth Parker
ColumnistIt is the latest mark of how Mark McGowan dominates West Australian political culture that he can consign perhaps the state’s most respected woman – plus his own party’s feminist trailblazer – to the category of mere “activists”.
That was the label he attached to Professor Fiona Stanley and Dr Carmen Lawrence, who disagree profoundly with his government’s hard line on youth justice.
Dr Carmen Lawrence, WA Premier Mark McGowan, and Professor Fiona Stanley. Credit: Getty/Supplied
Stanley is the 2003 Australian of the Year and was so admired that a former WA Labor government named the state’s largest and most technologically advanced tertiary hospital after her.
Lawrence was Australia’s first female premier, a federal minister too, and Labor’s first female national president (elected by the first ballot of ALP members for the position) holding portfolios including Aboriginal affairs and education along the journey.
Fundamentally, the pair believe the government’s response to allegations of excessive force and solitary confinement in the state’s juvenile custodial estate lacked compassion and humanity.
Lawrence – who is also at odds with the premier on the question of whether gas giant Woodside should sponsor their mutual favourite football team, the Fremantle Dockers – believes the age of criminal responsibility should be raised from 10 to 14 and has described the government’s response as “perfunctory”.
Stanley, who participated in the premier’s hastily convened 90-minute “stakeholder” meeting last week, believes it was a waste of time.
“My plan was to do what I have always done. Work with politicians and others in power, highlighting the best research in the world to influence policy. I hoped this might convince the government that their approach was not only failing but it was making the situation worse,” she wrote in an opinion piece in The West Australian on Tuesday.
After a series of violent incidents of damage at the Banksia Hill detention centre, a group of about 20 detainees was transferred to a specified juvenile-only unit at the state’s maximum-security adult prison Casuarina.
Lawrence wants the juveniles out of there by Christmas.
The issue, Stanley believes, is becoming an international stain on WA’s reputation.
Eye-opening research by the Telethon Kids Institute in 2018 found that 89 per cent of detainees at Banksia Hill had at least one neurodevelopmental impairment, while one in three suffered Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder.
Professor Stanley said the best evidence showed punitive lock-ups exacerbated aggression and culturally appropriate therapeutic approaches delivered superior outcomes (eight in 10 detainees at Banksia Hill are juvenile.)
“What more can we do? What is the block? Where is the premier who led us through COVID, with all the data and evidence informing his actions?” she asked.
He is in the same place he has been for a long while now: with the voting public well and truly on side.
“At the end of the day, I think I have a fundamental difference of opinion with some people,” McGowan said on Monday.
“That is, if you commit very serious crimes, serious assaults, grievous bodily harms, homicides, sexual assaults — you’re going to end up in detention.
“I actually think that’s where some people should be, whereas others don’t think they should ever end up in detention.”
It’s the sort of thing you might expect a Liberal law-and-order police minister to say, but it is exactly the political ground McGowan now dominates.
It’s another illustration of how the conservative side of politics in WA has absolutely nowhere to go.
With the biggest war chest in WA history, McGowan emphasises his conservative economic credentials, paying down debt as every other budget sinks further into red, and taking on unions with “responsible” pay offers so as not to add to inflationary pressures.
Already the owner of a $6 billion operating surplus, fuelled by surging mining royalties, he has nonetheless managed to extract even more cash from the miners.
Last week, he announced a $1 billion “community investment fund” underpinned by $250 million from iron ore majors BHP and Rio, $100 million from Gina Rinehart’s Hancock Prospecting, and $50 million apiece from Woodside, Chevron, Mineral Resources, with more requests for donations coming.
The photo opportunity of a beaming McGowan alongside resources company bosses on the South Perth foreshore evoked a famous photo of 38 years earlier: when a grinning Brian Burke and Bob Hawke were flanked by tycoons of the age including Alan Bond, Laurie Connell, John Roberts, Ric Stowe and James McCusker.
That 1984 assembly was for the John Curtin Foundation, a fundraising vehicle for the Labor Party that received much attention at the “WA Inc” royal commission.
There is no suggestion that McGowan has done anything untoward in courting donations from these mining companies. McGowan’s fund is not for party political purposes, but for feel-good baubles like a new Aboriginal Cultural Centre, or redevelopments of Perth Zoo or the Concert Hall.
It seems the miners are now funding projects directly, in addition to their royalty payments, while the donor/developer class (as has been chronicled previously) are very much in the Labor camp, leaving the Liberals increasingly penniless as well as friendless.
It can still get worse.
Earlier this month I highlighted that at federal level, it was remarkable after the ScoMo wipeout only Ian Goodenough in Moore represents the Liberal Party in the Perth metropolitan area.
It prompted a message from a former state Liberal minister, who knows the northern coastal suburbs intimately, who said that if Labor had really tried it might have won Moore too.
After sticking solidly with the Liberals at state and federal levels for most of the last 30 years, there was no sense of buyers’ remorse from voters.
“The general feel is, ‘We chanced our hand on a Labor MP … it has worked out even better than we thought’,” the former minister said.
“If they keep the steady hand that they have shown so far, they could get a swing to them up here.”
Consider this too: there is still an assumption among some Liberals that electoral gravity will bring traditional blue ribbon seats like Churchlands, Nedlands, South Perth, Carine and Hillarys back toward the blue team.
But what if, say, Kate Chaney and Simon Holmes a Court get themselves organised between now and 2025?
Could a well-funded, well-targeted teal campaign eye Cottesloe?
While McGowan outflanks the Liberals from the economic and law-and-order right, what if the teals were to mop up the evolving environmental and social sensibilities now apparently prevalent in some of Perth’s richest areas?
The Nationals, led by Mia Davies, would appear to be on much safer ground in their traditional constituencies.
The experience of both the federal election and last weekend’s Victorian election is the Nats have significantly outperformed their traditionally senior partners.
But the threat for Liberals is for survival.