Latest wipeout a nasty reality check for WA Liberals
We thought the Liberals would never deliver a worse result than the one we saw in Western Australia in 2021.
We were wrong.
The Liberals may have emerged with more seats than the meagre two they held after the 2021 bloodbath, but Saturday’s defeat is arguably a much worse outcome for the party.
Unlike 2021, there’s no Mark McGowan and there’s no Covid pandemic.
The 2021 vote was almost a wartime election, with West Australians behind their closed border smitten with the Labor government they believed was keeping them safe.
This time, the Liberals were up against a Labor government seeking a third term, running a groaning health system, in the middle of a cost-of-living crisis, and with a deeply unpopular Labor government in Canberra.
Yet one after another, the former crown jewel seats that were expected to turn blue again stayed red.
Churchlands, Nedlands, Bateman, Carine, South Perth, Kalamanda, Mount Lawley, Hillarys, Dawesville, Murray-Wellington, Jandakot and Scarborough were seats that provided the backbone of the WA Liberal Party for decades.
They had all been lost over the course of 2017 and 2021.
Most, if not all, were supposed to come back into the fold, but only three have been confirmed as Liberal gains so far.
Privately, no one expected the Liberals to win.
There was, however, an expectation they would gain enough seats to become a viable opposition and put them in a position to challenge Labor in 2029. That now looks like wishful thinking.
Star recruit Basil Zempilas looked like a man who was regretting his life choices as he watched the result unfold, as the prospect of eight years in opposition appeared to dawn on him.
Many had assumed the lifelong Liberal voters who supported McGowan in 2021 would automatically return to the fold.
That clearly did not happen.
Plenty inside the Liberals on Sunday were clinging to the overall 11.2 per cent two-party-preferred vote swing across the state as some sort of proof the party is on the right track in WA. That seems heroically optimistic.
That swing needs to be seen in the context of the insane 2021 two-party-preferred outcome of almost 70 per cent to 30 per cent.
An 11.2 per cent swing off that high-water mark is not the triumph some are touting it to be.
The swing was not uniform, and was inflated by the backlash against Labor in the regions, where the Albanese government’s sheep export ban and Premier Roger Cook’s gun reforms are much bigger issues.
Former heartland metropolitan seats have not come back to the party: Scarborough, South Perth and Riverton were all held by the government on margins of less than 11 per cent but all remain in Labor hands.
No party has ever run more dead in a seat it holds than Labor did in Nedlands – held for more than 30 years by former premier Charles Court and then his son, Richard, who would become premier 10 years after taking over from his father in the seat.
The Labor incumbent was helicoptered to a spot in the upper house, and replaced by an underfunded candidate who knew her only job in the marginal seat was to be a name on a ballot paper.
Liberal candidate Jonathan Huston ran a long and well-funded campaign. And yet the Liberals only just scraped home.
That should be a stark reminder of the troubles facing the Liberal Party right now.
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