Roger Cook and WA Labor’s prospect at next year’s election in the hands of Anthony Albanese

Anthony Albanese and West Australian Premier Roger Cook. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Sharon Smith

The biggest electoral danger facing Roger Cook and his government lies not in the fine print of the budget papers but some 3290km away in The Lodge.

The budget handed down by the Premier and his Treasurer, Rita Saffioti, is unusual in that it is both this government’s first and its last before the next election.

The two have delivered yet another hefty surplus, stemming from the state’s unrivalled iron ore royalties and its guaranteed if increasingly unjustifiable GST share. WA has been enjoying, and continues to enjoy, the sort of budget surpluses normally seen only in the fantasy realm that are forward estimates.

But surplus aside, this budget – much like Cook’s leadership itself – appears steady if unspectacular.

The cash handouts will have been long forgotten by the time next March’s election rolls around.

Beyond the ongoing and seemingly endless rivers of cash being funnelled into the government’s longstanding pet Metronet project, there is little by way of bold new projects to show for the financial windfall enjoyed by the state in recent years and catch the imagination of the public.

In the meantime, Perth continues to feel the strain on infrastructure, hospitals and housing that comes from the arrival of another 2000 people into the state each week.

The government’s extraordinary parliamentary numbers – it holds 53 of 59 lower house seats – mean it surely cannot lose the next election but the WA Liberal Party is increasingly buoyed by the idea that it can leverage the unpopularity of Anthony Albanese to accelerate its rebuild.

Tellingly, the latest advertisement released by the WA Liberal Party at the weekend features the Prime Minister’s face alongside that of Cook.

Almost every parliamentary question time, the opposition grills the government on issues that are primarily in the federal domain.

Issues such as the monitoring of the released immigration detainees, Tanya Plibersek’s ­nature-positive laws, and uncertainty over the state’s live export trade are common lines of attack.

As much as the Cook government ridicules the opposition for continuing to raise federal matters in state parliament, federal Labor’s successful leverage of Mark McGowan’s profile in 2022 shows voters don’t ­always care about demarcations between state and federal when assessing merits of the respective parties.

Increasingly, it appears that the Prime Minister’s frequent visits to the west – honouring a commitment he made before the last election – are being enjoyed more by Liberal leader Libby Mettam and her colleagues than they are by Cook and his government.