Reflections on the Reignof Mark McGowan, hero of Westralia

Mark McGowan never lost votes by sticking it in the eye of ‘easternstaters’.

As premier Mark McGowan was ’a man for all seasons’. Picture: NCA NewsWire / James Gourley

People on the eastern seaboard of Australia tend to scratch their heads about Mark McGowan, the McDonalds-munching Everyman who somehow became the most popular politician on planet Earth as premier of Western Australia. As someone who migrated to WA from Sydney three years ago, let me try to shed some light.

I say migrated because we headed west in mid-2020, only a few months after McGowan had closed the WA border and made his famous announcement that the state was now “an island within an island, our own country”. It was the height of Covid paranoia, and we got our first taste of McGowan’s isolationist manifesto after driving for four days to the WA border checkpoint on the Nullarbor Plain, a desert outpost 500km from the nearest town. We were holding an entry permit allowing us to relocate, so that my wife could help support her elderly parents, but the cop at the checkpoint had some bad news. Our visa had been cancelled.

It turned out the McGowan government was summarily rescinding the entry permits of potentially infectious easterners, to protect WA from the plague. Never mind that we had both quit our jobs, rented out our house in Sydney and driven 2500km across Australia with our two dogs. Never mind that we were Covid-free, that everything we owned was on a truck heading west, and that the WA government hadn’t bothered to tell us our pass had been voided. The cop wearily advised us that he’d just turned away a whole family relocating from Victoria.

The vast plains of the Nullarbor are a thankless place to contemplate homelessness – the highest landmark in sight was a prefab Big Kangaroo clutching a jar of Vegemite. Luckily for us, the helpful police officer suggested we reapply under a different entry category, so we filled in some paperwork and waited for an hour. This new application was also rejected, after a bureaucrat in Perth demanded proof that I was employable and would not be “a drain on the state’s economy”. But then inspiration hit: I let it be known that I was a journalist.

Within 10 minutes, our pass was approved.

Many of our West Australian friends expressed dismay about this story, which said much about the capricious nature of the state’s closed border policy. Later, we’d hear far worse accounts of families left stranded in motels and caravan parks, or people denied a final visit to a dying parent.

But one thing McGowan’s reign proved is that no premier in WA ever lost votes by sticking it in the eye of “easternstaters”, as they’re habitually known. He may have projected the persona of an affable suburban lawyer, but McGowan had an innate sense of how to tickle that pleasure zone to his own political advantage.

McGowan announces he is quitting politics, with wife Sarah by his side. Picture: Colin Murty

To most people outside the state, WA’s failed 1933 referendum to secede from the rest of the country is a historical oddity; among the native-born, not so much – at the height of the pandemic, an opinion poll showed that 25 per cent of West Australians wanted to secede. Geographical isolation is the historical root of that sentiment, obviously, but the mining boom fertilised it in recent years. It’s rare to meet a West Australian who can’t quote you the statistics on how many billions the state’s mining industry contributes to the national economy. And don’t mention GST distribution at a dinner party unless you want to hear a long exegesis.

So McGowan’s seemingly offhand remark that WA would become “our own country” was craftily pitched. A few months later, when prime minister Scott Morrison was forced to withdraw his opposition to the border closure, The West Australian newspaper went triumphal, publishing a front-page cartoon of McGowan as a grinning, top-hatted founding father. “OUR WESTRALIA DAY!” the headline crowed. “September 4 will forever be etched in folklore. Why? Because it’s when Canberra finally conceded our state IS special. Our economy IS special.” That month, McGowan’s popularity hit 90 per cent. Tattoo parlours were soon reporting a strange phenomenon – men and women wanting a likeness of “Mark” inked into their skin.

The West Australian’s Page 1 on September 5, 2020.

Westralia Day didn’t really take off, probably because there already is a Western Australia Day celebrating the state’s founding. But the state’s love affair with its premier got even nuttier when The West Australian presented him in superhero garb as “Captain Westralia”. And McGowan’s fight with Queensland mining billionaire Clive Palmer, who challenged the border closure in court, inspired a series of front-page cartoons depicting Palmer as a cockroach, a cane toad, a chicken, Dr Evil and (later) the Star Wars villain Jabba The Hutt.

We now know – thanks to the defamation case that erupted between McGowan and Palmer – that during this time, the premier was sharing jocular texts about those wacky images with the newspaper’s billionaire owner, Kerry Stokes.

“Mark, well done,” Stokes messaged. “I think no one else could have achieved the legislation in the speed you did. Reckon the insect heads should make a telethon sales item. People are with you!”

To which the premier replied: “Thanks Kerry. I was asked about those marvellous front pages today, and I said, ‘I think The West has gone a bit soft’. I appreciate the support enormously.”

Like any modern Labor leader, McGowan knew the importance of keeping big business on side. Property developers were among his biggest supporters, thanks to legislation that enables them to bypass local councils on “significant” projects.

When a lawsuit threatened Woodside Energy’s Burrup Peninsula gas project, he suggested the government would pass legislation to override any court decision. When the government was looking to redevelop the East Perth Power Station site, it gave the job to a partnership of Stokes and fellow billionaire Andrew Forrest – secured by a fee of $1.

McGowan’s genius was that throughout it all he maintained his image as an ordinary bloke who voters felt they were on first-name terms with. After his landslide 2021 election win, a story emerged that an elderly Liberal voter had turned up at a polling booth in the wealthy western suburbs, unsure what to do because he had never voted Labor in his life. “I want to vote for Mark,” the old gent reportedly said. When a Labor volunteer explained he could vote only for the local Labor candidate, not the premier himself, things became heated. “No,” the would-be McGowan fan insisted, “I want to vote for MARK!” The discussion is said to have gone on for a while before he strode off in disgust.

I tend to believe this story because a friend who was handing out how-to-vote cards at a nearby polling booth encountered a woman who insisted she also wanted to “vote for Mark” – to stop property developers ruining the area.

McGowan was truly a man for all seasons – a Labor premier who was so tough on crime he dismissed brain damage from fetal alcohol disorder as “just an excuse”.

He could quaff a $1000 bottle of wine at a private dinner with property millionaire Nigel Satterley yet still insist he preferred the bogan coastal suburb of Rockingham to the more up-market Cottesloe. His government was joined at the hip to a mining industry that provided 30 per cent of its revenue, but he burnished his green credentials by banning native forest logging.

Locals will tell you that McGowan kept the state largely Covid-free and the nation’s mining sector humming, and it’s hard to argue with that. Along the way he laughed at NSW’s lockdown laws and boasted that “we carry Australia – I mean, over east I don’t think they get that”.

If you suggest the isolationism has been bad for WA’s image, the response is often a shrug. After all, who cares what outsiders think? Not that the absurdity of the Reign of Mark goes wholly unrecognised. The punk rock band Dennis Cometti celebrated the new secessionism with its 2020 song WAXIT. “We’ve got the sharks!/We’ve got the ore!/The ACT doesn’t own us anymore!”

If only Mark had run again, it could have been his theme song