Labor hoping for another hit as The Cook and Albo Show gears up

Labor has long privately claimed the Prime Minister’s popularity is holding up much better in the west, and Saturday’s win has reinforced that belief.

Anthony Albanese and WA Premier Roger Cook in December. Picture: Sharon Smith/NewsWire

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Anthony Albanese and newly re-elected West Australian Premier Roger Cook are likely to be joined at the hip for much of the upcoming federal election campaign as Labor looks to hold on to the gains it made in WA three years ago.

Mr Cook’s emphatic victory last weekend, which was better than expected, has emboldened party strategists to believe federal Labor’s position in the west is stronger than many had thought.

Labor has long claimed privately that the Prime Minister’s popularity is holding up better in the west than it is in the eastern states, and Saturday’s win – and in particular the Liberals’ weak showing across key metropolitan seats – has reinforced that belief.

WA is a key battleground state, and Labor’s success there in 2022 proved critical to Mr Albanese being able to form a majority government. The Liberals lost six of their 11 seats in the west at that election and need to win back most of those if Peter Dutton is to have a chance of becoming prime minister.

Mr Albanese has been a frequent visitor to WA since becoming Prime Minister, visiting almost 30 times, although he was absent from the state during the official month-long state election campaign.

Several Labor sources told The Australian that the frequency of those visits would now increase as the election neared, with strategists eager to have the Prime Minister and Mr Cook seen together as much as possible.

While Mr Cook has been critical of federal Labor in the past and said at the outset of the WA campaign that his government was “proudly independent”, just hours after his election win on Sunday he said he would be directing his energy to seeing Mr Albanese re-elected.

Similarly, in 2022 Labor successfully leveraged off the popularity of then premier Mark McGowan, whose government had been emphatically re-elected not long before.

The party is also expected to lean heavily on Jim Chalmers – who Labor insiders say is a particularly popular figure in the west – and Defence Minister Richard Marles to maintain a higher presence in Perth during the campaign. Perth is arguably the biggest beneficiary of the AUKUS program, with tens of billions set to be invested in shipyards and maintenance facilities in Perth’s south, meaning Mr Marles has a strong story to tell in WA.

But Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek is expected to have a lower profile in the west during the campaign, with strategists instead believing she is better suited to help shore up support for Labor in inner-city electorates in Sydney and Melbourne. That would help the minister avoid difficult questions about her Nature Positive reforms, which Mr Cook actively and successfully lobbied against earlier this year.

The state election result has buoyed Labor’s expectations about its prospects of holding seats such as Tangney, which takes in riverfront suburbs in Perth’s south. All three state seats in that electorate were held by Labor.

There was a much stronger swing against Labor in regional seats, with the party losing Geraldton and set to lose Warren-Blackwood, Murray-Wellington and Albany. It is only narrowly ahead in Kalgoorlie and Pilbara and suffered a 17.4 swing against it in Collie-Preston.

While the Albanese government’s ban on live sheep exports hurt Labor’s brand and cost WA Labor seats in regional areas, the affected areas primarily sit within federal seats already held by the Liberals.

Asked about implications of WA Labor’s regional showing for the upcoming federal election, Assistant Minister to the Prime Minister Patrick Gorman said some of the regional seats lost at the weekend had always been tough for Labor.

He also said that if federal issues affected the result in regional seats, the same would be true for metropolitan seats in which Labor’s vote held up well.

“I guess the Liberals and the Nationals say it was federal matters that caused seat losses, but then ignore the results in the vast majority of the state, where people really said that they trust Labor,” he said.

“They trust Labor with their jobs. They trust Labor with their health system. They trust Labor when it comes to our education system. They trust Labor to do what’s right for WA.”

So far the Liberals have won only five of 59 lower-house seats in WA, although they hold narrow leads in another three. The party had been hoping to return to 13 seats – the same number it held after its landslide 2017 defeat.

The scale of the defeat has put a question mark over the party’s leadership, which is expected to be a battle between incumbent Libby Mettam and media personality Basil Zempilas.

Senior Liberal figures have been urging the party’s WA arm to avoid a bloody leadership battle that could distract from the looming federal election. While Ms Mettam has flagged that the leadership could be decided in the next week, other figures have been pushing for the matter to be delayed until the end of May.

Such a move would not only defer any leadership showdown until after the federal election but also would ensure the leadership question would be decided by the lower house and upper house MPs who will be in the next parliament.