Ben Small the big winner from WA Liberal nominations

The party’s efforts to regain its former crown jewel seat of Curtin from teal Kate Chaney will rest with one of two former political staffers.

Former WA senator Ben Small. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Gary Ramage

The number of women inside the federal Liberals is set to fall further, after former senator Ben Small was the only nominee to replace the outgoing Nola Marino in the safe West Australian seat of Forrest.

Responsibility for the party’s efforts to regain its former crown jewel seat of Curtin from Teal independent Kate Chaney will fall to one of two conservative males.

The potential ranks of female MPs at a state level has had a boost, with women now set to represent the party in at least two winnable seats after Liberal preselection nominations for a host of WA electorates closed on Wednesday.

Ms Marino, who has held the division of Forrest on WA’s southwest coast since 2007, announced late last year that she would retire at the next federal election.

Mr Small, who challenged Ms Marino for preselection in 2016 before spending 18 months as a senator after filling the vacancy left by Mathias Cormann’s retirement, had been speculated as her replacement ever since and was the only person to put his name forward for the seat.

The Curtin nomination will be a two-horse race between former political staffers Tom White and Matt Moran. Mr White was a policy adviser to then education minister Peter Collier during the Barnett government, before joining Uber in 2015.

He left a role with the ridesharing company in South Korea last October before moving back to Perth.

Mr Moran is a former Channel 10 journalist and Afghanistan veteran who worked as a press secretary to prime minister Malcolm Turnbull. More recently, he was the head of strategy and government relations at shipbuilder Luerssen Australia and sits on the board of RSL WA.

The lack of a female candidate in Curtin was met with differing opinions within the party.

One Liberal figure said last year’s voice referendum – in which Curtin was the only seat in WA to vote Yes – showed the party needed to back a moderate female candidate if it was to have any chance of reclaiming a seat that, until the 2022 election, had always been in Liberal hands.

Others noted that Ms Chaney defeated moderate Celia Hammond for the seat and said the voters of Curtin had not had a “proper conservative” Liberal candidate for years, with Julie Bishop having held the seat from 1998 to 2019.