Election 2025: John Howard is the Liberals’ only hope for winning Curtin, says Fred Chaney

Former Fraser minister Fred Chaney is backing his teal MP niece Kate Chaney in Curtin and says John Howard, who has campaigned in the seat, is ‘the last successful Liberal leader’.

Independent member for the Perth seat of Curtin, Kate Chaney, with her uncle and mentor Fred Chaney, who was a Liberal minister in the Fraser Coalition government. Picture: Colin Murty

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The Liberals are relying on John Howard to campaign for them in the must-win West Australian seat of Curtin because he is the last Liberal leader regarded by Australians to have done a good job, according to ­Fraser government minister Fred Chaney.

Mr Chaney, the former deputy leader of the federal Liberal Party, entered the fierce and well-funded battle for the suburban Perth seat of Curtin on Friday with a one-page newspaper advertisement urging voters to stick with the teal incumbent, his niece Kate Chaney.

When Mr Howard campaigned in Curtin last week with Liberal candidate Tom White, the former prime minister said much depended on whether voters who were angry with the Liberal Party in 2022 had repented and wanted to return. Mr Howard has predicted the teal vote nationwide will fall in 2025.

Mr Chaney was among Curtin voters appalled by the Morrison government and the Robodebt affair in particular. And he claims the Liberals have learned nothing in the past three years.

On Friday he said the 85-year-old Mr Howard was important to the party because “he is the last Liberal leader regarded by Australians to have done a good job”.

“I think the reason they will keep going back to John Howard is because no Liberal leader since then has been seen as having done a job that is vaguely acceptable to the Australian community,” Mr Chaney said.

“He is widely perceived as the last successful Liberal leader”.

Mr Howard won four elections. In November 2007, he lost his seat and the Coalition lost government in the Kevin Rudd-led Labor landslide.

John Howard at the Liberal Party campaign launch in Sydney last weekend. Picture: Richard Dobson / NewsWire

Senior Liberals argue that the Coalition cannot win government unless it claws back Curtin, the seat Julie Bishop held for 21 years until her retirement from politics in 1999. The seat was the Liberals’ safest in WA but Ms Bishop’s replacement, Celia Hammond, lost to Ms Chaney in the wave of voter support for teals nationwide three years ago.

One political strategist told The Australian that saying there is no path back to government for the Coalition without Curtin may be a deliberate tactic.

“Saying that might be a way of giving naturally conservative voters a little push if they’re thinking ‘Kate’s done a good job I’d like to vote for her again and it won’t hurt the Coalition’,” the strategist said.

WA had been a sure bet for the Coalition for decades. When most of the nation turned to Rudd in 2007, the state still voted overwhelmingly in favour of Howard government MPs.

However, Labor has been dominant there since the pandemic when voters and the mining sector backed then premier Mark McGowan’s isolationist measures. That sentiment was still high at the 2022 federal election when the Liberals lost all but one of its metropolitan seats. It then lost that seat – Moore – when Ian Goodenough became an independent.

In WA, the Liberals have just three sitting MPs recontesting lower house seats at this election. The Liberals have high expectations they can win the new seat of Bullwinkel that takes in the expensive and bucolic suburbs of the Perth hills, as well as farming areas where Labor’s plan to phase out the live sheep trade is deeply unpopular.

Mr White, the party’s candidate in Curtin, is a former staffer who worked for Colin Barnett when he was premier, and has also worked for Uber.

His campaign has honed in on Ms Chaney’s stance on environmental protections and the North West Shelf gas project to seed doubt she is the right choice for a resources state.

Ms Chaney had earlier said extending the North West Shelf gas project to 2070 was unacceptable but in February announced she would be open to an extension for the project if it was subject to ­certain conditions.

While Ms Chaney voted in parliament last July to keep the live sheep trade, Keep the Sheep protesters clearly prefer a Coalition government as a way of guaranteeing an end to the proposed live sheep ban. Keep the Sheep activists have been protesting in Curtin against her.

Ms Chaney, 50, is from a high-achieving family dynasty in the leafy waterfront suburbs that make up Curtin. The electorate covers Perth’s golden triangle of real estate between the Swan River and the Indian Ocean. Her grandfather Fred was a Menzies government minister. Her father is Wesfarmers chairman Michael Chaney.

She is a lawyer whose career before politics included advising companies on mergers and commercial agreements.

The Curtin campaign is regarded by both major parties as the biggest-spending in the west. Some estimates of what both sides have raised in donations so far are $3m, and images of Ms Chaney and Mr White are plastered on every major road throughout the electorate.