WA election: No other choice but a total rebuilt

WA Premier Mark McGowan with his family celebrating his election victory. Picture: Colin Murty

One by one they fell — a procession of blue-ribbon seats that had never before slipped into Labor hands.

The likes of Nedlands, South Perth, Bateman and Carine were for years the backbone of the WA Liberal Party. The most optimistic of Labor strategists may have thought the party might pinch one or two of them, but instead they are now all in Labor hands.

Labor also leads narrowly in Churchlands, another perennially blue seat from Perth’s western suburbs.

Newspoll had shown that the Liberals were at risk of being reduced to two or three seats, but both Labor and Liberal insiders, armed with their own internal polling, insisted the projections were unreliable.

As it turned out, the only unreliable polling was theirs.

For the past few weeks, since their leader Zak Kirkup publicly conceded he couldn’t win the election, the Liberals’ focus had been on saving the furniture.

Not only is the furniture now gone, so is the carpet, the blinds, the windows, the roof and the walls.

The party is in cinders.

Its two surviving members, Libby Mettam and David Honey, face the monumental if not impossible challenge to rebuild the party into a viable alternative.

Presumably they can use rock-paper-scissors to decide who leads.

The seats held by the WA Liberal Party’s last three leaders — Kirkup’s seat of Dawesville, Liza Harvey’s Scarborough and Mike Nahan’s Riverton — also fell to Labor.

If there is a bright side for the Liberal Party — and it is hard to find one — it is that the result is so emphatic that there is no choice but for a total rebuild of the party from the ground up.

There can be no doubt whatsoever that the Liberal Party has been comprehensively rejected in its current form and must start anew.

While the problems faced by the Liberals are extreme and existential, the bizarre result also presents issues for Mark McGowan and his government.

He now has a swollen and unwieldy backbench that will be full of idle hands and growing egos. Not everyone who believes they deserve a ministerial position will get one.

Labor’s presidential-style campaign was also understandably centred entirely around Mr McGowan, who enjoys extraordinary levels of popularity thanks to his handling of COVID.

But when the threat of COVID eases, will Mr McGowan start to find it hard to sustain his hero-like standing with the community?

Iron ore prices cannot hold their current levels forever, so a major hit to the state’s coffers in the next term of government is all but certain.

The popularity of Mr McGowan’s predecessor Colin Barnett turned 180 degrees in the space of a single term, and Mr McGowan — now proven as a masterful political observer and adapter — will need to stay on his toes to avoid similarly wearing out his welcome with the WA people.