WA election: ‘Start from scratch and get rid of powerbrokers’

The Western Australian Liberal Party needs to be completely rebuilt and its powerbrokers expunged, ­senior party members say.

Zak Kirkup on Sunday. Picture: Daniel Wilkins / The West Australian

The West Australian Liberal Party needs to be completely rebuilt and its powerbrokers expunged in the wake of its record-breaking loss in the weekend’s state election, ­senior party members say.

Former premier Colin Barnett, recently retired MPs Dean Nalder and Mike Nahan, and re-elected upper house MP Steve Thomas all said the party’s preselection processes needed a full overhaul.

While the pandemic had a major impact on the result, all agreed that the party had hurt its prospects with the policies and the candidates it took to the election.

Mr Barnett also criticised Prime Minister Scott Morrison over his failure to visit the state during the campaign and his government’s early support for Clive Palmer’s legal challenge against Western Australia’s borders, saying they had exacerbated the swing against the Liberals.

“He is the national Liberal leader but I don’t think he’s been to WA for more than 20 months,” Mr Barnett said.

“For him to come over and just visit the volunteers and the like would have been nice, and I think Liberal Party supporters were disappointed. I know I certainly was.”

He said the perceived influence of both religious conservatives and powerbrokers had also alienated voters.

“We had candidates with strange histories and strange ideas, and that discredited the whole party,” Mr Barnett said. “The whole process of selecting and checking out members and candidates, that’s the first reform that has to happen. And it’s not a matter of tinkering around the edges.”

Mr Nahan, who replaced Mr Barnett as leader after the Liberals lost government in 2017, said the West Australian Liberal Party risked disappearing if it did not tackle the influence of powerbrokers Peter Collier and Nick Goiran.

Giving party members a direct say over preselections would go a long way to improving the quality of candidates.

“Our party is a grassroots party but it’s dominated by power­brokers who have infiltrated the grassroots with their own people so they can control preselections and ultimately the votes for leaders and other issues in the party room,” he said.

The party needed to begin ­actively recruiting talented people from the private sector, noting Labor’s success in finding candidates from outside the union movement.

Now, he said, the candidates were mainly drawn from the Young Liberals or the religious factions. “We are getting young kids and people whose affiliation is with the church. We are not going out looking for business people, corporate people, 40-somethings who have run a business or paid a bill or made a decision,” Mr Nahan said.

“It’s because the powerbrokers don’t want any competition from them.”

Mr Nahan also slammed the failure of his parliamentary colleagues to develop a policy strategy ahead of the election, which left leader Zak Kirkup scrambling for ideas.

Mr Kirkup’s energy policy, which included shutting down coal-fired power stations from 2025, was widely ridiculed within the party.

“My colleagues often had an aversion to ideas and policy development. We had to do what Labor did from 2012 and develop an overarching policy to campaign on, but we didn’t do it,” he said.

“Young Zak cooked up an ­energy policy at the last minute that was an absolute disaster.”

Mr Nalder, who announced he would retire from parliament after missing out on the Liberal leadership last November, also believed party members should be given a greater say over preselection.

“If they don’t do it now, the party will disappear. Voters could not have sent a louder message,” he said.

Mr Nalder believed the powerbrokers have been more intent on preserving their influence rather than growing the party and ­improving its prospects.

“If the Liberal Party was a business, it would be in receivership right now,” he said.

One of the few surviving members of Saturday night’s inferno, South West MLC Steve Thomas, said the party needed to rebuild ­itself, overhaul preselections and refocus on the party’s founding principles.

Mr Thomas had been a fierce critic of his party’s energy policy, which sunk the party’s chances of reclaiming lower-house seats in the South West.

The party had prepared a good payroll tax policy to take to the election, he said, but had not mentioned it after its announcement.

“That policy should have been front and centre and it wasn’t. Instead we had this incredibly stupid greener-than-the-Greens energy thing,” he said.