West Australian election: McGowan making a mark on centre stage

For more than two decades, Mark McGowan had been crafting himself into a Labor leader lifelong Liberals would vote for. Then came a crisis that tested and elevated him.

Mark McGowan with wife Sara and daughter Amelia in Rockingham on Sunday. Picture: Colin Murty

For more than two decades, Mark McGowan had been crafting himself into the sort of Labor leader that lifelong Liberals would vote for. Then came a crisis that both tested and elevated him.

When seat after seat fell to Labor on Saturday, it was the ultimate rebuke to political enemies in the west who had privately ­derided him as not West Australian and not even a proper AFL fan.

His political enemies called him “the squash player from NSW”.

Even before COVID hit, McGowan had enjoyed a level of respect among the Liberal heartland that has eluded many of his Labor colleagues, but in 2020 he became a star. West Australians believed he had kept them safe and they loved him for it. Teens kissed his photo in TikTok videos. Comedian Chelsea Jones sang about his “hard, hard border” while sitting up in bed with a McGowan cardboard cutout. When McGowan agreed to greet a bride and groom while passing by a wedding at Perth’s Crown Towers in February, the father of the bride took the microphone and announced: “He is my God.”

McGowan always understood the need to govern from the centre. He took note in 2007 when West Australians continued to support John Howard’s Liberals as the rest of the Australia fell in love with Kevin Rudd.

It was during the pandemic, when WA was at odds with other states over when and how to bring down borders that McGowan tapped into state pride.

Thanks to McGowan, West Australians can now recite in their sleep that they contribute more to the nation per capita than any other state in Australia.

“There is a lot of ignorance about what we do,” he told West Australians on February 26 during a visit to Pilbara where record iron ore exports are driving a boom. “I understand it better than anybody, having grown up over there, that there is little appreciation.”

His live-streamed pandemic press conferences were his time to shine. Voters felt they got to know him at these daily COVID updates. He was calm and a clear communicator as he refused to let cruise ships dock in the wake of the Ruby Princess disaster. He was even-tempered under pressure from reporters. They saw him tired. They saw him concerned. They saw him dissolve into giggles at the story of a man who tried to outwit police when caught eating a kebab in a park during lockdown by saying he was just going for a run when he got hungry.

When billionaire Clive Palmer went to court to try to tear down the hard border, it was a threat and political gift all at once. When the commonwealth joined the action, McGowan’s hero status was assured.