Another COVID Winner in WA

As Jacinda Ardern showed, COVID panics might have caused global economic havoc and stripped civil rights on a grand scale, but they sure are a sweet vote-winner for the incumbent. Liberty dies, as Padme Amidala sadly observed in Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith, “with thunderous applause”. The government of Daniel Andrews exceeded its incompetence only by its brutal authoritarianism. Yet Andrews soared in the polls.

Another politician who readily realised that fear is a vote-winner is West Australia’s Mark McGowan. By combining COVID panic with the sandgroper state’s notorious superiority complex, McGowan assured himself of an election win that Ardern could only dream about.

Not since Julius Caesar uttered those immortal words “I came; I saw; I conquered” has a victory been so unequivocal. Mark McGowan’s WA Labor government was always going to win Saturday’s state election, but the size of the victory will reverberate for some time to come.

The Liberals look to have won only two seats in the 59-member Legislative Assembly, creating a coin toss for their next leader. The 34-year-old Zak Kirkup, picked just months ago to lead the party into the election, lost his seat and announced he’s retiring from politics after his one term in parliament. There goes the future.

On the contrary, it could be the Libs’ best decision. Selecting Kirkup just months ahead of a COVID election was as if National had compounded their two worst moves by not just waiting until the eve of an election to change leaders, but if they had elected a limp blue-green like Simon Bridges.

But with the state gripped by the deathly fear of a virus with an up to 99% survival rate and secure in its smug little, border-closed bubble, the Libs were dead in the water, no matter what.

Either way, Nationals leader Mia Davies will be the official Opposition Leader charged with trying to hold the re-elected McGowan government to account, leaving the two Liberals to play paper, rock, scissors in deciding who gets to be in charge of their duumvirate. Good governance requires good opposition to hold governments to account. McGowan will need to be careful not to fall victim to hubris because he won’t face much parliamentary opposition for the next four years. Labor is also on track to secure a majority in the state’s upper house, guaranteeing its ability to pass legislation.

Given that before the election, McGowan had already passed legislation to not only protect the government from being sued but also ensure that the premier could enact laws without bothering with all that parliament stuff, the certainty of WA remaining an elected dictatorship is grim.

As always, political journalists try to read too much into state politics, vis-a-vis federal.

The results at state level contrast sharply with the federal sphere. The Liberals hold 11 of the 16 seats in WA, with Labor having failed to do any better than that in two decades. Scott Morrison will be rightly worried that the size of the state defeat might hamper the party’s organisational capacities in the west, putting seats such as Swan, Stirling and Hasluck at risk[…]

With the Coalition holding on to the barest of majorities federally, and Labor’s McGowan re-elected in emphatic fashion, Anthony Albanese will be looking west for inspiration on how to overcome conservatives on their own turf. Because with the possible exception of Queensland, WA is the most conservative state in the commonwealth, and it just delivered the state conservatives a humiliating defeat.

The Australian

Mention of Queensland might serve to put McGowan’s victory into perspective. In 2012, Queenland Labor was wiped out almost as comprehensively as the WA Libs. Labor went from 51 seats to seven. Just four years later, Labor roared back, winning 37 new seats. Its majority increased at each election since.

Westralians are not exactly known for being outward-looking (except for looking yearningly at China’s piles of money), but McGowan would do well to consider the lessons of Queensland before annointing himself Premier-for-Life.

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