As at time of posting on Wednesday 12th March, the results of the WA Election have still not been concluded, even though the McGowan Government will undoubtedly be returned to power; still with a thumping majority. The seats which have been declared are:
Labor - 41
Liberal - 5
National - 4
Undecided - 9
Even with an 18.3% swing against the Labor Party, the Liberal Party has more than doubled its representation in the lower house, which sounds excellent until you realise they only hold five seats in total. That 18% swing against Labor did not correlate into an 18% swing to the Liberal Party; with more than half of those primary votes going to minor parties, and a chunk going to One Nation. Herein lies a problem for the Liberal Party, its hopes of being any kind of credible opposition remain in shreds, and even its hopes are the 2029 election look dim; which might very well extend the current run of Labor Governments in Western Australia to four or five terms.
The problem with the Liberal Party in Western Australia is... the Liberal Party. On election night; when being questioned by Sky News Australia, an absolutely deluded WA Liberal President Caroline Di Russo, still insisted that the result could still change and that they needed to wait for pre-polls and postal votes in order to get a better picture. In either a case of optimism through ignorance or delusion through entitlement, she outright refused to say how many seats she would be happy with for the WA Liberal Party at this election. Perhaps trying to being collegial, she repeated the line that it was "too difficult to say"; when in actual fact what I think that she meant to say is that it was "too embarrassing". However that is dependent on whether or not people in the Liberal Party can actually be embarrassed. Current indications point to 'no'.
Under every normal circumstance, an 18% swing away from Labor, should be ecstatic news for the Liberal Party. Even in defeat this should indicate that the results of the COVID election of 2021 were something of a statistical anomaly. Ms Di Russo could have played the line that Mark McGowan’s cult following has been hosed down and washed away, however even in defeat, there was still no kind of indication that she understood what had happened.
Admittedly I do not follow Western Australian Politics as closely as I follow it in my own state of New South Wales, but the manifestos on offer from the Liberal Party seemed to offer literally nothing that would have convinced most people that they would make a good government. Most voters when they go to the polls at least on some level, ask and should ask the question "what's in it for me?" or "what are you going to do for me?". Politics is the game upon which the contestation of ideas is fought, but Governance is the domain of the enactment of policy. In order to be able to enact policy, a political party needs at very least to have some kind of idea of policy.
The Liberal Party in its current form, simply refuses to offer much by way of policy at all. I do not know if the minders of the party realise this but the general public doesn't really watch Sky News Australia at all, and I no longer see any newspapers on the train which means that they are not getting opinion from print media. Increasingly what we are getting play out in politics, is the Liberal Party trying to weaponize American talking points as culture war ammunution, treating politics like a game, and offering nothing but obstruction. It isn't even that the general public are tired of this, it is more that the genuinely don't care.
The Liberal Party lost this election because they made no indication that they intended to serve the state of WA. They offered literally zero promises, or statements, or policies, or vision, on how they would improve anything. Unless people's grievances are so acute that they are forced into action, then no indication that a party is going to serve or improve anything means that they don’t deserve to win. I suspect that Ms Di Russo genuinely didn't understand the result at all and had no idea why the Liberal Party lost because she and the party generally, stand for absolutely nothing but their own entitlement.
And here's the rub. The Labor Party has been flirting with culture war issues of its own, and even lost its case at a referendum on the Voice because it couldn't successfully make the case of why it deserved the votes either. This WA Election is instructive as this is the first election in more than a century, across the Australian political landscape where independents scored more than 30% of the primary vote (and yes, I include One Nation in that because they are not functionally a political party). The 2025 Federal Election will probably fall roughly the same as in 2022 but how successful both sides are at responding to this problem, it might decide the long-term futures of both the Labor Party and the Liberal Party. The National Party is fine because they don't need to assume very much beyond a policy mix for big farmers and landholders, but at least they have policy.
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