It is said that a crisis benefits the incumbent, and this couldn’t be more true for Western Australia’s premier, Mark McGowan, whose political opponent waved the white flag 16 days out from this weekend’s election.
McGowan’s assured handling of the coronavirus pandemic has spawned predictions of a crushing landslide on Saturday, with a 12.5% swing forecast to deliver Labor its biggest election win in WA history.
A uniform swing of those dimensions would certainly topple the new 34-year-old Liberal leader Zak Kirkup, who won the seat of Dawesville, an hour south of Perth, with a margin of just 0.8% in 2017.
That would make him just the second major party leader in WA ever to lose his seat.
The Liberals would retain just two seats in the lower house if the February Newspoll – which gave Labor a 68-32 lead on a two-party preferred basis – was replicated across the state on election day.
Only the super safe Liberal seats of Cottesloe, which had a 14.1% margin in 2017, and Vasse, a booming wine and tourism region in the state’s southwest (14.6%) would survive such a landslide.
Labor currently holds 41 of the 59 lower house seats. By Wednesday more than half a million people had already voted, from an electorate of just over 1.7 million, the ABC reported.
Staring down the barrel of defeat, Kirkup spent his party launch last week playing the underdog card and warning that a parliament controlled by one party would be a threat to democracy.
“I firmly believe our fragile democracy is at risk if Labor gets too much control,” Kirkup said.
A growing trend of swinging voters and a cult figure premier with a personal approval rating of 88% are key to this election, UWA election analyst and The Poll Bludger blogger William Bowe says.
“Because there are fewer rusted-on voters that are loyal to a single party than ever before, it means that when the herd stampedes you get more unbalanced results than you have ever had in history,” Bowe says.
“In unprecedented, crushing election landslides like in 2012 in Queensland and 2011 in New South Wales, seats are won that before the election you would have said, ‘the conservatives couldn’t possibly lose that seat’.”
But Bowe says an almost total wipeout remains unlikely.
“I would expect that those seats at the outer range are going to be stickier, and we’ll see Labor blowing out their existing margins in suburban seats,” Bowe says.
Like Bowe, Notre Dame political lecturer Dr Martin Drum predicts the Liberals will also retain Nedlands, Churchlands and Carine.
If the polling is right, the Nationals could retain four rural seats in WA’s lower house. If the Liberals fail to match that tally, the Nationals would be entitled to claim the opposition leadership, with perks such as staff, parliamentary offices and media advisors.
That would be “very embarrassing” for the Liberals, Drum says.
WA Nationals leader Mia Davies has told the ABC she is confident her party could lead the opposition.
Given the question is not whether Labor will win, but whether they will assume total control of both houses, it might seem strange that Kirkup has emerged as one of the more interesting figures in the 2021 campaign.
The youngest member of the WA legislative assembly has surprised his Canberra counterparts and picked climate change as his signature campaign pledge, promising to ditch coal and put the state on track for zero emissions by 2030.
Bowe has labelled Kirkup’s climate move a play to the wealthy western suburbs, rather than to blue-collar mining and industrial voters.
“It’s not a strategy to win the election, it’s a strategy to hold onto the western suburbs,” he says.
It gets trickier for Labor in the upper house, the Legislative Council, where six electorates are each represented by six MPs.
Unlike federal parliament, WA still allows group ticket voting. At this election, Labor is preferencing a conservative shooting party over the Greens in the Agricultural and Mining and Pastoral regions in the hope of benefiting in conservative regional seats, such as Kalgoorlie and Geraldton, according to Drum.
Labor’s perennial problem is that the system is heavily weighted towards rural and regional areas. Despite having 70% of the state’s population, Perth elects just half of the upper house seats.
While it’s not impossible for Labor to win an upper house majority, it’s a high bar to clear, Bowe says.
