Mark McGowan is expected to be returned as premier of Western Australia with an increased majority on Saturday night, in an unsurprising result following a surprising campaign in which attention has been focused on the dwindling fortunes of the Liberal party.
Twelve months ago the McGowan government would have expected to win a second term handily at the cost of a few seats. Instead, with a forecast swing of up to 12.5% to Labor, the government is expected to pick up seats and reduce the Liberal party’s numbers in the lower house to low single digits.
Liberal leader Zak Kirkup is likely to lose his seat of Dawesville. Polling conducted for the West Australian newspaper showed Labor candidate Lisa Munday sitting on 55% of the primary vote – a 10.7% swing toward Labor.
The polling was conducted early this week before Kirkup on Thursday announced his intention to quit politics if he lost his seat, and held a disastrous press conference on his party’s costings.
The 34-year-old pinned much of his campaign as opposition leader on his lifelong ambition to be in politics – an ambition which could be over by 6pm. He would be the first WA Liberal leader to lose his seat in 88 years. The Liberal party has held Dawesville since it was created in 1994.
As of Friday, 653,457 votes – 499,226 pre-poll and 154,231 postal – had already been cast. That’s 38% of total votes, the highest number of pre-poll votes in WA history.
Despite a Labor win being clear for months before the writs were issued, much of the campaign has focused on Kirkup and internal issues within the Liberal party.
“It has been pretty astonishing,” says Prof John Phillimore, the executive director of the John Curtin Institute of Public Policy. “For an election that’s been a foregone conclusion for a long time, it’s been a pretty interesting campaign but probably not in the ways that people would expect.
“It has largely revolved around the Liberal party, which is interesting because it’s a pretty weak opposition. The government has just had to stand back and say ‘we stand on our record’, and watch the Liberal party explode.”
Kirkup’s strategy to concede the election with three weeks to go appears to have backfired, Phillimore said. Any discussion of policy was then halted, “because the only policy is: don’t let them win by too much”.
Even that modest ambition may be unattainable: if polling holds true, the Liberal party stands to lose between five and 10 seats.
If the swing predicted in Kirkup’s seat is replicated statewide, the party could be reduced to just three seats, but Phillimore says it’s likely some of the biggest swings would be in existing Labor seats, allowing the Liberal party to retain at least five.
If the worst predictions come true for the Liberal party it could leave the National party as the senior coalition partner in WA, a never-before-seen phenomenon. The Nationals leader, Mia Davies, has been a stable figure for the past four years, during which time the Liberals have had three leaders.
“The one thing Zak Kirkup’s strategy has done is that it’s lowered expectations so much that anything above eight [seats retained in the Legislative Assembly] will be thought of as not that bad,” Phillimore said.
The strategy of conceding early depended on the Liberal party being able to flip the torch and hold the government to account. Instead, moves like a renewable energy policy which appeared to take some conservative members of the Liberal party by surprise, and Kirkup announcing he would quit politics if he lost, “made it all about him”, Phillimore said.
“If the point was to keep the government honest and hold the government to account, then don’t talk about yourself,” he said.
The downside for the public has been that the immensely popular McGowan government, which is set to increase its already significant majority in the lower house, has not faced the level of scrutiny it may otherwise have received.
The one misstep was McGowan’s suggestion the border checkpoints could stay up to keep methamphetamine out of the state. He swiftly backtracked, saying that what he actually meant was that airport checks used during the pandemic could be extended to check for drug importation, without requiring the tracking of travellers.
The blunder does not appear to have dented the Labor vote.
Polls close at 6pm WA time.
