(Image: Private Media/Western Australian Museum Collections)

Now, it’s like that movie — in The Croods, people wanted to stay in the cave … and that young girl, she wanted to go out and live again and deal with the challenges of living in a different world … 

Scott Morrison, August 2021

[Mark McGowan and I] are both leaders of governments that have much to do and for a long time now … the best way to do that is to work together. And I mean, in Western Australia, I think we have a lot of commonality on the importance of having a strong economy which supports everything else.

Morrison, March 2022

Could Western Australia be the state to turn the election?

Since Bob Hawke left office, WA has proven uniquely unreceptive to anything federal Labor has pitched it. In that time, it’s never had more lower house MPs elected than the Coalition, and indeed it was the only state where Labor actually lost a seat in the Ruddslide of 2007. Yet a combination of factors threaten the conservative stranglehold in 2022.

First is the exodus of the highest-profile Liberals in the state. Former deputy leader Julie Bishop quit in 2019 and took her personal vote (not to mention her considerable fundraising abilities) with her. Former senator Mathias Cormann is gone. And of course, former attorney-general Christian Porter is retiring in decidedly messy and controversial circumstances. His seat, Pearce, is one of three that Labor feels is right back in the mix. The others are Swan, also losing long-time member Steve Irons, and Hasluck, held by Indigenous Affairs Minister Ken Wyatt. And Labor’s Anne Aly holds Cowan by a wafer-thin margin.

Second, and even more unpredictable, is the Mark McGowan of it all. The WA premier achieved an unprecedented majority in 2021’s state election, reducing the state’s lower house Liberal representation to a contingent that could arrive at work together on the same tandem bike. He did that, at the core, by locking the eastern half of the country out for nearly two years, thus sparing WA (and its faltering health system) from most of the worst effects of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison and Porter probably didn’t have WA’s status as a federal election battleground in mind when they decided to back Clive Palmer’s legal attempts to puncture that wall, and the sudden shift in rhetoric from Morrison this year — from comparing WA to the cave dwellers of The Croods to chummy pressers alongside McGowan was entirely predictable.

McGowan’s approval rating has, inevitably, waned slightly since it was clocking in at over 90% in 2020 — as Crikey contributor William Bowe put it, down from phenomenal to a merely “outstanding” 64% (The West Australian has it at 67%).

Whether this will translate to the federal election is uncertain; Roy Morgan polling last September had a 6.6% swing towards Labor, but there is some worry in that McGowan’s massive electoral advantage may work against the campaign, with voters choosing the Libs as a Senate-style check on Labor’s power.

But even if that’s true, McGowan’s obliteration of the Liberals still does federal Labor a lot of favours. As Gareth Parker points out in WAToday, it wiped out the party’s grassroots infrastructure, the “paying jobs for party loyalists in electorate offices, and the hubs around which volunteer efforts come election time are coordinated”, and lead to an internal party review so searing that it lead to defamation threats.

Regardless, the importance both parties are putting on the state is clear. The ALP is holding its campaign launch there on May 1 and former PM Kevin Rudd is reportedly going to be doorknocking on behalf of Labor leader Anthony Albanese — delaying his own visit on account of a cruelly timed bout of COVID — in the coming week. Morrison has already visited, as has John Howard, and Tony Abbott planned to visit to drum up funds for the election until he was also waylaid by COVID.

WA is sculpted by its scale and isolation and of course the sense that it has to give away too much of its resource wealth to the east, a cohort it feels excluded from on most other matters.

It’s no coincidence that Morrison chose WA as the place to attempt to reopen the climate wars, promising no mining tax under his government. Its immense scale is best illustrated by the two rural seats that take up its eastern half — Durack and O’Connor, two of the biggest single-member electorates in the world, essentially locked in for the Liberals.

WA will follow one of the currents of other states — the previously blue ribbon seat facing a serious challenge from an independent candidate. In this case, it’s Bishop’s far more conservative successor in Curtin, Celia Hammond, who suffered an 11% swing against her last time out, and this year has Kate Chaney challenging.

But in most other ways Western Australia will be an outlier. It usually is. This time the outlier might decide the whole show.