‘You’ve got to be parochial’: WA emperor Mark McGowan’s complicated triumph

West Australian Premier Mark McGowan’s sudden announcement that he was stepping down barely qualified as a speech — delivered completely straight, with the halting blankness of a dad providing the only public address of his life at his kid’s wedding.

As he listed his proudest moments and the loved ones he couldn’t have got by without, his voice wasn’t free of emotion, but there was no soaring rhetoric, just a quiet “thank you” each time, as often as not hidden by the rustle of his notes.

The quiver at the edge of his words could be mistaken for the nerves of an inexperienced public speaker. The closest thing to a unifying idea was his hope and belief the state was stronger than before he was elected.

What strange times anointed this man emperor of the western third of the continent. McGowan outlasted all but two of the other state premiers hoisted to unprecedented prominence and power during the early years of COVID-19, and he parlayed an only semi-ironic personality cult into the most overwhelming electoral success of any of them.

So to see him laughing nervously as he took questions after the announcement, like someone still not sure if their joke quite landed, and then remember the 90% approval ratings, the beer branding (“Hard Border Hefe“), the many tattoos dedicated to WA’s “state daddy”, you couldn’t help but think: “God, people are strange when circumstances allow them to be.”

But like Victoria’s Dan Andrews, his most analogous COVID contemporary, that lack of any discernible glamour or upfront charisma was part of the appeal. The sight of him, early in the pandemic, collapsing into exhausted giggles in response to a question about a guy who’d gone for a jog and got a kebab, was instructive: who couldn’t relate to the moment in the middle of great stress and overwork where your addled mind latches on to some faintly absurd detail as the funniest thing you’ve ever encountered?

Once the sudden nature of the departure sank in, it made sense. After a strong victory in 2017 with a mind-boggling annihilation of the Liberal Party in 2021, McGowan has already established his legacy as the person who delivered WA Labor at least 12 years in government. The party can fashion politics in the state with that kind of uninterrupted platform.

Along the way, just as significantly, his electoral demolition of the Liberals swept away a great deal of opposition credibility, leadership (he has seen off five Liberal leaders in his time at the head of the ALP) and campaign infrastructure. In 2022 that, combined with his personal popularity, greatly helped his federal counterparts to a huge and ultimately decisive swing in a state that had rejected them for years.

McGowan was clearly a competent and pragmatic administrator — those who are today noting his “luck” in benefiting from an iron ore boom while in office and thus being able to deliver billions in surplus, seem to have forgotten the similar boom frittered away by the government his replaced. The state’s debt was more than 10 times worse in 2017 than when former premier Colin Barnett took office in 2008.

The hard border McGowan erected around WA at the pandemic’s early peak protected an already quaking health system and largely preserved normalcy in the state while the east was locked inside. While not all the criticism this move received was from right-wing COVID sceptics, it undoubtedly saved lives.

It was also politically astute. McGowan was not a showman, but knew exactly how to play to his crowd — one of the sources of his exhaustion, he said yesterday, was the requirements politics imposed contrary to his non-combative nature. But he never once shirked an opportunity to go after other premiers, Scott Morrison, the media or Clive Palmer.

“You’ve got to be parochial,” he said, only a few months ago. A state frequently left out of the national conversation in normal times, now feeling pilloried for nothing more than protecting itself, loved it.

So it took a very odd set of historical circumstances to deliver him that kind of power and that kind of legacy, and as those circumstances dissipated all he could do from here was watch his empire chip away. He could hardly be expected to match 2021’s pyrotechnics at the next state election in 20 months. Labor could and probably will win fairly comfortably, while still facing what would otherwise be a catastrophic swing against it.

Without the singular public focus on a COVID response, suddenly his vigorous support for fossil fuels, the state’s horrific treatment of young, largely Indigenous inmates under his watch and the profoundly Perth indulgence of $100 million on a surf park could start to make him look a touch less exceptional. Why stick around and let that become part of his eulogy?

As such, McGowan represents the times in a more general sense. Anyone thinking the most powerful Labor government in the history of Australia might use that electoral buffer to offer voters any serious alternatives about how life might best be organised would be disappointed. His cosiness with big business, the conservative media and most particularly the resources sector was right out in the open. Billionaires Gina Rinehart and Chris Ellison both delivered glowing tributes. Many other leaders must have looked on jealously as McGowan put out press releases co-written with resource sector lobbyists and still got overwhelming support from all sides of the vote.

So as we contemplate the end of McGowan’s reign, a product of and emblem for the COVID-19 era in Australia, it’s worth remembering how much we once thought that era had the potential to change, and how little, fundamentally, it did.