Why the Liberals face a fight for survival in battleground WA – WAtoday

The flagbearer for the WA Liberals is now Attorney-General Michaelia Cash, a polarising figure who lacks the retail political skills of Bishop or the influence of Cormann.

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Linda Reynolds lost the significant defence portfolio to Queenslander (and future leadership aspirant) Peter Dutton and has been wounded politically in the fallout of her staffer Brittany Higgins alleged rape.

Melissa Price, who was anonymous as environment minister to the point of caricature, has made a better fist of it as Defence Industries Minister but is overshadowed in the Liberal khaki campaign by Dutton.

Indigenous Affairs Minister Ken Wyatt is widely respected and Liberals believe he will hold on to his seat of Hasluck despite Labors best efforts, but at 69 is closer to the end of his parliamentary career than the beginning.

Then theres Ben Morton, the special minister of state who is one of Scott Morrisons closest confidants and in the centre of the Liberal campaign brains trust. The one-time tyro state director of the WA Liberals in the Barnett years, he is like a pig-in-the-proverbial in campaign mode, but his skills are best deployed behind the scenes than out front with voters.

Morton has a knack of framing political contests as choices in terms that connect with voters everyday concerns, but when he was state director of the WA Liberals, he was also blessed with Kevin Rudd and Wayne Swans mining tax, a policy that was anathema to the rock-kicking entrepreneurs out west who showered the Liberals with donations.

That tide has well and truly turned and now it is WA Labor who are overwhelmingly preferred by Perths donor class, property developers chief among them.

A coterie of deep-pocketed Perth identities that has coalesced around residential developer Nigel Satterley and former Ernst and Young partner and now-CEO of disability and human services provider APM Mike Anghie fell out with Colin Barnett in the dying days of his government and is now right in the McGowan corner, with $1000-a-plate pay-for-play fundraising dinners a feature of Labors recent period of local supremacy.

And it is here that McGowan has done so much to put the sword to the once-dominant Liberal branch.

The Premiers extraordinary win at last years WA election erased dozens of Liberal office holders, with the party reduced to just two members of the 59-member Legislative Assembly and seven of the 36-member Legislative Council.

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The Liberals were essentially wiped from their former stronghold north of the Swan River in greater suburban Perth, where WA electoral majorities typically take root.

That doesnt just mean parliamentary dominance at a state level, it also obliterates the Liberals grassroots party infrastructure: paying jobs for party loyalists in electorate offices and the hubs around which volunteer efforts come election time are coordinated.

The rout has been compounded by the partys own dreadful internal dynamics, which the faction Cormann once led now dominated by polarising conservative southern suburbs MLC Nick Goiran, who is seemingly hated by everyone outside of his grouping.

So bad is the acrimony that Goiran threatened defamation action against the authors of a critical election review, and state director Stuart Smith a threat that elicited an apology and the withdrawal of the relevant section.

If the Liberals are a party on the brink and they appear to be it will be for the voters to decide whether to tip them over the precipice.

The action is again centred on Pearce and Swan, which, if Labor won both (a result that is not certain but would see the WA Labor campaign well satisfied with a job well done) would see the party hold seven of WAs 15 seats.

History is on the Liberals side.

Labor has not won more House of Representatives seats in WA than the Liberals since 1990, when Bob Hawke defeated Andrew Peacock, securing eight of 14 in the lower house, and has not won more votes than the Liberals since 1987, when Hawke beat John Howard.

WA swung against Labor, which lost seats, in Paul Keatings 1993 defeat of John Hewson.

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The west also stuck with John Howard in 2007; WA was the only state in which Kevin Rudd lost a seat (with Swan and Cowan swinging to the Liberals as Hasluck swung to Labor for a net loss of one in WA amid gains of 24 seats in the rest of the nation).

But complacency has cost the Liberals dearly of late. Many in the party figured McGowans 2017 win was its low-water mark and the vote would automatically begin to come back in 2021 a disastrous miscalculation.

In an increasingly volatile electorate, nothing can be taken for granted.

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Why the Liberals face a fight for survival in battleground WA - WAtoday