Western Australia’s Liberal Party endured a devastating election night on Saturday, with the party failing to meet what were already appallingly low expectations.
Pundits and insiders were generally putting a potential return to double figures in the 59-seat lower house at the low end of what the party could hope for, with former Labor premier Brian Burke offering a detailed election eve prediction that got them as far as 19.
The shattering reality for the party is that it is only likely to manage seven, having failed to regain even half the losses from a 2021 result that compounded what was already a landslide defeat in 2017.
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The Liberals can’t even be sure of recovering the official opposition status they lost in 2021, as the Nationals enjoyed the fruits of a regional backlash that looks set to boost them from four to six despite the abolition of one of the seats they won in 2021.
It’s cold comfort for the Liberals that, if viewed from the perspective of vote share rather than seats, the result wasn’t quite as bad as it looked — which is why broadly accurate opinion polls did nothing to dispel the general sense of surprise.
Had the two-party swing of over 12% been uniform, the Liberals’ uninspiring double-digit benchmark would have been met, if only just.
This failure to convert swings to seats reflects two commonly observed electoral phenomena: sophomore surge, where first-term members enjoy the dividend of four years spent working an electorate that had previously been unfamiliar with them, and the capacity of governments to rain money upon target seats, particularly when hit on the arse by the rainbow of a GST deal producing many more billions in revenue than was originally anticipated.
As well as retaining South Perth, Bateman and Scarborough, which it would never have imagined winning a decade ago, Labor appeared for much of the evening to be in reach of blocking presumed Liberal saviour Basil Zempilas’ path in Churchlands.
This proved deceptive, with the Liberal swing having been locked up in an early polling centre that didn’t report its large number of votes until late in the evening.
Even so, Zempilas must reckon with the fact that his 3.5% swing looks to have been the lowest of any Liberal or Nationals candidate out of the 53 seats for which the relevant data is available.
The ghost that should be haunting Zempilas right now is that of Bronwyn Bishop, who entered the House of Representatives at the Mackellar by-election in 1994 with a view to fulfilling her manifest destiny as Australia’s Margaret Thatcher, after seven years of drawing attention to herself in the Senate.
Bishop then proceeded to send the Liberal vote backwards despite the absence of competition from Labor, with party-aligned speechwriter and raconteur Bob Ellis filling the breach as an independent and unexpectedly scoring nearly a quarter of the vote.
From that moment, the notion of Bishop as a future prime minister survived only as a punchline, her subsequent career trajectory sending her no higher than the junior ministry, a stint as speaker that epitomised everything wrong with Tony Abbott’s prime ministership, and a gig in retirement as a scourge of socialism on Sky After Dark.
Zempilas can hold at least some hope that his future won’t be as bleak as that.
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The result was no more helpful for the prestige of leadership incumbent Libby Mettam, who appeared distinctly deflated on Saturday night and would only say that her tenure was “a matter for the partyroom”.
With Mettam the only lower house member boasting any parliamentary experience whatsoever, Zempilas’ high profile is the only thing any alternative contender can claim in the way of a leadership credential.
And while reports of internal polling suggest Zempilas’ personal ratings are mediocre at best, his weak showing reflected a Liberal trend evident throughout affluent areas of Perth — one which, together with Kate Hulett’s potential win at the expense of Cook government minister Simone McGurk in Fremantle, bodes well for the teal independent movement.
Editor’s note: William Bowe conducted paid consultancy work for Climate 200, which provides support for the campaigns of teal independents.
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