Colin Barnett says he’s no longer the Western Australian premier because of an overwhelming “It’s time” factor.
Having dispensed with one lot of self-interested spin, let’s deal with the second run.
Before federal Liberals line up to begin the inoculation task this Sunday, the task of finding a camera and saying the weekend state election has no federal implications, let’s be clear about a couple of things.
That spin is bulldust. This state election has a number of very clear federal implications.
Over the past few election cycles, frustrated Australian voters have developed an appetite for punishment.
The verdict on Barnett and his government wasn’t polite. It was a rout. Labor could end up with 41 seats after the close of the count. It needed only 30 to take government.
The clear message from the weekend case study is that, once a government falls into a hole, it is very, very difficult to clamber out.
Malcolm Turnbull needs to understand that’s the contemporary reality very clearly and not console himself with spin or self-justification.
Now we can look at some fine print.
The biggest losers of the WA election are the Liberal party (as opposed to the Nationals, who held up in an anti-government swing reasonably well) and Pauline Hanson’s One Nation.
The Liberal party endured a stunning collapse in its primary vote – a negative swing on present indications of 15%.
Hanson polled respectably in some regional areas but the One Nation vote wasn’t uniform across the state.
In a statewide sense, the party performed well below expectations. Zero lower-house seats, a possibility of only one upper house seat.
We can take a couple of things from this bit of field evidence.
The controversial preference deal between the Liberals and One Nation was clearly a mistake for both parties.
The WA Liberal party brains trust, which included the federal finance minister, Mathias Cormann, did the deal in an effort to put a floor under the catastrophic plunge in the Liberal primary vote – but the tactic backfired.
The tie-up not only failed to deliver on the basic intention, because One Nation didn’t do as well as expected, it also served the purpose of underscoring the rancorous divisions between the alleged governing partners, the Liberals and the Nationals.
For the Liberals, the preference deal was not only the wrong thing to do both in principle and in practice – it became a concrete metric of desperation, and a symbol of an ageing government losing the plot.
It also freed the Nationals entirely to run their own race in the regions, to be a distinct and different voice, to criticise the Liberals early and often, to distance themselves from their own incumbency – which was beneficial to them in the contest.
Turnbull can bet Barnaby Joyce will have watched that trajectory closely, which is an interesting thought if you let it settle on your mind for a bit. It has some possibilities which I suspect the current generation of Nationals in Canberra won’t be slow about exploiting.
Now let’s look at One Nation. The insurgent protest party ran a poor campaign, culminating in a spectacularly bad last week.
In fairness to One Nation, WA is not their strongest state in an institutional sense. The party will have more infrastructure and resources in Queensland, the next state election to contemplate, than it has in the west, where it was obviously making it up as it went along.
But one fact is a significant problem that can’t be explained away.
Pauline Hanson, the star of the show, the great lightning rod for disaffection, performed very badly under pressure. She damaged herself and her party by extension.
If published opinion polls are a reliable guide, One Nation lost half its support in the final week, where Hanson rolled from one mis-step to another.
Before the vote, I did wonder whether a complete cluster cuss of a campaign would worry One Nation supporters, who march to their own drum, and who want different things from politics.
But clearly it did matter. The chaos cost support, as did the preference deal, which Hanson now acknowledges was a mistake.
If you are billing yourself as a “not those bastards” insurgency, best not to do a deal with the incumbent government. It tends to undercut your message somewhat.
One Nation’s poor performance tells us a couple of things.
It tells us the micro-party protest vote in this country is still soft, rather than hard-baked. That’s a consoling message for parties of government – that people are still listening if you can get your act together and connect with their concerns.
It also suggests scrutiny and sustained pressure works – it can move the dial – which is a relevant measure for people inside the government who want to take One Nation on, rather than persist with the current strategy of flattery and appeasement.
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