WA Liberal president quits after just 13 months

You simply gotta hand it to the Western Australian Liberals. Sure, they don’t have enough lower house members for a game of Catan, but that doesn’t stop them from achieving a level of dysfunction the envy of crap opposition parties the nation over.

Richard Wilson has resigned as state president 13 months after his initial election, having promised to lead a process of reform, and a mere three months after being reelected. In his farewell email, which The West Australian got its hands on, Wilson took aim at those in the party fostering “disunity” and public score-settling, saying “toxic self-interest” in the party was trumping “any deep-seated commitment to liberalism”.

Wilson doesn’t name names, but there are some obvious public examples of what he’s talking about, and he manages to paint a picture of things being even worse than we realised. So when he references two senior MPs threatening legal action against the party, it doesn’t just remind you that the party’s all-time shellacking in the 2020 state election resulted in an internal review so scathing that Legislative Council member Nick Goiran threatened to sue his own party for defamation over it, causing sections to be removed — it also tells you that Goiran wasn’t the only one.

Goiran is an influential member of a group of powerbrokers known as “the Clan”, which used to be headed by Mathias Cormann. Another member of the Clan, Ian Goodenough — the only federal member for the Liberal Party still in a metropolitan seat after they were cleaned out in a state that used to be a stronghold — claimed in Parliament that texts depicting him threatening to quit the party were fakes.

All this comes at the end of a week when the Liberal leader in the state, David Honey, polled at a 9% approval rating. So it’s not all bad news: 9% of people polled have heard of David Honey.