Politics in WA has suddenly got very interesting

Western Australian politics was turned on its head this week when a rare state opinion poll found that the Labor government, which two years ago enjoyed perhaps the most crushing election win in Australian history, would be turfed out of office at the proverbial “election held today”.

Even allowing for the unexpected resignation of Mark McGowan two months ago, the 24% swing implied by the poll’s 54-46 lead to the Liberals seemed hard to credit — so much so that doubts were raised, even by the poll’s sponsors at The West Australian.

Happily, a real-world litmus test is at hand with tomorrow’s byelection for McGowan’s seat of Rockingham, a hitherto little-noticed affair that has suddenly taken on great significance.

Suspicions that the poll struck a heavily conservative rogue sample were strengthened when further results showed opinion running two-to-one against the Indigenous Voice — by far the most negative result yet recorded by a credibly conducted poll, in WA or anywhere.

But while Labor sources shared the general scepticism with the extent of the results, few doubt that the party has taken a serious hit since the same outfit (Utting Research, headed by former national Labor pollster John Utting) credited it with a 60-40 lead immediately after Roger Cook was anointed as McGowan’s successor in late May.

At the heart of the government’s problems are Aboriginal heritage laws passed in response to Rio Tinto’s destruction of ancient rock shelters at Juukan Gorge in 2020, which came into effect at the start of the month. The difficulties Labor has always faced with land rights and native title issues are finding a new dimension in the social media age, with reporting on tree planting events being held to ransom by Indigenous leaders taking on a life of its own.

The evident success of referendum opponents in tying the issue to the Indigenous Voice suggests an upset win for Yes later this year will have to be accomplished without help from WA.

The deeper question for Labor is whether the bloodletting will end there.

Quite apart from what it says about the Cook government’s prospects, the poll offers the suggestion that a state that has moved on from COVID will now revert to its electoral type — a prospect sure to cause sleepless nights for a federal Labor government that owes its majority to four seats gained in Perth last year from what may prove a transitory swing.

Western Australia’s significance to the next election will incrementally increase after yesterday’s population-based determination of state and territory seat entitlements for the House of Representatives, through which the state will gain a 16th seat — very likely a marginal one somewhere in the suburbs of Perth.

As such, even beyond the niche market of WA state politics, the result in Rockingham tomorrow will warrant judicious scrutiny.

It should be noted in advance that’s not the kind of scrutiny likely to come from the media, which will almost certainly deploy terms such as “shock” and “bombshell” regardless of whether they are duly warranted. The swing will inevitably be of such scale as to justify those terms in normal circumstances — but not when the benchmark is the extraordinary result of 2021, when Rockingham voters returned the then-premier with a scarcely believable margin of 37.7%.

A more realistic point of comparison is McGowan’s 23.4% margin when he led Labor to what seemed at the time like a landslide win in 2017 — and even that would have been engorged by a robust personal vote that is no longer at Labor’s disposal.

On that basis, Labor should regard a swing in the low double digits as more than satisfactory. But if the swing proves to be in the orbit of the 24% suggested by Utting Research, state Labor should start to feel worried, and federal Labor should assume that gaining seats in other states will be a matter of life and death come early 2024.