Via the ABC:
Colin Barnett’s eight-and-a-half-year reign as WA Premier is over, after his Liberal-National Government was swept out of office by a huge swing towards Mark McGowan’s Labor Party.
Mr McGowan will be sworn in as the state’s 30th premier within days, after Labor won a clear majority in parliament and the Liberals suffered disastrous losses above even its most dire fears going into the election.
The ABC called the result less than 90 minutes after polls closed, with early counting showing dramatic swings to Labor.
ABC election analyst Antony Green said he expected Labor to win as many as 41 seats, having needed just 30 to defeat the Barnett Government.
Three Liberal ministers, including Health Minister John Day, have lost their seats while Corrective Services Minister and possible leadership aspirant Joe Francis is also in severe trouble.
The National Party’s vote only fell slightly, but leader Brendon Grylls’s seat is still uncertain.
In celebratory remarks made to a raucous gathering of Labor supporters in Rockingham, Mr McGowan thanked Mr Barnett for his “many years of public service to West Australians”.
Mr McGowan pledged to get to work immediately, as he reaffirmed his commitment not to privatise Western Power.
“Today West Australians voted for hope and opportunity over desperation and division,” the Premier-elect said.
“Today we showed we are a state of decency and intelligence, not a state of stupidity and ignorance.
Making his concession speech less than three hours after the polls closed, Mr Barnett congratulated Labor and said his opposition had won an “emphatic and decisive victory”.
“We ran, in my view, a great campaign, but time was probably against us,” Mr Barnett said.
“Politics is a brutal, harsh business.
“I can assure you that I have given this our best shot in every sense.”
Mr Barnett said he would leave the post-election analysis to others and did not comment on the party’s controversial preference deal with One Nation, which he had previously admitted to feeling “uncomfortable” with.
With more than half of the vote counted, the Liberals have lost 16 per cent of their primary vote — putting them on course to suffer the biggest-ever swing against a sitting government in WA.
It is also shaping as a disappointing night for One Nation, with Pauline Hanson’s party receiving just 4.5 per cent of the primary vote so far — less than half of what it had been projected to receive in pre-election polling just weeks ago.
But One Nation is polling slightly better in the Upper House and is still in the mix to win seats in that chamber.
Among the Government seats the ABC is projecting Labor to win, Mr Day, Local Government Minister Paul Miles and Environment Minister Albert Jacob have all lost their spots in Parliament.
In a huge shock, Mental Health Minister Andrea Mitchell is also in severe danger of losing her previously very safe seat of Kingsley.
Incredibly, the previously very safe seat of Murray-Wellington also appears to have fallen into Labor’s hands while a massive swing has left Mr Francis’ seat of Jandakot in doubt.
The Liberals are also projected to lose Southern River, Mount Lawley, Perth, Forrestfield, Morley, Swan Hills, Collie-Preston, Balcatta, Bicton, Belmont, West Swan and Darling Range.
There are also big swings in Geraldton, Joondalup, bringing all of these Liberal-held seats into play.
Labor is also polling strongly in Pilbara, with Mr Grylls likely to face a long wait to see if he can hold onto his spot in Parliament.
There was little good news for the Liberals, although Treasurer Mike Nahan has held onto his seat of Riverton and Peter Katsambanis beat independent Rob Johnson in Hillarys.
That’s bad news. Nahan could now run for leader or retain shadow treasurer when he is horribly tainted goods.
Still, congratulations to WA. The worst state government since Joan Kirner’s Labor rabble in Victoria has gotten its just deserts for epic fiscal mismanagement.
Are there other messages here? Oh yeh.
For me, the number one takeaway of the WA result is that the polity wants, neh demands, legitimacy in its leaders. They must stand behind their values no matter who they are. Deliver that or you’re stuffed.
Thus, the courtship of the Coalition and One Nation is over. Even though Do-nothing Malcolm tried to keep it alive yesterday, our Pauline apologised for it on the night. I don’t see this as much of a problem for her. She’s human and will be forgiven.
But for the Coalition federally this is nothing short of apocalypse. Do-nothing Malcolm is a progressive liberal but he can’t get back to centre ground owing to the loony rump and his own vacuity. Even if he did, who would believe him now?
It is now next to certain that the Do-nothing government will be wiped out at the next election. It shares precisely the same profile as Colin Barnett in its fiscal failure and and illegitimate progressive leader doing deals with loons.
Can the party dump him and shift Right? They can, sure, but with no deals ever to be done with One Nation again they will never win. Indeed, they’ll be fragmenting a smaller and smaller portion of the traditional Coalition base. They’ll be fighting Cory Bernardi as well, who launched an attractive anti-politician agenda on the weekend. This is the stuff of the nightmare that afflicted the Labor Party for decades when BA Santamaria’s renegade Democratic Labor Party kept Robert Menzies in power for as long as he wished.
The only way back for the Coalition is to rediscover centrist liberalism. Terry McCrann sees Peter Costello coming back to do it:
Costello’s credentials speak for themselves over the 11 years of his treasurership of the nation’s, and more narrowly the government’s, finances. Depending on your perspective, he was either the second most important player in the second-most successful government in Australia’s federated history, or he at least sat at the feet of the second-best PM in our history.
I would suggest the former: that the most accurate description of the political and even more the policy success was a construct of the fact that it really was the Howard-Costello government. More immediately, a Costello PM would promise a return to “grown-up government”, where good policy was proposed and fought for.
For goodness sake, has there been a more dramatic example than Howard being prepared to go to an election, in 1998, promising to introduce a GST? And thank God or Gaia that he did: think how much bigger a mess our tax system would be in if he (and Costello) hadn’t?
…Yes, Costello ended up riding the first and in some ways the best and certainly the simplest stages of the China-driven resources boom. On one level it was “easy” to produce surplus budgets and surplus budgets every year after 1996 after — entirely appropriate — tax cuts.
But he did it; and even more importantly he largely succeeded in keeping the sticky fingers of his cabinet colleagues off the loot. Which, given both the PM’s inclinations when in a tight spot and his absolute dominance, certainly after 2001, of the party and the Coalition, was no small, if unrecognised and so unheralded, achievement. Plus, as discussed last week, the Future Fund.
More broadly and more simply, Costello would be thought of warmly across the political divide. Voters would remember we had stable government. We had political and policy direction and cohesiveness. We had budget surpluses and regular tax cuts: we will get none of that in the foreseeable future. And the nonsense that he was a big spender: in his last budget he got it down to 23.1 per cent of GDP. Only one year in the past 40 had been lower — the pre-GST 22.9 per cent of 1989-90.
There is no doubt that Costello could claim to have been a great success as Treasurer. He’d bring some short term confidence on that basis and he can hold an argument and narrative better than the current crop of fools so he’d have a good shot at sustaining it.
But he would also come with some very heavy baggage that would make it hard for him to succeed. The key problem for the Coalition is that the economic model that developed under his watch – and his reforms – is exhausted. It relied upon the terms of trade to derive national income rather than productivity gains, and it leveraged that into house prices to drive wealth and consumption:
Both of these are now headed for the scrap heap as growth engines. Worse, the last desperate attempts to keep them alive are the very policies driving the rise of the alt-Right, high immigration and bending over for any and every corporation.
The alternative for Costello, or similar, is to undertake massive structural reforms aimed at rebooting multi-factor productivity growth which under his watch was stalled for a decade:
Two essential reforms in that process would be to cut Australia’s staggering tax concessions for property and super, both of which were installed by Costello. He has repeatedly and defensively ruled out changing both ever since.
Moreover, Costello is a progressive and would still not bring the loons to heel.
Rather than some mythical genius, what Australia and Coalition needs is a whole new suite of policies that breaks with the past as it pushes productivity, competitiveness and tradables growth within a framework of mutual sacrifice sold by a competent leader. It’s not magic, it’s just hard yakka. Treasury may finally be onto it, via David Uren:
Treasury secretary John Fraser wants to recapture the reforming energy that his department enjoyed when he previously worked for it under the Hawke and Keating governments, before he left for the private sector.
He hosted a morning tea (with sausage rolls) in Treasury’s executive suite on Wednesday, bringing together for the first time the 40 staff of his new “structural reform group”, which will sit alongside the department’s tax, budget, economic and financial markets groups.
“It’s more of a rebirth; there was a structural reform division in the late 1980s. I thought it was very successful and I wanted to re-establish it because we need in Treasury a group that looks at structural reform, which is fundamentally about increasing productivity and efficiency, and we can do this on an economy-wide basis,” he says.
Fraser has taken the head of Treasury’s financial system division, Meghan Quinn, to head the new group. She was previously head of the department’s modelling division, where she ran carbon tax modelling for the Rudd and Gillard governments. She was also head of the secretariat for Julia Gillard’s Australia in the Asian Century white paper.
Yep.
