Hot on the heels of the Wolf & Smith national results on state voting intention, The West Australian had its own Freshwater Strategy poll on Monday which matched its headline figure on 55-45 in favour of the state Labor government, as compared with its unrepeatable 70-30 win at the 2021 election. The primary votes are Labor 39%, Liberal 32%, Nationals 6% and Greens 11%, with Roger Cook leading Libby Mettam 46-34 as preferred premier.
The accompanying reportage says Roger Cook has a plus seven net approval rating and that 37% “have either never heard of him or are unsure”, which presumably means he has 35% approval and 28% disapproval. This compares with plus four for Libby Mettam, minus two for the presumably little-known Nationals leader Shane Love, minus four for ambitious Liberal election candidate Basil Zempilas – and plus 41 for the departed Mark McGowan. The sample for the poll was 1045, with the field work period not identified.
UPDATE: The Freshwater Strategy website has the results, which show Libby Mettam at 21% approval and 17% disapproval (29% had never heard of her, compared with 10% for Roger Cook). The poll was conducted Friday to Sunday.
The voting intention results are little different from those of another Freshwater Strategy poll reported by The West Australian three weeks ago, commissioned in this case by the Liberal Party. Conducted in July from a sample of 1000, it had Labor leading 56-44 from primary votes of Labor 39%, Liberal 33%, Nationals 5% and Greens 12%. The primary votes from the Wolf & Smith poll were Labor 37%, Liberal 29%, Nationals 3%, Greens 12% and One Nation 4%.
Recent-ish news relevant to the March 8 election:
• Labor determined the order of its Legislative Council ticket in mid-July, with Dylan Caporn of The West Australian helpfully listing all 22 candidates and their union and factional affiliations. With Labor on track for perhaps fourteen seats, nine of the 22 incumbents are in positions of greater or lesser comfort; another, Stephen Pratt, will run for the lower house seat of Jandakot; two (Sandra Carr and Dan Caddy) are on the cusp; and four in positions where they are unlikely to be returned. Four non-incumbents hold competitive or better positions, one being Nedlands MP Katrina Stratton at number ten. Andrew O’Donnell, a staffer for Balcatta MP David Michael, aligned with the Right faction Shop Distributive and Allied Employees Association (SDA), is at nine; Lauren Cayoun, the party’s assistant state secretary, aligned with the Right faction Australian Workers Union, is at eleven; and Parwinder Kaur, biotechnician and associate professor at the University of Western Australia, aligned with the SDA, is at thirteen.
• One Nation’s sole incumbent, South West region MLC Ben Dawkins, has not won a position on his party’s Legislative Council ticket. Dawkins ran for Labor at the 2021 election, entered parliament as an independent when he filled Alannah MacTiernan’s vacancy on a countback in March 2023, and joined One Nation in February. The ticket will instead be headed by Rod Caddies, the head of the party’s state organisation, who told The West Australian he “would be the one responsible for who is on the ticket”. Caddies expressed the view that Dawkins had not “lived up to the professionalism of what I would expect”. Dawkins will nonetheless remain a member of the party, whose formal registration for the election was confirmed by the Western Australian Electoral Commission a fortnight ago.
• Aswath Chavittupara, whose daughter Aishwarya’s death while awaiting treatment at the Perth Children’s Hospital emergency department in April 2021 was a serious embarrassment for the government, will be the Liberal candidate for Morley, after earlier saying he would run as an independent. Jack Dietsch of The West Australian reports Chavittupara won preselection ahead of Nirmal Singh, owner of a beauty services company.
• The Liberal candidate for Bicton will be Christopher Dowson, a former policy officer at the Department of Premier and Cabinet and current postdoctoral fellow at the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities in Munich. Jack Dietsch of The West Australian reports Dowson won preselection ahead of Bill Koul, owner of an engineering consultancy and an unsuccessful candidate for the federal Tangney preselection.
Can we please keep this thread for discussion of WA politics. The open thread for general discussion is here.
Cook has spent most of this year distancing his Government from the federal labor government.
Housing failure biggest killer for state government.
Unless the economy is really bad by March, I think WA Labor is favoured. At the moment (as long as there isn’t a black swan event), Labor should end up in the mid 30s in seats at worst. I am more interested in individual seats. In this case the 2013 ALP seats where they are vulnerable, Albany and Fremantle. Albany will be weird because there is no Peter Watson but the Lib candidate is a dud. Fremantle is a Green threat, though they finished in the top two in a general election there for the the first time ever in the last election.
The biggest threat to the WA ALP is the Federal ALP’s IR changes that the big miners are pushing back on.
Gosh golly that’s a shocking result for the Coalition. Does not bode well for the Coalition in the Federal election. Greens below their national average as well!
The West Australian is campaigning hard against Federal Labor on industrial relations and environmental reform and live sheep exports and trying to link it to the WA Government.
The biggest threat to WA’s resources industry is not Labor, but declining world prices for iron ore and lithium and the nickel miners have already basically shut up shop.
That’s got nothing to do with Labor.
2/12/1972: “… as long as there isn’t a black swan event …”
WA is the place for black swans …
FUBAR says:
“The biggest threat to the WA ALP is the Federal ALP’s IR changes that the big miners are pushing back on.”
Look at the scoreboard! 🙂
Roger Cook comes across to me as a good bloke, pretty inoffensive!
The Liberals and Nationals certainly will regain some of their traditional seats next March, but I still expect the Cook Labor Government to be reelected with a fairly big majority.
Dr Jags might retain Riverton for ALP if he can block Leach Hwy upgrades. Though there is an argument to be made that Liberal candidate Amanda Spencer-Teo has a better record for not delivering road upgrades based on Webb St
WA Labor will lose a big chunk of seats from their absurd 2021 majority but at 55-45 you’d imagine they’d still hold a comfortable majority with 35-40 seats in the 59 seat lower house. The Liberals will probably win back most seats under a 15% margin and the Greens will do better as well an outside chance of winning the district of Fremantle, and will probably also do relatively well in seats in inner Perth.
This will be the first WA election where all 37 upper house seats will be elected as a single statewide constituency removing the previous heavy weighting given to regional areas and group voting tickets will also be abolished. On this polling you’d be looking at a seat count in the upper house of:
Labor – 15 seats
Liberal – 12 seats
National – 2 seats
Greens – 4 seats
Others/Uncertain – 4 seats
No surprises here. I always liked Cook and was confident he had what it took to hang on after McGowan where other successors failed. He’s also lucky that he still has most of McGowan’s better ministers.
WA Greens are a bit lost in the wilderness, and given that their Legislative Council ticket is predominantly enviro-wonks with no social justice chops, are not really in a position to capitalise on the factors that are leading to breakthroughs in other states. Pettitt in particular is a plain liability as leader and a perennial gift to the ALP.
One Nation whacking yet another sitting state MP, and doing so to make way for Rod Caddies getting about his fifth shot, is pretty funny.
Good point MJ – for the first time the Upper House in WA will actually reflect how the people of WA as a whole voted – not a few thousand people in a country town. Living in one of those towns I am regularly dismayed at how much influence the non metro voters of WA have had.
Based on current polling it looks like no one party will get a majority, so should prove interesting to see how the new government deals with the challenge of having to negotiate.
It’s hard to imagine the Labor Party, State and Federal, being any deeper in the pockets of the gas and mining companies than they already are. FFS the Feds are arguing over who can give the biggest handout to “critical minerals”.
Rebecca, not sure what you were expecting Brad Pettit, as a single member amongst a massive Labor majority was going to achieve? And let’s face it, most people voting for the Greens in the Upper House in WA are voting for the party. And I think your critiscism is a bit harsh – Diane Evers did some good work as a MLC, and Sophie McNiel a policy wonk?
TropicalWonderland: It wouldn’t have been hard to put a better showing than Pettitt with a single seat – even Lynn MacLaren was a vastly better campaigner from that position, and I wasn’t a fan of her either. Pettitt is just a bit of a non-entity – was a kind of okay mayor, has no real policy chops outside of his academic expertise, and not much campaigning ability on the issues. Like, he was a Greens mayor who cracked down on the homeless harder than his Labor predecessor – did anyone really expect him to be able to campaign effectively on social justice issues?
McNeill is the exception on the ticket – everyone else in a possibly-winnable position is a career enviro-wonk of some sort, and I’m a bit unconvinced even McNeill is going to be able to focus in on the social justice/cost of living issues that have spurred Greens successors interstate. After some of the people they’ve had – Scott Ludlam, Rachel Siewert, Alison Xamon, Robin Chapple – this lot are pretty uninspiring. There are zero Greens winnable-seat candidates in WA, state or federal, who could ever hope to have the kind of cut-through somebody like Ludlam had.
When Scott Ludlum was first elected to the Senate you barely heard a peep from him. He grew into his job but he didn’t start out that way – people would have also labelled him uninspiring initially.
The WA Parliament is a one-sided rubber stamp this term, it’s pretty hard to get any cut-through when your vote is irrelevant. The Greens will probably hold the balance of power in the next Parliament, think it would be more fair to assess them after the next term.
I am – and I see the disaster that the Mining Tax was for the ALP. They are trying to kill the Goose that lays the golden eggs, again. Let’s see how that works for them.
MJ: I assume you’re talking about the upper house? If so, the Greens will share the balance of power but won’t have it to themselves. There’ll probably be two seats for the Nats and one each for the Shooters, Legalise Cannabis, Animal Justice and whichever god-bothering party shows up. (There’s been a couple of different attempts at restarting Family First, and I’m not sure if the CDP / Aus Christians are still a thing.) Maybe One Nation if they don’t completely implode. Shooters could be good for a second seat if they play up the “Fishing” part of their name – in outer coastal suburbs with lots of FIFO workers, boats and jetskis are popular toys. They could crack 10% in seats like Baldivis and Butler if they play their cards right.
One interesting thing for the WA Greens is that for the first time in the history of the party, they’ve got a pecking order. Up til now there’s only been one winnable seat in each region, so all candidates run their own race; now, they have to figure out who gets to be #1, #2 etc. That’s caused issues in NSW in the past, where they’ve had to balance out seniority / who the membership voted for / gender and diversity quotas.