Category: Western Australian Politics

Click here for full display of Western Australian state election results.

Friday

Even slower progress in the count today. Labor has claimed victory in Fremantle after another batch of postals broke 637-488 in favour of Simone McGurk, pushing her lead out to 491. Finally some progress in Warren-Blackwood, where only rechecking occurred between Monday and Thursday. My system is still allowing for the possibility of either a Labor or a Liberal win, though far the most likely result will be that it goes to the Nationals. The Nationals lead Labor by 956 on the two-candidate preferred candidate count – the hypothetical chance of Labor winning would involve the Liberals beating the Nationals to second and Labor doing better out of preferences against the Liberals than they are against the Nationals. Thirty-six votes separate the Nationals and the Liberals on the primary vote, but the Nationals will surely gain as minor contenders are eliminated.

Thursday

The Liberals hold a 98-vote lead in Kalamunda after the two-candidate count almost caught up with the primary votes, and the first (but presumably not last) batch of absents broke narrowly in favour of Labor. My system is projecting the narrowest of Labor leads based on the fact that they did quite a lot better on postals in this seat in 2021 than is usual — the batch counted on election night slightly favoured the Liberals, but the general tendency is for later batches to get less favourable for them. One way or another, this seat seems up in the air, although The West Australian continues to report the Liberals are “confident”.

It was noted yesterday that Labor’s lead in South Perth was cut from 345 to 189 when nearly 70 votes at the Challenger Reserve booth were shifted from Labor to Liberal. It is apparent from comparison of the primary and two-candidate counts that they had this right the first time. A batch of absent votes also broke 902-791 to Labor today, leaving a published lead of 300 votes that almost certainly around 440 in reality, which is surely enough to withstand whatever’s still out there.

The upper house count isn’t too far behind the lower house now, though all the votes to this point are above-the-line. It’s looking like Labor 16, Liberal 11, Greens four, Nationals two, one each for One Nation, Legalise Cannabis and Australian Christians, and one in play. On the latter count, Animal Justice are on 0.43 quotas and One Nation’s second candidate will be on 0.35 after the election of the first, with the latter presumably to do well out of preferences from the Libertarians, Stop Pedophiles! and Shooters Fishers and Farmers (the latter of whom flopped after committing the rookie error of identifying themselves on the ballot paper as “SFFPWA”). An unknown quantity is “Independent” on 0.47 quotas – if most of this went to the ticket headed by former Legalise Cannabis member Sophie Moermond, rather than the ungrouped candidates, she too could be in contention.

Wednesday

Simone McGurk moved further ahead today in Fremantle, a second batch of absents breaking 1029-718 her way, increasing her lead from 31 to 342. Labor did badly out of rechecking in South Perth, where their lead fell from 345 to 189, mostly because nearly 70 votes at the Challenger Reserve booth were shifted from Labor to Liberal. Dawesville became the second seat to add absent votes to the count, which increased the Labor lead from 438 to 512 after breaking 1162-1088.

Tuesday

The big news (the only news, really) from today’s counting was that Simone McGurk moved into a 31-vote lead in Fremantle after absent votes broke 1390-1121 in her favour. I am not clear if there are more absent votes to come, but outstanding postals, of which there should be as many as 2000, seem very likely to favour McGurk. This puts Labor on track for a forty-sixth seat, and sets up a third successive state election at which no cross-benchers were elected to the lower house.

Monday

End of evening. Labor member Rebecca Stephens has conceded defeat in Albany, though it remains unclear if the winner will be Scott Leary of the Liberals or Thomas Brough of the Nationals. A point worth noting about the count for Kalamunda is that the seat had no dedicated early polling place, meaning all early votes were classified as absent votes, none of which have been counted yet. There are still three booths outstanding from a two-candidate count that currently has the Liberals ahead by 187, a situation that is unlikely to change much when they are added. The West Australian reports the Liberals “remain confident”. Since my brief review of the upper house on election night, both Labor and Liberal have improved enough to suggest they will win 16 and 11 seats respectively. That leaves the Greens assured of the balance of power with what looks like a certain four seats. The Nationals look solid for two, and One Nation, Legalise Cannabis and Australian Christians for one each. The last seat is harder to pick, although I would think Animal Justice well placed.

3pm. The WAEC is now conducting a two-candidate count between Simone McGurk and Kate Hulett in Fremantle, which so far has McGurk receiving 41.3% of overall preferences — the estimates I was going off earlier only had it at 34.4%. My projection still has Hulett ahead, but it might not be taking into account how heavily postal votes are going against her (1069 to 718), and will presumably continue to do so. With barely half the likely postals counted, the existing trend would be about enough to eliminate Hulett’s lead. So once again, the result is likely to come down to absents, which are difficult to predict. We also finally have a TCP count in Murray-Wellington, which suggests the Liberals are very likely to win.

Sunday night

I appeared on Ben Raue’s Tally Room podcast today to discuss the result, which you can access at the bottom of this update. I should also have a paywalled piece in Crikey later today (i.e. Monday). Developments from today’s counting, which mopped up mostly early polling places that didn’t finish counting last night:

Dawesville. My call of this seat for Labor got rescinded in the small hours of Saturday when a second batch of votes was added for the Dawesville Early Polling Place (presumably the first was election day votes and the second was the pre-polls), breaking 3109-2619 to Liberal and reducing the Labor lead to 438. As the first batch of postals favoured Labor slightly, Liberal hopes of closing the gap rest on what I’ve roughly calculated at around 3500 absent votes.

Murray-Wellington. Still no two-candidate count here, but the 4491 votes of the district’s early polling place reported early afternoon yesterday. This pushes my projection of the Liberal lead out to a seemingly formidable 2.4%, bringing it closer into line with the ABC’s 1.9%. Here as in many other places, this all hinges on the accuracy of our preference estimates. I note that One Nation polled an uncommonly strong 8.1% here, perhaps helped by their top position on the ballot paper. Donkey votes will go Labor as preferences.

Warren-Blackwood. I’m not exactly sure why, but the 1.4% Labor lead I was projecting last night has become a 2.6% lead for the Nationals, though there remains a theoretical hope for the Liberals.

End of Saturday night

This seat will be progressively updated over the coming week with updates on late counting for the Western Australian state election, starting with a review of the situation in the most doubtful seats as of the end of the night. A few general points before moving on to specifics. Accurate election eve polls, which in fact slightly overstated the Labor primary vote, had few predicting such a sweeping result. The minority of seats in which the two-party swing was below double digits included a rich haul of the election’s most keenly contested seats. The other outstanding feature of the result was the Liberals’ dismal performance in affluent Perth seats, of which Churchlands is only the most visible example.

With only three seats confirmed as Labor losses — Carine and Nedlands to Liberal, Geraldton to the Nationals — my system is calling 40 seats for Labor, four for the Nationals and three for the Liberals and twelve in doubt. However, I’m confident enough about Labor in Bateman and Kimberley and Liberal in Cottesloe that I won’t be detailing them further. I also think it very likely that Labor will lose Albany, though whether to the Nationals or the Liberals is unclear. If it’s the Nationals, the Liberals had better hope they stay ahead in the three further seats where my system rates them as such, as they may otherwise suffer the ignominy of failing to recover opposition status.

Albany. A close race for second between the Nationals and Liberals means the WAEC is sparing us the valuable insight that would be offered by a two-party count conducted between Labor and Nationals candidates. My own three-way results system is projecting Nationals candidate Scott Leary to finish ahead of Liberal candidate Tom Brough (who defeated Leary for Liberal preselection) by 30.1% to 27.6% and then giving him a 68.2% chance of winning the seat, but it factors in enough uncertainty about Brough dropping out to still give him a 17.6% chance. The remaining 14.2% allows for the possibility that Labor’s Rebecca Stephens may yet hold on.

Churchlands. One of the biggest stories of the evening was the prospect of spectacular failure for Basil Zempilas, but it proved illusory to the extent that his swing was locked up in seat’s early polling booth, which reported late in the evening. My system isn’t quite calling it though, and a swing of barely more than 3% looks to be the weakest of the election after Warren-Blackwood.

Fremantle. The WAEC conducted a Labor-versus-Greens preference count we will presumably never see, because the star performer here proved to be teal independent Kate Hulett, who trails Labor’s Simone McGurk by 33.2% to 28.8% on the primary vote. My own preference estimates, which split the Liberals 80-20 and the Greens 50-50, push Hulett to a solid 3.7% lead, but the ABC has other ideas, getting only so far as 0.7%.

Kalamunda. A lot of the biggest swings were in outer metropolitan seats, Kalamunda being the only one where the Labor margin wasn’t too big to matter. Liberal candidate Adam Hort leads by 272 on the two-candidate count, which is unlikely to change much when we get results from six booths that have so far reported only on the primary vote. A lot will depend on absent votes, which are hard to predict — they will include early votes cast outside the district, which I don’t believe was the case in the past.

Kalgoorlie. A three-way race between Labor, Liberal and the Nationals in which the current total of 5611 votes counted will shortly be swamped by the Kalgoorlie Early Voting Centre, encompassing 8241 votes pre-polls plus however many were cast there on election day. Here as in Albany, Labor, Liberal and the Nationals all have a chance, with my system presently favouring Labor.

Murray-Wellington. Due to some manner of glitch at the WAEC, no votes from this seat reported until late in the evening, by which time the person in charge of unlocking two-candidate counts had seemingly gone home. My preference estimates give the Liberals a 0.6% lead, but the ABC has it at 2.5%. The electorate’s early polling place is yet to report: it received 7167 early votes plus however many were cast there yesterday.

Pilbara. The WAEC conducted a Labor-versus-Nationals preference count here, but isn’t publishing it because Liberal candidate Amanda Kailis leads Kieran Dart of the Nationals 24.1% to 16.2% on the primary vote. My system still gives Dart a slender chance — he will presumably do well on One Nation preferences — but it is most likely a question of Labor-versus-Liberal that must presently be left to preference estimates, mine putting Labor 1.6% ahead, the ABC’s doing so by 2.1%.

South Perth. With a well advanced count including the two-candidate numbers, Labor’s Geoff Baker leads Liberal candidate Bronwyn Waugh by 345 votes, leaving much riding on absent votes. The postals counted so far only slightly favoured Waugh, and there’s a general tendency for late-arriving postals to be less favourable to the Liberals.

Warren-Blackwood. Labor’s Jane Kelsbie is a good chance of pulling off an extraordinary second win in one of the high-water marks of the 2021 landslide. Oddly, the WAEC has lifted the lid on the two-candidate despite the Nationals and Liberal candidates being in a very close race for second. This has the Nationals 400 votes in front, but the two-candidate count is lagging far behind the primary count, and my own projection that uses estimates to fill the gaps gets Kelsbie 1.4% ahead of the Nationals. There also remains the possibility that the Liberals will make the final count and sneak home.

For the Legislative Council, polling booths around the state got as far as they could with counting the first preference above-the-line votes last night. The numbers may well move around a lot, but at the moment there looks like a solid chance that the Greens will hold the balance of power in their own right, looking good for four seats with Labor in contention for 15. The Liberals at present look like winning ten and the Nationals two, with One Nation, Legalise Cannabis and Australian Christians looking good for a seat each, and the last seat maybe going to Animal Justice.

Click here for full display of Western Australian state election results.

Live commentary

9.43pm. Early days in a very slow count, but the disendorsed Liberal candidate is looking competitive in Kimberley (part of a pattern of big swings against Labor in regional areas).

9.40pm. More TCP counts now unlocked, as far down the alphabet as Scarborough.

9.12pm. A lot of seats (though not all) between A and K have had their TCP numbers unlocked.

9.02pm. The WAEC has unleashed its first two-candidate preferred numbers, for the exquisitely uninteresting seat of Armadale. A good occasion to remind you all that my projections are based entirely on my pre-determined estimates of how preferences would flow.

8.30pm. Something else I’ll stick my nose in about: amid a result that’s surprising on the up side for Labor (or do I mean on the down side for Liberal), do keep in mind that we will see a flood of early votes coming in from around 10pm. When this happened in New South Wales, Labor lost the majority that everyone was projecting early in the evening. And another thing: if you’re enjoying my live results (or anything else here), please consider a donation through the “become a supporter” button at the top of the page.

7.51pm. Something I’ll stick my nose in about: there is a result in Fremantle for the Fremantle Early Polling Place which is fairly spectacular for independent Kate Hulett. But over 9000 votes were cast at that booth, and there’s only 635 of them here. So I imagine what we’re seeing here is election day results, to which the much larger amount of early votes will be added later. But the swing is based off a historic result that makes no distinction between them. Still, it’s obviously interesting that there’s a booth where Hulett is on 38.2%.

6.36pm. In short, mobile polling booths — aged care facilities and such — are reporting their results.

6.28pm. My system has successfully processed the first result – mobile voting from Scarborough – which is always a relief.

6pm. Polls have closed. I’m not going to be providing running commentary on the results, but I may pop in from time to time to explain technical details of what’s going on with the results.

Preview

This post will be used to provide a discussion forum for today’s Western Australian election, and as a launching pad for the live results feature linked to above. It will be the first workout of my new three-candidate model for projecting results at a general election, which received some useful stress testing at last month’s state by-elections in Victoria. My back-room involvement with Nine’s television coverage means I’m unlikely to have much to offer in the way of supplementary commentary this evening, but hopefully my results projections will speak for themselves. I had some further thoughts on the matter in a paywalled article in Crikey yesterday. Yesterday’s post reported on the only public polling to have emerged since the start of the campaign – today’s newspaper’s offer little in the way of further intelligence on what might be expected this evening, although Tom Rabe of the Financial Review reports a view in both camps that the polls’ implication of around 11 seats for the Liberals and Nationals combined is “at the lower end of potential losses for Labor”.

The Western Australian Electoral Commission acknowledges a likely feature of tonight’s counting that has become familiar to election watchers across the land: a lull in proceedings between 8pm, by which time most of the election day booths have reported their results, and at least 10pm, which is at long as it takes for most of the early polling places to process their many thousands of votes. The WAEC relates that 557,693 out of 1,868,946 enrolled voters have cast votes at early polling places, which I actually make to be down a little on 2021. There is no data that I’m aware of on postal votes — those that have been received will also be counted this evening. Only first preference above-the-line votes will be counted for the Legislative Council, the process for which will drag out until at least the end of the month.

Some other peculiarities of tonight’s proceedings are worth noting. This is the first Western Australian election at which early votes are ordinary rather than declaration votes, meaning the results category of “Early Votes (in Person)” has been abolished. The early polling place locations around the state will all be open today as well, and the results reported for them will include both the early and election day votes. Early votes cast out of district are now classified as absent votes, which are still declaration votes and will thus not be counted this evening. This is particularly significant in the case of Kalamunda, Forrestfield, Butler and Baldivis, which do not have a dedicated early polling place. Voters in these seats will doubtless have cast absent votes in neighbouring electorates in very large numbers, none of which will be counted this evening. All of which has made life complicated for those of us who create historic datasets allowing for swing calculations and booth-matched projections of the results.

Another unusual feature of the WAEC’s procedures is that the notional two-candidate preferred counts are kept under wraps until the commission is satisfied it has picked the right candidates, which seemed to start happening on a large scale at around 7:30pm in 2021. This means that the various media outlets’ results projections, including my own, will be based on speculative preference estimates for much of the night. My system is geared to be rather conservative when when going off preference estimates, and I’m guessing it will lag behind other media outlets in calling results.

On the eve of Western Australia’s state election, the first two public polls have emerged since the start of the campaign, with little to separate them. Newspoll in The Australian finds Labor leading 57.5-42.5, out from 56-44 in its poll four weeks ago, from primary votes of Labor 44% (up two), Liberal 29% (down three), Nationals 5% (up two), Greens 10% (down two) and One Nation 3% (down one). Roger Cook’s ratings are all but unchanged with respect to both respect to his performance, with approval steady on 55% and disapproval up one to 38%, and his lead as preferred premier, in from 54-34 to 53-34. Libby Mettam is up four on approval to 43% and one on disapproval to 42%. The poll was conducted last Thursday to Wednesday from a sample of 1061.

The West Australian has a result from DemosAU putting the Labor two-party lead at 57-43, from primary votes of Labor 43%, Liberal 30%, Nationals 5% and Greens 11%. The results at the 2021 election were Labor 59.9%, Liberal 21.3%, Nationals 4.0% and Greens 6.9%, with a two-party preferred of 69.7-30.3 in favour of Labor. A preferred premier question produces a narrower result than Newspoll, with Cook’s lead at 47-32. Forty-nine per cent rated that the state was headed in the right direction, with 31% disagreeing. The poll was conducted Tuesday and Wednesday from a sample of 1126.

The accompanying report also relates that both parties believes themselves to be ahead in Dawesville, with Liberal polling put them at 52-48 and Labor’s at 54-46, and quotes a Labor source saying the party was “in the game” in South Perth and “close, but feeling more confident” in Albany.

UPDATE: I have a paywalled article in Crikey on the election, with a focus on the performance and prospects of the Liberal Party.

Highlights of another dull old week on the Western Australian campaign trail:

• In an echo of the Queensland election, the Liberal candidate for Albany, Thomas Brough, has placed the issue of abortion on a campaign agenda that his leader would have preferred be kept free of it. Appearing alongside Libby Mettam at an announcement of a promised expansion of a local hospital, Brough – himself an emergency room doctor – responded in the affirmative to an enterprising ABC reporter’s question about whether abortion laws should be reviewed, offering that “babies born alive should not be left to die”. Mettam subsequently issued a statement that such a review was “not part of the WA Liberals’ plan”. Brough had already established his conservative credentials last year when he criticised a colleague on Albany City Council for supporting the Albany Pride Festival, saying “the coalition of the LGBTQIA+” encompassed “minor-attracted persons”, a comment Mettam rated as “bizarre”. It was also reported earlier in the week that Brough had been referred to the State Administrative Tribunal over claims of professional misconduct.

• Dylan Caporn of The West Australian reports Monday’s leaders debate was “awarded to Mr Cook narrowly over Ms Mettam by a tailored group of 25 voters”. However, the consensus of the paper’s journalists was that Mettam did slightly better out of the occasion, owing to a combination of low expectations, Labor’s sensitivity on the performance of the health system, and Cook saying his government put “Labor first” before correcting himself to “health first”.

• Media reportage has provided few if any indications of what sort of a result the parties are expecting, and nothing in the way of real opinion polling since the Newspoll at the start of the campaign. The West Australian did have a straw poll this week conducted at early voting centres on Monday, an exercise that distinctly failed to prove its worth when the Herald Sun tried it in Daniel Andrews’ seat ahead of the 2022 Victorian election. Jessica Page of The West Australian relates that 49% out of 302 voters who offered a response said they had voted Liberal in “seats which were shock losses in 2021”, though one of them seems to have been Kingsley, a normally marginal seat that Labor won in 2017.

Two weeks out from election day, there is still not a great deal to report – which I guess is instructive in and of itself, a low-key campaigning presumably being advantageous to the party with the giant majority.

• Joe Spagnolo of the Sunday Times reports Liberal leader Libby Mettam has promised to reverse the government’s upper house reforms and reinstate the old rurally weighted system of three metropolitan and three non-metropolitan regions returning six members each, arguing that “the mining and pastoral, agricultural and south-west regions are the backbone of the West Australian economy where the wealth of the state is generated”. While this will undoubtedly be popular in regional areas, implementing it will require the concurrence of an upper house elected under the new system, which is likely to provide representation for a number of small parties who would not have won seats under the old system, together with natural opponents in Labor and the Greens.

• The Liberal candidate for Kimberley, Darren Spackman, “resigned” this week at the direction of Libby Mettam, though the closure of nominations means he will remain identified as the Liberal candidate on ballot papers. Spackman made headlines earlier in the week over a Facebook post from 2022 in which he described a break-in at his Kununurra hotel as a “welcome to country”. Mettam at first went no further than characterising this as a poor choice of words, but then gave Spackman his marching orders when he subsequently asserted that “ten years ago I would have said hang the c…s”. This was despite the overall thrust of his comments being that his position had softened over time, as he had come to see that young offenders were in “survival mode”. Presumably Mettam had the salty language in mind when she said “these are not the values of the Liberal Party”, having not deemed the post itself a sacking offence.

• Joe Spagnolo in today’s Sunday Times reports Labor has “written off Nedlands, Carine and Churchlands, and expect to lose Warren-Blackwood and Kalamunda” – the latter being the one surprise of the list, since Labor won it in 2017 and hold a post-redistribution margin of 15.1%. Labor is also “nervous about losing seats like Kingsley, Scarborough, South Perth, Albany, Geraldton and Kalgoorlie”, which again sounds unremarkable with one exception, that being Kingsley, which was likewise won in 2017 and has a margin of 16.9%.

• A leaders’ debate will be conducted tomorrow evening by 7News, but at state level especially, these almost invariably go unnoticed by the public at large. Some manner of verdict will be reached by a selected audience of seven traditional Labor supporters, seven traditional Liberal supporters and seven who are undecided.

Ballot paper draws have been conducted for the Western Australian election and candidates published on the Electoral Commission website, though they will not be in a format I can make use of until later today (UPDATE: Now updated). I will then incorporate full candidate lists into my election guide. Antony Green crunches some numbers on his blog and finds nominations slightly down on 2021 for the lower house and dramatically down for the upper house, reflecting the abolition of the former system of six regions and the group voting tickets that encouraged preference harvesting.

There are twelve registered parties, each with an upper house ticket, and Antony Green has been able to surmise that the ten independent candidates include five grouped on to a ticket and another five in the ungrouped column. The formerly is presumably the grouping that brings together three cross-benchers incumbents who have broken with their original parties: Louise Kingston, formerly of the Nationals; Sophia Moermond of Legalise Cannabis; and the member formerly known as Ben Dawkins, who ran for Labor in 2021 but has been an independent since filling a mid-term vacancy, except when he had a spell with One Nation. Dawkins has changed his name to Austin Trump, allowing him to trade under the name “Aussie Trump”. There was a period when this grouping seemed to have split, Kingston promoting her wares through an “Independents for WA” website while Moermond and Dawkins-Trump made common cause as Vote Independent WA. Evidently the rift has healed though, with the former website now offline and Kingston back on the original site.

The names on the registered parties list are all familiar, with one conspicuous exception: Stop Pedophiles! Protect kiddies!, which is how the Democratic Labor Party has chosen to brand itself following federally inspired laws prohibiting minor parties from having Labor or Liberal in their names. The West Australian reports the other upper house cross-bencher, Wilson Tucker, was in talks to run with the Democratic Labour Party when it was still called that, but broke ranks when he learned of the new name and will now retire from politics. Tucker was famously elected to a Mining and Pastoral region seat for the Daylight Saving Party in 2021 off 98 first preference votes and a tight network of preference harvesting. Tucker became an independent when the party was deregistered in February 2023. Shooters Fishers and Farmers seem to have chosen to be identified on ballot papers, rather unwisely in my view, as SFFPWA.

This is the first election at which how-to-vote cards have been registered and published on the Electoral Commission website, a helpful practice from the perspective of the election analyst. For the upper house, Labor is recommending a second preference to the Greens, a third to Legalise Cannabis and a fourth to Animal Justice in city seats, but a second to Legalise Cannabis and third to the Greens in the country – prompting not unreasonable accusations from the Liberals that it is seeking to obscure its support for Animal Justice in areas sensitive to live sheep exports. The Liberals are recommending six numbers be marked, successively for the Nationals, Australian Christians, One Nation, Shooters and Libertarians. Labor are favouring the Liberals over the Nationals in three-cornered contests in Mid-West, Warren-Blackwood, Geraldton and Kalgoorlie. Neither side seems keen on independents: Labor has competitive contenders in Geraldton and Kalgoorlie behind both the Liberals and the Nationals, and the Liberals are favouring Labor incumbent Simone McGurk over teal independent Kate Hulett in Fremantle.

In other news, The Sunday Times reported this week that the Liberals are either managing expectations or taking a distinctly bearish view of proceedings, expecting to emerge from the election with between six and twelve seats. This suggests a swing of between 7% and 13%, as compared with the 14% indicated by the Newspoll last week. For Labor’s part, Dylan Caporn of The West Australian reports a source saying Albany will be “hard to win”, being “the only electorate in WA where the ban on live sheep exports is putting us at risk”.

The Australian celebrates the issue of the writs for the March 8 Western Australian state election (which you can learn about in detail through the Poll Bludger election guide) with a fresh result from Newspoll. This suggests Labor is headed for what would normally be reckoned a handsome win, but with a swing at the high end of what polling over the last year or so has indicated.

Labor is credited with a 56-44 lead on two-party preferred, compared with the extraordinary 70-30 result in 2021, from primary votes of Labor 42% (59.9% in 2021), Liberal 32% (21.3%), Nationals 3% (4.0%), Greens 12% (6.9%) and One Nation 4% (1.3%). Roger Cook’s personal ratings, while no match for Mark McGowan’s, are very strong by normal standards, with approval at 55% and disapproval at 37%, while Liberal leader Libby Mettam records 39% approval and 41% disapproval. Cook leads Mettam 54-34 as preferred premier.

The poll was conducted last Wednesday to Tuesday from a sample of 1039.

The Poll Bludger kicks off what promises to be an action-packed year with a comprehensive guide to a Western Australian state election now 66 days away. As always, this features pages for each of the lower house electorates including historic background and displays of past results in map, table and chart form, a guide to an election for the Legislative Council to be conducted for the first time under a new system that abolishes the old model of six-member regions, and a general overview of the situation. A full accounting of the post-redistribution margins and party vote shares can be found here. If any of this seems of value, a reminder that the bi-monthly Poll Bludger donation drive is also under way.

Some recent election-related developments since I last weighed in on the subject, either new or hitherto unnoticed by me:

• Steve Catania has been confirmed as Labor’s candidate for Midland, to be vacated with the retirement of Michelle Roberts. Catania is a lawyer and former Construction Forestry Mining and Energy Union organiser, the brother of Labor-turned-Nationals former MP Vince Catania, and the son of former Labor MP and Vincent mayor Nick Catania.

• Kyran O’Donnell, the Liberal member for Kalgoorlie from 2017 to 2021, announced in August he would run for the seat as an independent. O’Donnell is a former police officer and was elected to Kalgoorlie-Boulder City Council in October 2023. He was initially preselected for an unwinnable position on the Liberal Legislative Council ticket for the coming election.

• Three independents have emerged who can loosely be categorised at teals: Rachel Horncastle in Cottesloe, a general practitioner backed by the Cott Independent group; Lisa Thornton in Churchlands, a Stirling councillor backed by the Churchlands Independent; and Rosemarie de Vries in Nedlands, a Subiaco councillor. Another independent in a normally Liberal-held seat is former Global Lithium director Hayley Lawrance in South Perth, who disavows the teal label.