Category: Western Australian By-Elections

North West Central by-election and other WA news

A date set for WA’s first state by-election in over four years, plus news from the Liberal Party’s ongoing struggle to put the pieces back together.

I have knocked together a guide to Western Australia’s state by-election for North West Central, the date for which was set on Monday at September 17 following the official resignation of Nationals member Vince Catania. Nominations close August 26 – what’s known at present is that it will not be contested by Labor, likely making it a contest between Nationals candidate Merome “Mem” Beard, who has owned and run the Port Hotel in Carnarvon for two decades, and Liberals candidate Will Baston, owner of a pastoral property 150 kilometres east of Carnarvon and nephew of former Barnett government minister Ken Baston. The Nationals currently have four seats in the Legislative Assembly and the Liberals only two, giving Nationals leader Mia Davies the status of Opposition Leader, which would raise questions with no simple answer if the by-election result happened to make it three-all.

Other recent electorally related Western Australian state politics news:

• The Liberal Party’s state conference voted the weekend before last for a new preselection model that will grant a vote to all party members, replacing a system in which delegates were elected by each branch. However, the reform’s effectiveness in discouraging branch stacking has been limited by a failure to exclude non-branch delegates from the process, as had been recommended by the review conducted after the 2021 election debacle. This would have prevented it receiving the support of the factional leaders identified as “The Clan”, notably Peter Collier and Nick Goiran, whose power base rests largely on recruitment of members from suburban Pentecostal churches. Such support was required to clear the 75% bar required for changes to the party rules. Critics further complain that no action was taken against widespread payment of party memberships on single credit cards exposed by an audit in June.

• Suggestions that the party might be able to draft a saviour in the shape of former test cricketer Justin Langer having fallen through, more recent reports have suggested that one of the two Liberal lower house members, Vasse MP Libby Mettams, might topple party leader David Honey, Cottesloe MP and Mettams’ only lower house Liberal colleague. Rounding out the Liberal party room are seven members of the Legislative Council, including the aforementioned Collier and Goiran.

• Two cabinet ministers have announced they will not be contesting the next election: Alannah MacTiernan, following a career going back to 1993 in which she has served in federal and local as well as state politics, serving in the latter capacity in both houses of parliament and two different Legislative Council regions; and Sue Ellery, who has served in the upper house since 2001 and is currently Education Minister.

Monday miscellany (open thread)

Return of the vexed question of expelling elected members of parliament, an improbable set of state voting intention numbers from Victoria, and more.

I would guess that Newspoll will return on the eve of the resumption of the parliament, which is still three weeks away. This is an off week for Essential Research; there may be a Roy Morgan poll, or there may not. Until then:

• Kylea Tink, the newly elected teal independent member for North Sydney, says she believes a new federal integrity commission should have the power to sack parliamentarians for sufficiently serious breaches of a parliamentary code of conduct; David Pocock, newly independent Senator for the Australian Capital Territory, says he would have “real concerns about an unelected body being able to dismiss elected representatives”. The federal parliament denied itself of the power to expel representatives through legislation passed in 1987, such power only ever having been exercised in 1920, when Labor MP Hugh Mahon made “seditious and disloyal utterances” regarding British policy in Ireland. Mahon then re-contested his seat of Kalgoorlie but was narrowly defeated, which remains the only occasion of a government party winning a seat from the opposition at a by-election.

• If you can’t wait another three years for my 2025 federal election guide, Robin Visser offers an online geospatial tool for examining polling booth results at the recent federal election.

Victorian state news to go with that related in last week’s dedicated post on the subject:

• Roy Morgan has results of a “snap SMS poll” of state voting intention in Victoria, showing Labor with a rather inplausible two-party lead of 59.5-40.5 from primary votes of Labor 43.5%, Coalition 29.5%, Greens 12%, United Australia Party 2% and Derryn Hinch’s Justice Party 1%. The poll was conducted Thursday to Saturday from a sample of 1710. A similar poll in November produced the same two-party result.

• Morgan’s result is at odds with a detailed assessment of the state of play by pollster Kos Samaras, who expects Labor to struggle to maintain its majority in the face of four to five losses to the Liberals, two to the Greens and others yet to independents. However, it’s also “extremely difficult to see how the Coalition get anything north of 38 to 40 seats” in a chamber of 88.

• Jane Garrett, who held a seat in the Legislative Council for Eastern Victoria region, died on Saturday of breast cancer at the age of 49. Garrett moved to the chamber from the lower house seat of Brunswick at the 2018 election, which duly fell to the Greens. She resigned from cabinet in 2016 after a dispute with the United Firefighters Union in her capacity as Emergency Services Union brought her into conflict with Daniel Andrews. Garrett announced last December that she would retire at the election. Labor’s ticket in Eastern Victoria will be headed by incumbent Harriet Shing, who was last week promoted to cabinet, and Tom McIntosh, a former electrician and (at least as of 2019) electorate officer to federal Batman MP Ged Kearney, who is presumably well placed to fill Garrett’s casual vacancy in the interim.

Also:

• As detailed at length on my live commentary thread, South Australia’s Liberals copped a 6.0% swing in Saturday’s Bragg by-election to add to the 8.8% one they suffered at the March state election, leaving about 2% intact from a margin that was 17.4% after the 2018 election, and had never previously fallen below 12.8%. The next by-election off the rank is for the Western Australian state seat of North West Central, to be vacated with the retirement of Nationals member Vince Catania. The Nationals last week preselected Merome Beard, proprietor of Carnarvon’s Port Hotel, whose BLT comes strongly recommended. Labor is considered unlikely to field a candidate, but the Liberal state council voted last week to call for nominations.

By-elections three

A quick run through the three state by-elections shortly to be held in Liberal and Nationals seats in Labor-run states.

There are now three state by-elections on the way, one imminent, another three weeks away, and a third on a date yet to be determined. I have election guides for the first two of these, linked two below. In turn:

Callide. A by-election will be held for this rural seat in Queensland on Saturday to replace Liberal National Party member Colin Boyce, who has now gone federal as the member for the corresponding seat of Flynn. Labor has not gone the usual path of forfeiting a seat in which it has never been competitive, at least notionally setting up a contest between LNP candidate Bryson Head and Labor’s Bronwyn Dendle. However, there seems at least as much chance that final count will be between the LNP and One Nation, whose candidate Sharon Lohse achieved as much when she ran in 2017. Lohse was also the party’s candidate in Flynn at the recent federal election. For whatever reason, the party sat it out in the seat at the 2020 state election. Also in the field are Legalise Cannabis, Katter’s Australian Party and Animal Justice – but not the Greens, who tend not to trouble the scoreboard much in this part of the world.

Bragg. This blue-ribbon Adelaide seat goes to the polls on July 2 to choose a successor to former Deputy Premier Vickie Chapman, who displeased her party by pulling the plug on her political career shortly after the March election defeat. Here too Labor is gamely taking the field in a seat it has never held, but given the Liberals’ form in comparable seats at the federal election and its all-time low margin of 8.2% after the state election, it’s easier here to see why they might think it worth a roll of the dice. The Liberals could have had particular trouble if disgruntled political staffer Chelsey Potter had followed through on her threat to don the teal independent mantle, but it seems she was persuaded not to. The by-election thus pits Liberal candidate Jack Batty, who until recently worked at the High Commission in London, against Labor’s Alice Rolls, head of policy and strategy at the Australian Pro Bono Centre. The Greens and Family First have also announced candidates; nominations close on Friday.

North West Central. One of only six seats out of the 59 in Western Australia’s lower house not held by Labor, North West Central is shortly to be vacated with the retirement of Nationals member Vince Catania. Catania began his political career with Labor as a member of the Legislative Council in 2005, transferred to the Legislative Assembly in 2008, defected to the Nationals the following year and comfortably retained it through to 2021, when he held out by 1.7% against a swing of 8.4%, one of the lowest in the state. Although anything would seem possible given the loss of Catania’s personal vote, which is of particular significance in a seat where only 8000 voters were cast at the last election, the consensus seems to be that Labor will not field a candidate as it fears a backlash over its one-vote one-value reform to the Legislative Council, expects the seat to be abolished at the next redistribution and already has more MPs than it knows what to do with. The seat could potentially develop into a contest between the Nationals and the Liberals, but the odds on the latter would presumably be rather long.

Darling Range by-election live

Live coverage of the count for Western Australia’s Darling Range state by-election.

Final for Saturday. Some better results for Labor on pre-polls have brought the swing inside 10%. My own accounting of the results and swings can be found here.

8.24pm. Two booths are outstanding on the two-party vote, and with the writing well and truly on the wall, I won’t be waiting up for them. I’ve got the Liberal swing at 10.1%, which is a little down on where it was before, but still handsomely sufficient to account for the 5.8% margin. Other than Labor, the other losers are pollsters – ReachTEL was way off, and apparently there was a report this morning of Labor internal polling crediting Labor with 38% of the primary vote, which is 7% north of where they seem to have ended up.

7.57pm. All polling day booth results now in on the primary vote, Byford and Kwinana South doing nothing to disturb the overall picture. Still only eight booths in on two-party.

7.49pm. The biggest booth yet, Kelmscott Primary School, is round about par for the course.

7.47pm. Finally some two-party votes to play with: from seven booths, with an overall Liberal swing of 12.8%.

7.40pm. West Byford booth is consistent with the overall picture. We’ve also got a bunch of pre-polls and postals now, which are very slightly better for Labor than the polling booth votes.

7.34pm. Not sure where the numbers are, but Antony Green reports a 12.7% swing on two-party preferred from six booths counted out of 14, which is bigger than I’d figured.

7.27pm. Bedfordale and Mundijong booths maintain the overall picture of a double-digit drop in the Labor primary vote and only a slight improvement for the Liberals, with minor parties (not including One Nation and the Greens, who are static) soaking up the rest. The minor party vote is about evenly split between candidates of the left and the right, so presumably the primary vote will be a pretty good guide to the final outcome, and I’m projecting the Liberals will end up 4% in front (it’s 8% on the raw vote, but that’s because smaller rural booths have come in earlier than larger metropolitan ones). I’m not sure what’s going on with the two-party vote – I would certainly have expected to see quite a bit of it reported by now. There are four booths outstanding on the primary vote.

7.24pm. Roleystone Hall added, a slightly better result for Labor, but not enough to change the overall picture.

7.16pm. Mundaring Hall and Oakford are in, and Labor are still on track for a double-digit drop on the primary vote that could roughly be projected to give the Liberals a winning margin of maybe about 4%. Still no two-party results though, oddly.

7.12pm. Serpentine Primary and Picking Brook both in; the latter not bad for Labor, but the former has another double-digit swing on the primary vote and twice as big.

7.08pm. Big swing to Liberals at Marri Grove booth, so not looking good for Labor.

7.05pm. The non-major party vote is heavily right-of-centre, so Labor would want to be ahead on the primary vote, and I’m projecting that they won’t be.

7.04pm. Serpentine-Jarrahdale booth added, with nearly 1000 votes, and the primary swing vote against Labor is looking big enough now to be alarming for them. Still nothing on two-party preferred though.

6.59pm. I’m having trouble finding the error I thought I must be making, so it may just be a case of me and Antony doing things differently, and it generally being too early to tell.

6.53pm. It seems my projections are going awry, as Antony Green calculates a 7.6% primary vote swing to Liberal and minus 14.6% from Labor.

6.50pm. Another two smallish booths in: Armadale Primary and Bruno Gianetti Hall. Still looking close, but with a high combined non-major party vote, a lot will depend on preference flows we don’t know anything about yet.

6.42pm. Karragullen District Hall’s 234 votes in: Liberals up 3.3% on the primary vote, Labor down 7.2%. This suggests a very close result, but it is of course an extremely small booth.

6.32pm. I can’t quite get the formatting right, but my projections of the results can be found here. Unusually, we have 68 pre-poll votes in before anything else, which are impossible to booth-match. For what it’s worth, 28 of them are for Liberal and 19 for Labor.

6pm. Polls have closed. I will hopefully have tables presenting booth projected results by the time the first results are, which I’m guessing should be in about an hour, but I have a great many kinks to iron out before that can happen.

‘Twas the night before the Darling Range by-election

One last overview ahead of tomorrow’s Darling Range by-election in Western Australia.

Western Australia has its first state by-election involving both Labor and Liberal candidates tomorrow since the Peel by-election in 2007, at which, in a non-portent of things to come, the Labor government of Alan Carpenter picked up a rare pro-government swing. The circumstances this time around would not appear to be fortuitous for Labor, as the by-election was initiated by the resignation in disgrace of Barry Urban, who won the seat from Liberal incumbent Tony Simpson at the March 2017 state election by a margin of 5.8%, after a swing of 18.6%. This was the eighth highest swing of the election, making Darling Range the fourth safest seat lost to the Liberals and Nationals at the election.

Urban’s career unravelled last November when it emerged that a decoration he wore for police service overseas, which he originally claimed to have received for war crimes investigations in Bosnia-Herzegovina, had actually been bought online, and that two British universities he claimed had awarded him degrees had no record for him. He resigned from the ALP shortly after the story broke in November, and announced his resignation from parliament on May 7, a day before the parliament’s privileges committee was due to bring down a report on the matter. However, Labor’s troubles didn’t end there: a similar, though less severe, controversy would shortly engulf the candidate anointed by the party’s state executive as Urban’s successor: Colleen Yates, former chief executive of Regional Development Australia Perth. It shortly emerged that Yates had exaggerated her educational attainments on her LinkedIn profile, a misdemanour she could probably have glossed over under other circumstances, but fatal in the context of the by-election.

Labor promptly announced its new candidate would be Tania Lawrence, senior manager of global business integration at Woodside. The Liberal candidate is Alyssa Hayden, who held a Legislative Council seat in East Metropolitan region from 2008 to 2017, when she unexpectedly lost her seat to One Nation. Despite the seemingly ill portents for Labor, the one opinion poll of the campaign, from ReachTEL, credited Labor with a clear lead. My newly updated guide to the by-election can be viewed here.

ReachTEL: 54-46 to Labor in Darling Range

A week out from the McGowan government’s first electoral test in Western Australia, a new poll suggests Labor will do rather a lot better than they might have feared.

The West Australian had a ReachTEL poll yesterday of voting intention for next week’s state by-election in Darling Range, which Labor won by a 5.8% margin after an 18.9% swing at the state election last March, and which is now being vacated by Barry Urban after it emerged his CV had been littered with falsehoods. The result is remarkably strong for Labor, who hold a 54-46 lead on two-party preferred. The online report is a little vague on the primary vote, but it seems after exclusion of the 10% undecided that the primary vote for Labor candidate Tania Lawrence is little changed on the election result, while Liberal candidate Alyssa Hayden is up from 30.4% to around 34%. One Nation look to be around 10%, and the Greens on around 4%. More than half the respondents said Barry Urban’s resignation (and presumably also the first choice of Labor candidate, Colleen Yates, after it emerged she had exaggerated her educational attainments on her LinkedIn profile) would not affect their vote, with around a third saying they were less likely to vote Labor and 16% somehow registering that they were more likely to. The poll had 600 respondents; the field work data is not provided, but I’m assuming it was Thursday.

Darling Range by-election: June 23

A date is set and the main starters confirmed for the challenging by-election faced by Western Australia’s McGowan Labor government.

While we remain in suspense as to the timing of the federal by-elections, which appear likely to be held on either June 30 or July 7, we at least have a date for the Darling Range state by-election in Western Australia, for which a date of June 23 was confirmed on Friday. The major party candidates are now in place, with Labor last night endorsing Colleen Yates, former chief executive of Regional Development Australia Perth. The Liberal candidate is Alyssa Hayden, who held a Legislative Council seat in East Metropolitan region from 2008 to 2017, when she unexpectedly lost her seat to One Nation. Hayden reportedly had a narrow victory in the local preselection over Rob Coales, police sergeant and Serpentine-Jarrahdale councillor. Her backers included Christian Porter and Ken Wyatt, while Coales had the support of Tony Simpson, who held the seat for the Liberals until his defeat by outgoing Labor member Barry Urban last year. Nathan Hondros of Fairfax reports the party’s state council may have insisted on Hayden even if she lost the vote. The Poll Bludger’s guide to the by-election may be viewed here.

Darling Range by-election guide

Mark McGowan’s government faces its first serious by-election test as Barry Urban calls time in troubled tenure as member for Darling Range.

A difficult by-election looms for the Labor government in Western Australia in the seat of Darling Range, which was among the 20 seats it won as it swept to power in March last year. The outgoing member is Barry Urban, whose career unravelled last November when it emerged a decoration he wore for police service overseas, which he originally claimed to have received for war crimes investigations in Bosnia-Herzegovina, had actually been bought online, and that two British universities he claimed had awarded him degrees had no record for him. He resigned from the ALP shortly after the story broke, and has announced his intention to resign from parliament a day before the privileges committee brings down a report into the matter. I have posted a preliminary guide to the by-election, although there are no details to offer at this stage on the timing or who the candidates might be.

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