Not much in WA's win for federal Labor to take home

Labor had a thumping victory in Western Australia on the weekend but unfortunately for Anthony Albanese, there’s not much positive he can draw from it for the imminent federal election.

The ALP has been riding high in WA since the hugely popular Mark McGowan led the state as Premier.

His handling of the COVID pandemic, which saw the state all but secede from the rest of the country with its strict lockout laws (to the delight of most West Australians), only served to cement his popularity.

He pretty much wiped out the Liberals at the 2021 state election, leaving them only two seats in the 59-seat parliament.

McGowan’s subsequent decision to step aside from the top job resulted in a seamless transition to Roger Cook and has seen Labor win a third consecutive term in office with a resounding victory.

So what’s in it for the Prime Minister? Not a lot.

A Labor win in any state is always good news for a Labor federal government, but the WA situation is unique.

McGowan’s hero-like popularity, combined with Scott Morrison’s plummeting charm, helped federal Labor pick up WA seats at the 2022 federal election, but it will be a much tougher task to hang onto them this time round.

There are now a good number of marginal seats at play.

Even though Labor swept back to power in WA on Saturday, there was nevertheless a swing against it in the state.

Federal Labor is well and truly up against it in the West, which is why the Prime Minister has spent so much time there since coming to office.

The WA result might not have boosted his party’s federal electoral chances much, but then neither has the now ex-tropical cyclone Alfred.

Mr Albanese has handled the weather crisis well, but it has been nowhere near as dire as it promised to be.

If it had hit harder, we might have even got to see a sandbag carrying Albo complete with rolled up shirt sleeves coming to the aid of devastated locals in Queensland and New South Wales. (Is that being too cynical?)

They’ll have to instead settle for financial support, for which they will no doubt feel some goodwill towards the government.

At least the PM wasn’t in Hawaii.

If it wasn’t for Alfred, there was every chance the PM would have announced an election date over the weekend just passed.

He couldn’t do it with the cyclone looming and rightly had to focus on the plight of those in the weather path instead.

Now the Prime Minister will be sending the nation to the polls in May, likely without the boost of another interest rate cut and likely with some bad news from a 25 March federal budget.

Federal Labor did have one solid piece of good news over the weekend that could play out well in the election campaign.

The fake terrorism plot involving a caravan full of explosives in the Sydney suburb of Dural has allowed the government to expose a high degree of scaremongering on the Coalition’s part.

Australian Federal Police investigators concluded “almost immediately” that it was a con job when it was discovered in January with antisemitic threats attached, yet the Opposition jumped on it as having potential to be the “most catastrophic terrorist attack in our country’s history”.

When the AFP made its conclusion known publicly on Monday (10 March), it allowed Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke to expose the Opposition Leader’s scaremongering.

He said Mr Dutton had never sought a briefing over the incident, preferring instead to try to strike fear in the community in the chase for votes.

“The revelations this afternoon about the incident in Dural show that Peter Dutton has played directly into the hands of organised crime figures who have been trying to profit from dividing our community,” Mr Burke said.

“He made claim after claim which is now demonstrably untrue, and simply asserted a large-scale planned terrorist attack.

“That is not what we were dealing with. We were dealing with a criminal con job, and Peter Dutton was one of the people who was conned.”