When Scott Morrison visited Western Australia in March, he briefly fumbled a question from a reporter by saying he had met the state’s opposition leader, the Liberal David Honey.
Morrison had to be reminded that the opposition leader is Mia Davies, a National, after the landslide 2021 election returned just two Liberals to the WA lower house.
That result sent shockwaves through the Liberal party, and suggested WA could deliver a rich return for federal Labor: Swan (on a 3.2% margin), Pearce (5.2%) and Hasluck (5.9%) could fall with a swing just one-third as big as Mark McGowan’s.
Since the Labor premier’s emphatic re-election, Morrison has told Western Australians they could have both McGowan and Morrison – refining the pitch to acknowledge that although he may not be universally popular, he is at least a known quantity.
But many voters in Swan and Hasluck say Morrison lacks the consistency to make the case for “better the devil you know” over Anthony Albanese’s small-target approach.
Andrew, an undecided voter in Swan who Guardian Australia meets on the South Perth foreshore, complains all parties have the “same agenda”. But he has “no confidence” in the prime minister, he says, and “Morrison and his personality” may be the best thing Labor has going for it.
“When he’s questioned, all his answers are deflected on to something else, there is no definite yes or no … I’d rather someone say the wrong thing and have a point of view than just change the subject.”
Nigel Harrison, who votes for Labor or the Greens, says Morrison “flip-flops continuously”. He says Western Australians were frustrated by the PM’s approach to the pandemic.
“He just drove us nuts,” Harrison says. “All the Liberal states were worried about businesses not the people.”
WA remained blissfully Covid-free for much of the pandemic, closed to the rest of Australia despite the Morrison government’s attempts to help Clive Palmer force the state open through a high court case – which it pulled out of in the face of overwhelming unpopularity.
Many undecided voters either say Morrison got in the way of McGowan’s pandemic response, or, at best, took credit for it.
But Harrison worries that if people are voting on personality, Albanese “may cost us the election” – he sees the Labor leader as “a bit of a wet leaf sometimes”.
The engineer …
Swan is a perennial must-win seat for Labor in a state where it has historically underperformed. The retiring Liberal MP Steve Irons has held it since 2007.
Directly across from the Perth CBD, it takes in most of the area between the Swan River and Canning River, including the airport and Curtin University. Voters lean Liberal at its fringes along the Swan River in the west and Hasluck in the east.
When we visited in March, awareness of the local candidates in Swan was low as war in Ukraine, floods on the east coast and the first community spread of Covid after the WA border reopened crowded the news cycle.
Eventually, Don Stephens, a Swan voter we find out-of-electorate by Cottesloe beach, ventures that the Labor candidate “is a female engineer, which seems positive”.
Labor’s Zaneta Mascarenhas tells Guardian Australia she is excited that Swan’s next member will be a woman, but emphasises the electorate has “two very different candidates” to choose from.
She notes that her opponent, Liberal Kristy McSweeney, comes from a “political dynasty” and has worked for a federal MP and as a news commentator. Mascarenhas on the other hand was “born and bred in the goldfields” to a metalworker dad and a cleaner mum. Her career, she says, started “in steel-capped boots”.
Asked about improving representation in politics, she replies that though some are interested in her candidacy because she is a woman of colour, she is “most excited” about the diversity of skills she will bring to parliament, as an engineer from a science background.
The pitch: identity politics for blue-collar blokes. Mascarenhas plays it skilfully – and more authentically than “ScoMo”, the welding jack of all trades and master of none caricature constructed by the PM.
Mascarenhas says Morrison is “not a leader” and suggests his attempts to recover the Coalition’s position through scares about national security or the economy are “desperate” and will fall flat. “Australians can spot a fake.”
Out doorknocking, Mascarenhas shows her talent in the field. She calibrates her tone: respectful towards Irons when speaking to an older gent, more critical when addressing a young mother who feels left behind by the Coalition government.
Federal parliament “needs more people with real skills”, she tells Bernie Lawrence, the Irons voter.
“It’s not so much what you’ve done or what you’ve learned,” he replies. “It’s what you can do for the people in this area.” Delivery will be his focus when casting a vote.
… versus the insider
Despite stints as a staffer over 16 years, McSweeney, who worked for Tony Abbott and Michaelia Cash, rejects the image of her as an insider when we meet near her South Perth office. She appears on Sky News “at night time”, she says.
During the day, she spent seven years building her own business, a PR consultancy – “from a laundromat,” she says, “because I couldn’t afford wifi in my apartment that I was renting”.
McSweeney paints her political experience as a virtue, arguing she won’t be “bamboozled” if she makes it to Canberra. Her election would make for the “very first conservative mother-daughter team in Australian politics”. (Her mother, Robyn McSweeney, started as a social worker and ended up as child protection minister.)
At Belmont Forum Shopping Centre, it’s the federal issues deciding people’s votes. Most want a change of government, perhaps because the electorate is Labor at its core.
Beth Runciman, a first-time voter, “doesn’t really agree with the Liberal policies”, which she sees as “more high economic status-based”. She associates Labor with greater equality: “I’m more for helping people who need the help.”
John Eaton, a teacher who votes Greens, says “the most important thing is we get rid of Morrison and his cronies”. He cites “the need for a federal Icac”, support for disadvantage in times of crisis, and Morrison’s “inability to respond to crises”.
Milan Simic, a rusted-on Labor voter, criticises Morrison for “getting too much in the political side against China, which is our number one trader”.
Michelle Parker says after a few terms of the Coalition, Australia “needs true leadership in our prime minister, something that’s really been lacking”.
“I want to see a federal Icac, more than anything,” she says.
“I think we need to look into the rorts and things that have been happening.”
Hasluck: a tipping-point seat
Party operatives say if Labor can win Swan and Pearce (vacated by the retiring Liberal MP Christian Porter) then WA will have done its share for Albanese.
But Hasluck, a sprawling outer-urban electorate stretching over Perth’s north-east, is also a target – the sort of seat that could turn a nail-biting election night and hung parliament into a workable majority.
At Guildford train station, Sue Millard, a nurse and Labor voter, says Morrison “hasn’t done a very good job” on the pandemic. “We’ve been very lucky in WA to have Mark McGowan and the stance he’s taken.”
She cites other concerns, too – “sexism, lack of concern with the fire that happened and he was on holiday”.
It’s not just progressive voters unhappy with the federal pandemic response. While that cohort wishes Morrison had left the job to McGowan, reactionary right voters criticise the PM for not stepping in enough over the state’s sweeping vaccine mandates, which cover 75% of the workforce.
At Ellenbrook Central shopping centre we meet Ken Taylor and his wife, Yvonne. Ken, who lost his fly-in-fly-out construction job due to a mandate, says Covid “has been managed very poorly from the government … in the sense that it’s not a pandemic”.
“I certainly won’t be voting for the major parties,” he says. “There’d be no way I’d vote for them after this.”
Ken says he’ll vote independent or for minor parties, and scrutinise preferences to “make sure they’re not going to Labor or the other larger parties”.
“Scott Morrison could stop this … He could turn around and say these mandates aren’t right.
“I don’t think Morrison will [win] and I think it would be a disappointment if Albanese gets in the seat – he probably will.”
Ken Wyatt stares down the swing
But while Morrison is poorly rated, the Indigenous affairs minister, Ken Wyatt, is a chance to hold Hasluck against a swing to Labor.
Wyatt, the member since 2010, is well known in all parts of the electorate except Ellenbrook, an expanding outer-urban project home suburb redistributed into Hasluck from Pearce.
Greg Waller, a former Labor voter in Midland, says he votes for Wyatt because he “does a good job”.
“Really, it’s the local MP you can interact with and get issues corrected [by] that you’re worried about,” Waller says.
“Scott Morrison’s not going to answer my phone call, but Ken will.”
Waller is less impressed with Morrison, whose performance he says is “not real good”.
“He puts his foot in his mouth sometimes,” he says, citing trade disputes that “wouldn’t have happened if he kept his cool”.
Gretchen Walsh, a Liberal voter, says she is “quite happy” with Wyatt. She has “no confidence whatsoever” in Albanese however.
“He only criticises everything, he doesn’t suggest, ‘we could do this or do that’,” she says.
Walsh credits both Morrison and McGowan for their handling of the pandemic. “Because of these times and this Covid-19, anybody with any power has been doing the best they can.”
It’s a common refrain from Liberal voters – who feel sorry for Morrison and say he has done well in the circumstances – but it’s often tinged with surprise that others have turned against the Coalition in what is usually a stronghold.
We meet Wyatt outside the Ray Owens Sports Centre in Lesmurdie. It’s where the West Rise special needs basketball competition runs, of which Wyatt has been a patron since 2011.
He argues the Coalition is better on both local and national levels, citing the economy and national security, including higher defence spending than under Labor and “deporting people who are significant offenders and dangerous to the community”.
Asked about the PM’s line that Western Australians can have both McGowan and Morrison, Wyatt’s face falls before he makes the case the two have similarities.
“The premier is popular because of the border closure and people have looked at that as a strength,” Wyatt says.
“The prime minister is very pragmatic … We closed our international borders to travellers from the beginning. So we did have a border closure to protect us.”
Looking for a government that delivers
Labor’s Hasluck candidate, Tania Lawrence, says the election result will reflect that Western Australians hold Morrison “responsible for his failure to act on vaccines and on quarantine”.
Lawrence says the electorate’s big issues are aged care, climate change – “given we live and breathe the risk of climate change with bushfires” – and mobile phone coverage, which is “patchy across the entire electorate”.
Lawrence doesn’t have “any beef” with Wyatt, who she describes as “personable”. But she says the electorate has “expectations that the Liberal government should have delivered by now, and have failed to do so”.
“Is that a reflection on Ken? That’s ultimately for the voters to decide.”
