CLANCY OVERELL | Editor | Contact
WORKED FOR TRUMP I GUESS? The Western Australian Liberal Party has somehow found themselves more fucked than they were after the 2021 landslide state election.
The demoralising loss to Labor Premier MArk McGowan left the Coalition with only two seats, as voters rejected the WA Liberal Party as an unhelpful bastion of culture wars – and one that was completely out of step with the average Western Australian.
Their perceived sucking up to the hapless Prime Minister Morrison and the billionaire mining baron Clive Palmer also did not help. Neither did their inability to embrace this modern concept known as female representation in Parliament – less than six months after those so-called ‘rednecks’ in Queensland went to a state election between two female leaders.
In fact, they fucked it up so badly in 2021 that their Federal colleagues could, and probably do, argue that the WA Liberals are a big part of the reason why Albanese flipped four seats in the West a year later.
Nearly a full State Parliamentary term later, and the WA Liberals are somehow in a worst state then they were back then.
This follows an unsuccessful campaign to oust the party’s leader. Who, again, is one of two Coalition MPs that remain in Parliament.
Their plan was to replace her with the blokey local Perth celebrity Basil Zempalas, a former reserve grade Aussie Rules player and sideline commentator for Channel Seven, who has not yet been elected to Parliament.
Again. They wanted to go into an election with a leader who is not an MP, but merely a candidate with not much on his CV other than working for Kerry Stokes in the soon to be extinct world of free-to-air TV, and the party was willing to replace their only female MP, who represents 50% of their party room, to do it.
Luckily for Libby Mettam MP, the plan failed. But with not much more in the toolbelt, there is no doubt the knives will come out again.
Lord knows who votes on a leadership spill when there’s only two MPs in Parliament, but many Western Australian voters just assume it’s probably the same billionaires that got Basil Zempalas to lead the campaign to shut down Perth’s ‘noisy’ domestic violence shelters.
