If these Voices are to be among the next government initiatives to deal with Indigenous disadvantage then we would be wise to study their history — for the idea is not new. For that reason, Max Angus’s new book, Too Far Out, an “administrative history” of the Ngaanyatjarra community of Western Australia, couldn’t be more timely.

The Ngaanyatjarra community — 1542 kilometres northeast of Perth, 750 kilometres northeast of Kalgoorlie, 560 kilometres northeast of Laverton, 1050 kilometres southwest of Alice Springs and (by my estimate) 2200 kilometres from Canberra — is remote from any recognised administrative centre. Imagine a London borough governed by officials living and working in Budapest with oversight from officials in Bucharest.

As a “nation for a continent” (in the words of Australia’s first prime minister) “remote” is what Australia does: assuming responsibility for all corners of this land is our sovereign project. Since the early twentieth century, the Ngaanyatjarra have become interlocutors of  Australia’s three-level state; less and less are they “too far out.” They have been Australian citizens since 1948 (and British subjects before that). They have become literate in English, and were fully enfranchised in 1984. Many would call themselves Christian, and their homeland has been of intermittent economic significance. They have been statistically visible — on the wrong side of the gap — since the 1970s. How their homeland became a governable region is the story that Angus, a former professor of education, wants to tell.

Until 1873–74, when William Gosse, Ernest Giles and John Forrest began to map cross-continental routes, no European had entered the region. An imagined Laverton-to-Oodnadatta stock route would have passed through but it never came into existence; only in the early twentieth century did prospectors venture there and humanitarians begin considering how the denizens of this arid interior might be protected.

From South Australia’s Christians came a proposal, in 1914, to declare reserves — “sanctuaries” — on each side of the border with Western Australia. Would the Commonwealth join them in its adjacent southwest corner of the Northern Territory? After years of negotiation the three contiguous Central Australian Reserves were gazetted in 1920–21 and this “inviolable” region of interacting desert peoples came under three colonial authorities.

But officials in Perth, notionally responsible for the welfare of the Ngaanyatjarra, had no program and no knowledge. In the 1930s, from Mount Margaret Mission near Laverton, pastor Rod Schenk and schoolteacher Mary Bennett peered east and hoped that Perth would not license the Ngaanyatjarra homeland to graziers and gold-seekers. Motor cars were replacing camels but there were still no roads. The Ngaanyatjarra were reported to be “gentle and well mannered” and evidently “contented and well fed.”

The WA government refused tenure in the region to all but missionaries. After Schenk established a mission at the Warburton range, near the reserve’s western edge, in 1934, he persuaded the government to extend the reserve boundary further west to include a permanent Euro-Australian presence, the United Aborigines’ Mission under William and Iris Wade.

With the state stinting the money needed to feed the desert people attracted to the mission, Ngaanyatjarra people, encouraged by the Wades, began competing for the government bounty on dingo scalps with “doggers” already active in the Western Desert. The state government sought to regulate the mission’s scalp dealings, and in 1947 visiting police observed the Ngaanyatjarra hunters breeding dingos for scalp harvesting. (In the mid sixties, anthropologists began learning of a dingo dreaming track starting at a site known as Nanku.)

By then, Australian governments were imagining Indigenous Australians’ secular pathway to economically independent citizenship. Officials wondered if the mission was giving the Ngaanyatjarra enough to eat and whether it was right to house children in dormitories. Native affairs commissioner Stanley Middleton (1948­–62) was committed to “assimilation,” even for the most distant and “primitive” people, but the policy raised a question: could a Christian mission on an inviolable reserve be an instrument of its residents’ progress?

Warburton mission’s government subsidy increased, but it was calculated on the assumption that many who frequented the mission were living as hunter-gatherers and dingo farmers rather than reliant on the mission. But the government began considering a plan to close the Warburton mission and transfer residents 200 miles to Cosmo Newberry, a settlement acquired by the missionaries in 1953 to train children with state government support. Warburton mission found an advocate in Bill Grayden MP, however, who persuaded the Legislative Assembly to set up an inquiry into the welfare of “natives” in the Laverton–Warburton Ranges region. Having found the people at Warburton to be in a depleted condition, the committee recommended that the government subsidise a pastoral enterprise for the Ngaanyatjarra.

A dispute ensued: visitors in 1957 (including a young Rupert Murdoch) debated how well or how badly off were the Ngaanyatjarra, what remedies they were entitled to, who was responsible for delivering assistance and whether English should replace Ngaanyatjarra as the region’s lingua franca. The records assiduously consulted by Angus suggest that the Ngaanyatjarra had no independent voice in these debates.

Meanwhile, the “inviolable reserve” was being subjected to excisions. The Commonwealth’s weapons testing program required it to establish an observation post within the reserve — Giles Weather Station, with connecting roads — and the WA government opened a third of the reserve (7500 square miles) to International Nickel of Canada in 1956. The Ngaanyatjarra thus became a “problem”: in order to protect them, authorities now had to exclude them from places where Commonwealth and company employees — in small numbers — were residing. Middleton hoped that the Commonwealth would assume responsibility for developing all of the Central Reserves; South Australia, for its part, initiated a pastoral enterprise at Musgrave Park, later known as Amata, in 1961.

To begin with, the Ngaanyatjarra are in the background of Angus’s story, but he is able to move them steadily to the foreground. The more their homeland was encroached on, the more their remaking of their life became visible to colonial authority and thus to the historian.

Some 450 residents were counted at Warburton in 1962. They were increasingly dependent on the food the mission provided. The following year a patrol officer reported that the Ngaanyatjarra were using their homeland’s recently graded tracks — even purchasing their own truck from sales of copper ore found near the mission. At this point it becomes possible for Angus to name individual Ngaanyatjarra.

A man called Tommy Simms had discovered the copper, and by 1961 the mission was managing the earnings derived by a small number of men from mining the ore and sending it to British Metals in Perth. The government wanted to develop the enterprise on a commercial footing, but the mission sought to defend its own interests and assure a degree of Ngaanyatjarra control. Western Mining offered to partner with the men, the government approved, and Simms became the first Ngaanyatjarra with the means to purchase his own vehicle (a Toyota and a Bedford truck).

In 1966 the government licensed Western Mining to prospect within the reserve and form partnerships with Simms and other individuals. Between forty and sixty men were involved in mining by 1967; in keeping with Western Desert people’s now well-known respect for “autonomy” within a continuously negotiated “relatedness,” those with tenements preferred individual partnerships with Western Mining to a cooperative. Others participated as employees. Would copper ore pave the way to the future governments hoped for?

But the Ngaanyatjarra easily disengaged from copper mining: the land was unevenly mineralised, the work was tedious, hunting remained an attractive alternative, and the mission would still feed them. “Their deep attachment was to the Ngaanyatjarra people and lands,” writes Angus, “not to a mining corporation or to a Western lifestyle.”

By the time Western Mining decided it was no long profitable to work with Ngaanyatjarra, one in ten Warburton residents had become eligible for the social security payments that now made up two-thirds of the community’s income. In 1969 the payments, previously made collectively, began being paid to individual recipients. The change was conceived and defended as a step towards “citizenship,” but it wrecked the mission’s system of communal provision.

Prospects of further income from the mining of nickel (around Wingellina) and chrysoprase had to be weighed against a growing official concern for the protection of sacred sites whose locations were being revealed to researchers during the 1960s by Ngaanyatjarra. They wanted income from mining, but in ways that respected country.

By this time, a new federal Office of Aboriginal Affairs was looking at how employment could be brought to the region in ways that aligned with local interests. An inquiry proposed that a new, federally funded Central Reserves Trust representing Ngaanyatjarra and neighbouring peoples would gradually assume control of the three reserves, re-establish Warburton mission as a planned township, develop tourism and horticulture, and permit Aboriginal prospecting. Before that happened, the Commonwealth demanded that Ngaanyatjarra land excised for mining be returned to the reserve. Western Australia complied in February 1972, while also amending its own legislation to allow a minister to approve exploration within the reserve.

Where did Warburton mission fit into this plan? Around Australia, Christian missions were relinquishing administration to Aboriginal councils. The WA government considered that its agencies — including the new (1972) Aboriginal Affairs Planning Authority — were better suited to administering Commonwealth investment in the reserves. The missionaries agreed, with misgivings, to confine themselves to “spiritual and linguistic” work. Administering the food supply — the children’s dining room and the store — devolved to Ngaanyatjarra, who were unprepared for the role. They were equally unprepared when a new Warburton Community Inc. introduced unfamiliar modes of governance in mid 1973. It was “a difficult period for all concerned,” writes Angus, but the policy of self-determination was politically irreversible.

For these policies and plans to work as “development,” much depended on which of the proliferating authorities and visitors the Ngaanyatjarra — the intended workforce and clientele — felt comfortable with. Visiting tradesmen were unfamiliar with the Ngaanyatjarra’s opportunistic approach to employment — intermittent and punctuated by spells on unemployment benefits. The local labour markets that worked in some Australian regions seemed not to apply in Ngaanyatjarra country. Teenagers rejected the daily discipline of school attendance and some residents refused to cooperate with nurses employed by the Australian Inland Mission. Blasting for the construction of a hospital upset the custodians of the Marla so much that visiting workers demanded police protection.

By 1975 Warburton was becoming known as a hostile environment for non-Ngaanyatjarra. For reasons cultural and logistical, it was proving difficult to police Warburton from Laverton. One of the Commonwealth’s responses was to assist Ngaanyatjarra to decentralise. The four resulting “homeland” communities — Wingellina, Blackstone, Warakurna and Jameson, each with its own white community adviser — were all places where Ngaanyatjarra had interacted with “whitefellas”: all were on the road network that prospectors and weapons researchers had created since the 1950s.

People from Docker River (a welfare settlement established in the Northern Territory in 1968) and Amata (a South Australian settlement established in 1961) also moved to the four communities. The Central Reserves were being repopulated using resources deliberately or inadvertently provided by a variety of non-Aboriginal intrusions. Their viability was based largely on welfare payments, as Angus writes, for the federal Department of Aboriginal Affairs “had given up pretending that some large-scale economic enterprise, leading to regular paid work, was just around the corner.”

As public health practitioner David Scrimgeour tells it in his recent book, Remote as Ever, a cohort of whites with relevant skills was emerging from southern capital cities to work alongside these Western Desert people. They believed that self-determination could work as long as it was re-spatialised according to Aboriginal wishes and resourced according to their rights as citizens. For Indigenous nations living almost entirely on imported food, the “smoothly operating well-stocked store” was each new community’s foundational institution. Schools and clinics (each with itinerant staff) followed. Able to move among Ngaanyatjarra’s five communities, people occupied their homeland with fewer material constraints; but it was difficult to service “communities” so transient.

The 1967 referendum had created the potential for intergovernmental relationships to change in ways that could work to the advantage of Ngaanyatjarra. The Commonwealth sought to treat the entire Central Reserve as a single “tri-state” object of reformed administration. Decisions in Canberra meant that the Ngaanyatjarra began to look more to the local Department of Aboriginal Affairs office in Alice Springs and less to state officials in Perth. WA government agencies increasingly faced demands from community advisers who answered to Canberra.

Empowering the Commonwealth at the expense of the states caused tensions among non-Indigenous officials. A major Commonwealth innovation in 1977 was to lump unemployment benefits into a single payment to each community — the Community Development Employment Projects, or CDEP, schemes.

When their expectations were not met, Ngaanyatjarra were sometimes violent towards service providers, making policing (where, how many, what methods) a policy issue in the late 1970s. Christian evangelism (including a “Christian Crusade” in 1981) and new by-laws in Warburton reduced but didn’t stop alcohol abuse and petrol-sniffing. Angus argues convincingly that outbreaks of “lawlessness” preceded the 1970s transition to “self-determination.” But the question remained: could the institutions of self-determination reduce the frequency and severity of such “turbulence”?

A certain level of turmoil did not stop the Ngaanyatjarra and their neighbours to the east from collective action using the Commonwealth’s and South Australia’s land rights policies. The formation of the Pitjantjara Council, the continuing interest of mining companies in the reserve’s nickel, and the pro-mining stance of WA premier Charles Court stimulated the formation of the Ngaanyatjarra Council in March 1981. In well-publicised lobbying, the council demanded inalienable freehold title to the WA portion of the Central Reserve.

An inquiry initiated by a subsequent premier, Labor’s Brian Burke, recommended in 1984 a way to legislate land rights. With claimable land amounting to 47.2 per cent of Western Australia’s total area, the Liberal Party argued, as it would in 2023, against “a set of rights which will be attributable to one small group of our population,” and it had the numbers in the Legislative Council to defeat Labor’s bill.

Burke’s government was impressed by the mining industry’s public relations campaign and lobbied for the Hawke government to abandon its planned national land rights bill. Would the Ngaanyatjarra accept a ninety-nine-year lease and the prospect of a nickel mining town (with jobs for Ngaanyatjarra) instead? The Ngaanyatjarra suggested that the government use existing legislation to lease the reserve land and other desired portions to a new body — the Ngaanyatjarra Land Council — some land portions with ninety-nine-year, others with fifty-year leases. Mining companies would apply to the land council, not the mines minister, for permission to explore, with a right to take any refusal to independent arbitration. Visitors could apply to the land council for permission to enter land under lease.

This 1988 deal, which Angus describes as “a masterfully executed compromise,” has lasted through several changes of government.

Because roads are an essential part of the Ngaanyatjarra’s adaptation, it mattered that, not being rate-payers, they could not vote in shire elections. When the franchise was extended to all adult residents, voter turnout among Ngaanyatjarra was much higher (40 per cent in May 1987) than among all other voters in the Shire of Wiluna, which extended to the west. Recognising that the shire was now two regions distinguished by need, revenue base, economic activity and cultural outlook, the WA government split the Shire of Wiluna in half and established the Shire of Ngaanyatjarraku in the eastern portion in July 1993.

This belated municipal enfranchisement of the Ngaanyatjarra was by then paralleled in the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission, or ATSIC. Replacing the Department of Aboriginal Affairs in 1989, ATSIC was made up of elected regional councils with responsibility for certain Commonwealth programs. At first, ATSIC comprised sixty elected regional councils; after amalgamations for the second round of elections in December 1993, there were only thirty-five. Ngaanyatjarra objected to being amalgamated with neighbours to their west (Martu) and south (Spinifex mob) and took legal action against the electoral process that chose the Western Desert Regional Council. Their objection — not wanting to be represented by strangers — remains a familiar theme of Indigenous Australian politics. Warren Mundine — campaigning against the 2023 referendum — cited the Ngaanyatjarra as an ally in his critique of the Voice co-design process proposed by Marcia Langton and Tom Calma.

“By the mid-1990s,” Angus concludes, “the Ngaanyatjarra Council could justifiably claim that the region had become self-managing within the state and Commonwealth legal frameworks.” He lists formally incorporated enterprises (transport, stores) the Ngaanyatjarra have developed through collective action.

In an afterword, he briefly takes the story to the present. He condemns the Howard government (1996–2007) and its successors for modifying, then abandoning, the single most important financial basis of “self-management,” the CDEP. An older set of expectations regained authority in government and to some extent among the wider public: the Ngaanyatjarra would develop (must develop) into job-seekers (with “work-like habits”) despite their region still having almost no labour market (other than that provided by the CDEP).

In his valuable ethnography of the social and linguistic practices that have evolved within Ngaanyatjarra transactions with governments, The Dystopia in the Desert, former Ngaanyatjarra employee Tadhgh Purtill argues that the community, its advisers and distant public servants have tacitly agreed never to confront the tensions between the different practical senses of a word that all feel obliged to use: “development.”

Ethnography yields an account of something on which all governance rests: embedded, routinised ways of describing Ngaanyatjarra circumstances. As Purtill observes, talk and text can be seen as enacting a kind of political truce. That is, they shield the fantasy of remote Aboriginal assimilation from a reality test it could not survive. Purtill’s point of view is elusive; he seems, at times, to be a whistle-blower unmasking a systemic rort of public funds. Yet in his account of mutual complicities the reader can see an adaptive structure, a buffer against the ongoing (and potentially lethal) chaos that is settler colonial authority in its liberal democratic form.

Well advised and adept, the Ngaanyatjarra litigated against the smashing of the CDEP in 2021. They won a $2 million payment and a government promise to negotiate a new framework of public financial support. Angus concludes his book wondering how that will work out in a political system that equates centralised decision-making with administrative rationality. There is a Ngaanyatjarra voice, but it is nothing without an attentive listener. •

Too Far Out: An Administrative History of the Ngaanyatjarra Homelands
By Max Angus | Hesperian Press | $66 | 295 pages

The post Voices off appeared first on Inside Story.

I have to start with my parents because without them I would not be here. My mum was born in 1910. She is a Binjarib woman, a direct descendant of the original Nyoongar people from the Pinjarra area in the southwest of Western Australia. A Binjarib Nyoongar. We consider ourselves coastal plain people and we have a strong spiritual and cultural connection to both fresh water and salt water.

Fresh water because we lived right near the bilyah, the river which flowed down from the hills to our east. Salt water because within walking distance of where we lived, the river emptied first into the estuary, then the ocean to the west. It was the perfect location for hunting and fishing throughout the year.

Our mob are the Binjarib traditional and custodial owners. Our ancestry can be traced through both our oral history and the recorded history of the wadjerlar [white people] colonists since settlement. It was Mum’s people, my ancestors, who were killed by white soldiers at the massacre which took place in Binjarib country at Pinjarra in 1834.

Our stories and songlines, our sacred and special sites, and our very cosmology are deeply imbedded in our Binjarib language, land and cultural knowledge. My mum taught us her Binjarib Nyoongar language, but insisted we never spoke it at school. To the white authorities our language was the devil’s own. We risked being taken away from our families if we were ever heard speaking it.

We loved listening to the yarns Mum told. She made us so proud that some of our people had survived the 1834 massacre. How our ancestors had come up against wadjerlar soldiers on horseback, with guns and swords when our maaman only had spears, koondees and boomerangs. Yet despite the overwhelming odds, with many of our people dying, there were those who had lived to pass on to our own children and grandchildren the stories and language for us to share the truth of what happened.

My mum was a very special woman. She was born in Nyoongar Boodja — Nyoongar country — the only sister with five brothers. Like my mum, my uncles passed the Binjarib stories on to their children. Of course, their recollections were from a male perspective, but the outcomes all tallied. Each one of her brothers loved Mum and treated her with utmost respect. I have never known any of my five uncles to say even one angry word to their sister. Ever!

Mum was the keeper of our Binjarib history and stories, a very strong-minded woman, much loved and respected by all her family. Not even government policy could break the family bonds that existed between Mum, her husband, ten children and all her brothers.

One particular policy that really irked Mum related to the citizenship rights papers, as they were referred to among our family at the time. Those Aboriginal people who were given the papers were allowed to enter pubs and buy alcohol. They were also permitted to be on the streets before the six o’clock morning curfew and after the six o’clock evening curfew. It gave them quite a bit of freedom to go about their business and they were seen as “white citizens.”

On the downside, anyone granted those papers was not allowed to interact or socialise with other Aboriginal people. Family members included. If caught doing so, they would lose their papers and face jail.

As Mum told us, “I would never apply to get those papers. I have spent too much of my life being separated from my brothers. First, in New Norcia Mission, and then I was put in Moore River Native Settlement. My brothers and their families are worth more to me than being classified as a white person. I love my family so the government can keep their papers.”

Dad, too, was born in 1910, in the springtime. At least, that was the year the authorities estimated he came into the world. Dad was not a Nyoongar man. His mum, my paternal Nanna Mary, was a Palyku Mulbpa woman from around the Nullagine area. His father was a wayfaring Irishman.

Dad was born in the Pilbara on the banks of the Shaw River at Hillside Station. The homestead was not far from Marble Bar, about seventy miles southwest of the small goldmining town, but it was more than 900 miles north of Perth. He was taken away from Nanna Mary and sent to Perth when he was very young, about eight years old.

Dad always told us that he first met Mum when he was living in Moore River Native Settlement. Mum had been sent to the same place from New Norcia Mission as a fourteen-year-old when she was deemed old enough to go out and work on the stations.

Although they were never sent to work at the same place, Mum and Dad told us it was really tough working on the stations. He cleared the land, put up fences, broke in horses, rounded up cattle and fixed windmills on the stations where he worked. Mum worked in various homesteads as a housemaid. She kept the homes clean and cooked all the meals for the station owners and their family, sometimes for ten or more people.

The hours were long, from sunrise to sundown, and they were paid a pittance. But my mum and dad were survivors. And they always caught up with each other whenever they were sent back to Moore River Native Settlement if their work ran out on the stations.

As it turned out, government and religious rules proved to be hurdles to their plans for a long-term relationship. Back then, if Aboriginal people wanted to marry, they had to apply to the government, and their respective churches, for permission to do so. When my parents finally married in 1934, after years of red tape, they shared a whole lot of love, mutual respect, appreciation and tolerance for each other, and it endured over their years together.

As Dad often told us, “I met the love of my life at Moore River Native Settlement when I was fourteen years old, back in nineteen twenty-four. From that day onwards, I knew your mother was the only one for me. I have never regretted marrying that beautiful girl.”

Theirs was a love story that lasted more than fifty years. Right up until he died in August 1992, many years after Mum, who passed away in 1975, Dad still proclaimed his love for her.

Apart from his own children and our mum, Dad had no other immediate family living around Pinjarra. From time to time he was visited by our people from up north. And though it was usually very late when they turned up, Dad always walked to our fence line to talk with them. Mum warned us kids not to stickybeak when we tried to sneak a glimpse of them standing out in the moonlight talking with Dad. From what I could barely hear, the men spoke in a language I couldn’t understand. Mum said it was “men’s business.”

I realised later that us kids were multicultural even in our own country: Binjarib Nyoongar, Palyku Mulbpa and Irish. When tracing our family tree, very early mention is also made of an American ancestor who sailed here and married a Nyoongar woman from the Albany region. Another interesting fact Mum often told us was that her great-great-grandmother was of Chinese heritage. In the features of some of my siblings there is definitely a strong Asian influence.

Ancestry aside, to the Australian government back then we were classified as Aboriginal. Since colonisation, our people had been through some traumatic times with very limited freedom to do what we wanted. Even when we were adults, government policy dictated everything we did. The rules applied to everyone, and authorities made sure they were diligently enforced. Our people had to be strong just to survive.

In those days, as long as I had my mum and dad, a feed and a bed, I was okay. But I have to tell you, there were periods in my life as a young Nyoongar girl that I found really hard going. To some I know it may sound petty, but back then it bothered me, especially when I got to an age where I began to notice things happening around me and I overheard comments by family and friends.

For instance, when people talked about who was the prettiest in our Connell family — and there being six sisters — my name always seemed to be last on the list. My older sisters with their pretty faces, perfect brown skin and long jet-black hair have won beauty contests. Rightly so. They were very beautiful. Glamorous photographs and huge beauty competition trophies attest to those facts.

My youngest sister, Hannah, much like our oldest one, Janie, has a natural Nyoongar and Asian-influenced beauty, with her black hair, dark doe eyes and smooth unblemished olive skin. But me? With my very pale skin, honey-blonde hair and hazel eyes, thanks to the genetic traits I inherited from my Irish grandfather, I seemed destined to miss out on the compliments. Especially from other Nyoongars.

When my brothers wanted to be extra mean to me, they said our mum had brought the wrong baby home from the hospital. I hardly ever got any compliments. Oh, I sometimes received a mention, but mainly because I was very good at sports and smart in schoolwork. But as a young girl I always felt I missed out when the really pretty faces were handed out in heaven.

I know Mum loved me and she always said, “Lavinia, it’s not what you look like on the outside. It’s whether you are a good person on the inside that counts. God is watching what we do, not what we look like. He already knows those details. So you remember that’s how He will judge us. By our actions. Who cares what other people think? They are just ordinary humans.”

My mum’s words eased my mind. Still, at the time I always thought maybe I should have been the one called Jane. In my mind it surely was a match with me being plain.

There were other tough things about being a Nyoongar girl. And knowing how to fight was one of them, and it was going to come in useful throughout my life. When my four brothers had to fight five other boys, I always fought the boy who was about the same age as me. No hair pulling, biting or scratching like girls fight. It was stand back, shape up and punch each other. Queensberry Rules boxing, Dad said. Maybe if I wasn’t such a tomboy and hadn’t belted them up, those boys might have called me pretty.

Though I was never — and I am not now — a vain person, there were times when people commented on my appearance in a really spiteful way. It was so hurtful to be told, “Lavinia, you wanna know something? From a distance, yeah, you looked gorgeous. But up close? Nah. Nah. You don’t even look Nyoongar. Are you sure you’re Aboriginal? You are so white.” Then the laughter.

When I was thirteen, this was said to me in front of a group of my peers. My two best friends got so angry with the person who said it, they wanted to punch into him. At the time I retorted by telling that bloke to get nicked. He apologised only because he was scared my friends wanted to hit him, but I could tell his apology was fake. Besides, his words were out and they couldn’t be taken back. It stung. I realised later that I was angry for two reasons. One for being called ugly, but also it hurt more to be challenged about being a Nyoongar just because of the light colour of my skin. Thanks, Grandfather!

Another time, I was asked by an acquaintance if I was truly an Aboriginal and whether I should be talking about Nyoongar people. I turned and walked off, but not before I told him to go fornicate with himself with the old Queensland bush medicine, a big prickly pineapple.

I told that mean-mouthed bastard in both English and Nyoongar. Fortunately, that second time I was no longer a teenager. I was in my mid twenties, yet it brought back a reminder of the days when I was younger and more vulnerable to mean comments like these.

Another painful memory as a youngster relates to government policy and its impact on our people. At any given time, it wasn’t hard for the authorities to keep track of us Nyoongars. Especially those six families who owned land and were permanent residents in the town, like our family and Uncle Levi’s.

Because our land was near a big swamp, the police identified us as the “Swampies.” There were also about seven other Nyoongar families living in the area, but they had all set up camps on reserved government land. They became known as the “Reserve Mob.” They had found steady work on the farms and with government agencies, like the public works department, and settled with their families in Pinjarra. In all, there must have been close to eighty Nyoongars in the town who had no intention of moving away.

Then there were transient families who only came to town for seasonal work and moved on when that ran out. They usually stayed with relatives for the duration and sent their little ones to the same state school we went to. Sometimes when that happened, the number of Nyoongar kids in the classes almost doubled. Some families also enrolled their children in the local Catholic school. Strict government rules said it was compulsory for all young Nyoongar kids to get educated. Rain, hail or shine.

If we missed even one day, there had to be a note from Mum or Dad or one of the older sisters who had already left school. If there was no note, the police could be, and often were, contacted by the school and sent to check why we hadn’t turned up.

There was one cardinal rule for every Nyoongar, whether you were transient or a permanent resident. If you were moving into town or leaving the place, you had to report your movements to the police. Failure to comply could mean jail for the parents and the forced removal of their children.

I remember when my first cousin Gertie, who was some twenty years older than me, had her six children taken away from her. Her oldest child, Margie, at eleven, was only a year older than me, and Nina, the youngest, only six. Yet they were unceremoniously placed in a Catholic mission because she could not account for why her koolungahs were not at school.

It didn’t matter that Gertie was heavily pregnant and needed help with other serious health issues. Or that her husband, Dan, had to travel away for weeks at a time shearing sheep for farmers in other towns so he could earn some money for his family.

Her children were attending the local Catholic primary school, so maybe they were under even closer scrutiny and monitoring by the convent nuns. More so than those of us at state school. I don’t know the reason. I do know that it upset a whole lot of people in our Nyoongar community.

Those six kids were an integral part of our family group. Everything changed when they were taken away by the government. Everybody grieved for them, it was so sad. We missed them terribly. It took a long time, especially for everyone in our close-knit families, to adjust to not having them around.

Even though they were allowed to come home during the summer for the school holidays, it was never, ever the same. Most people seemed to understand why their mother, after delivering her seventh baby, turned to alcohol to blot out the hurt of not having all her kids with her. Luckily other family members helped to rear the new baby. But as a one-year-old, that little boy was taken away too. It was a terrible time for everyone, especially us kids. Their departure hurt even more because we kids had spent a whole lot of our lives growing up with them. Then suddenly, they were gone.

We had all gone bushwalking together, hunting for kaardas (big yellow speckled goannas), rabbits, parrots, koomools (possums) and wild ducks. Picking wild berries. Pinching mulberries from the big tree in the middle of the wadjerlar neighbour’s farm, running through the paddocks and being chased by big angry cows and bullocks.

We would spend nearly all our summer months together at the river swimming, fishing and catching marrons — freshwater crayfish. The river sustained us in so many ways. We not only had our bush tucker, but pinched the juicy grapes and ripe stone fruit — apricots, nectarines and peaches — from the orchards that grew near the river. As a last resort, there were always the nuts from the pine trees that grew alongside the Anglican church. Mum didn’t like us eating those because it was said they caused rickets or some illness like that in kids.

And I remember a big mob of us kids crammed together on the back of my dad’s old Model T Ford going to the estuary, crabbing and camping out. We rarely went alone, with other family members in their own vehicles forming a mini convoy of winyarn, rickety old trucks and motor cars heading out.

I clearly remember being taught what we could and couldn’t eat from the bush, and all about our medicine plants. Making sure we tossed some sand into the river to let the spirits know we were there before we cast our fishing lines. Learning from our oldies about our culture and using our own language. We felt so special, having our own Binjarib words. Like some secret code that only we would know. Being reared in the mission, Mum and Dad would have never, ever allowed it, but in secret our older girl cousins taught us our Nyoongar swear words.

At home we were taught our Nyoongar language and culture. We learned that unlike the wadjerlars, who only had four seasons in a year, we had six. Biruk — when it is very hot in December and January; Bunuru — still hot but with the promise of cooler days in February and March; Djeran — cooler weather with signs of early rain in April and May; Makuru — when the heavy showers come down in June and July; Djilba — a time of new growth and flowers everywhere in August and September; and Kambarang — warmer sunny days around October and November. Our Elders explained that our bush medicines and our food supply depended on and varied with each of our seasons.

We were taught what signs to look for when hunting kangaroos, emus, goannas, possums and rabbits. The one thing our family was never allowed to eat was the booyaiy — long-necked turtle — because that was our totem. We spent so much of our time honing our bush skills. To us it was childhood heaven.

Sometimes we even packed some bread or damper and cold meat from home and took it with us, along with a flagon of sweet black tea. That way we would stay at the river nearly all day. If any of us kids happened to have some money, we’d chuck in and buy a loaf of bread, chips, tinned meat or polony and a bottle of cool drink to share. There were even times when Mum let us book up at the local grocery store and paid the account on Dad’s payday. Whenever that happened, a couple of packets of Granita biscuits was the favourite with all of us.

Things were tough at times, but we rarely went hungry or thirsty over summer because we all shared what we had. While in primary school, I remember reading about the adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn. Those two may have had the mighty Mississippi but they had nothing on us lot. We had the pure, clear waters of the Murray. It was like God himself had given us Nyoongars this special gift out of nowhere. Serendipity. •

This is an edited extract from Louise K. Hansen’s Smashing Serendipity: The Story of One Moorditj Yorga, published by Fremantle Press.

The post Two worlds appeared first on Inside Story.

At state level, however, boxes aren’t so often needed. Labor premiers Bob Carr (New South Wales), Steve Bracks (Victoria) and Peter Beattie (Queensland), for example, all retired on their own terms in the mid 2000s after securing three election victories.

WA premier Mark McGowan seemed likely to follow suit. After winning office easily in 2017 and then spectacularly in 2021, a comfortable election win in 2025 was assured. It was widely assumed he would then hand over the leadership to someone else. But on Monday this dominant figure in WA politics shocked almost everyone by announcing his resignation as premier and from parliament.

With the benefit of a few days’ hindsight, perhaps we should not have been quite so surprised. Remaining in office until the next election, due in March 2025, and for a respectable period after that would have meant three more years in the job — three more years of “normal” politics in which the only direction was down, given the heights McGowan had reached.

And what heights! Politically, McGowan achieved the greatest electoral victory in Australian history in 2021, securing almost 60 per cent of the primary vote for Labor — which translated into fifty-three out of fifty-nine seats in the state’s Legislative Assembly — and reducing the Liberal Party to a derisory two seats.

On top of that, Labor took outright control of the upper house for the first time in its history, and promptly reformed the electoral system to remove Australia’s last case of egregious rural vote weighting. McGowan then played a pivotal role in Anthony Albanese’s bid for the prime ministership, helping Labor win four WA seats from the Liberals at last year’s federal election.

Added to that, McGowan’s period as leader has been accompanied by record budget surpluses, driven by booming iron ore and gas prices and a deal brokered with Scott Morrison that ensures at least 70 per cent of GST raised in Western Australia is returned to the state. The economy is strong, and McGowan has a respectable record of reform on issues such as voluntary assisted dying, environmental protection and public transport investment through Labor’s signature Metronet suburban rail project.

All of this, of course, was underpinned by McGowan’s deft handling of the Covid crisis, in which his hard border closures fed into Western Australia’s inherent independent streak. By becoming “an island within an island,” the state largely kept Covid out, allowing daily life to continue almost as normal while the mining industry powered on. Toss in disputes with Clive Palmer, the Morrison government and the NSW Liberal government, and the rest is history.

Of course, there were failures — most noticeably in the youth detention system, the destruction of Juukan Gorge, and lax regulation of Perth’s only casino (which led to a royal commission) — as well as problems in health and housing. But overall, McGowan’s legacy is assured politically, economically and financially.

What happens now?

After a day of factional drama on Tuesday within the Labor caucus, deputy premier Roger Cook has emerged as the premier-elect. Cook has been Labor’s deputy leader since he entered the parliament in 2008. Like McGowan, he had a good pandemic: as health minister he was often by the premier’s side, and the state’s low incidence of Covid gave him a prominent and largely positive public profile in a portfolio that is often a poisoned chalice for an ambitious minister.

As Covid’s prominence fell during 2021, though, problems in the health system mounted and Cook was shifted into the economic portfolios of state development, tourism and science. He later added hydrogen industry to his responsibilities, and he has been active in promoting the state’s critical minerals industry. In retrospect, the shift was shrewd, allowing him to demonstrate a breadth of interests.

Cook has promoted himself as the continuity leadership candidate, but he does represent a departure from McGowan in some important respects. He has described himself as “born and bred” in Western Australia — subtly differentiating himself from McGowan and his main challenger for the leadership, health minister Amber-Jade Sanderson, both of whom were born in New South Wales.

He is also the first strongly factional Labor leader for many years, having been senior in the party’s Left faction. By contrast, McGowan — like former premiers Geoff Gallop and Alan Carpenter — was factionally unaligned.

Cook has always had a strong interest in Aboriginal issues, having worked for several Aboriginal advocacy organisations before entering parliament. Whether this leads to a change in the government’s hard-nosed approach to juvenile detention — for which McGowan was increasingly facing criticism — will be closely watched.

The main issues facing the new premier and his government will be those facing most state governments around the nation — health and housing systems under stress, cost-of-living pressures, and labour and skill shortages. Unlike in other states, however, Cook has a large budget surplus, a strong economy, a weak opposition and a massive electoral buffer. He now has twenty-one months to prove himself.

For Anthony Albanese, McGowan’s resignation is undoubtedly a blow. Before 2022, Western Australia had been a Liberal stronghold federally. But McGowan’s popularity saw massive swings to Labor, with four seats switching to Labor, which also gained a senator. With McGowan gone, those seats are potentially back in play.

Western Australia’s support for the Voice referendum may also come into question. Albanese has been diligently paying attention to the state, visiting twelve times in his first year, including holding a cabinet meeting in Port Hedland in the state’s Pilbara iron ore region. While some state and territory leaders have raised the possibility of rewriting the state’s GST deal now its architect is leaving the scene, there is little prospect of that happening. It would spell certain electoral disaster in Western Australia for any federal political party. •

The post More closure in Western Australia appeared first on Inside Story.

The number of active and fluent speakers of these languages is low and declining. Among the Indigenous population aged under twenty-five — half the region’s Indigenous population — the lingua franca is primarily English and Kimberley Kriol, a relatively recent hybrid. The 2016 census listed 2315 Kriol speakers and just 158 Gija speakers.

Colonisation came late to the East Kimberley. The four decades of frontier violence after the pastoral invasion in the early 1880s caused untold — and largely unrecorded — loss of life as a result of disease, economic and social disruption, and overt violence. Today’s Aboriginal population of the East Kimberley are the descendants of the survivors of that forty-year war — survivors who made an accommodation with the owners of the cattle that had disrupted their waterholes and destroyed the basis of their subsistence livelihood.

The incentive for Aboriginal people to detach themselves from their subsistence lifestyle, attach themselves to missions and work on pastoral stations was reinforced by the imperative to avoid the pervasive violence of pastoralists and police, and possible exile to Rottnest Island and other prisons. Working for pastoralists at least gave traditional owners continued access to their Country, and time off for ceremonies during the wet season, and removed the risks of relying completely on subsistence.

Despite their concessions, Kimberley people have strenuously sought to maintain their cultures and languages. They have established cultural and language resource centres across the region, and many of the region’s schools support language maintenance. The Ngalangangpum School at the Warmun community and the Purnululu Community School at Frog Hollow, or Woorreralbam, both in the heart of Gija Country, offer instruction in English and Gija. But these cultural maintenance projects increasingly compete against the pressures of modernity and commercialism.

This is the context for Aboriginal Studies Press’s recent publication of Gija Dictionary. Its authors, Frances Kofod, Eileen Bray, Rusty Peters, Joe Blythe and Anna Crane, have produced an extraordinary linguistic resource for Gija people, derived from thirty-plus years of linguistic research, especially by Kofod, and the expert language skills of Gija co-authors Bray and Peters and the linguistic contributions of around sixty other Gija collaborators.

This is not simply an etymological project, translating vocabulary and explaining meaning; in many respects, it allows Gija speakers — and learners — to see themselves and their culture in a linguistic mirror. It reflects and documents the sophisticated worldview, developed over eons, that enabled Gija society to thrive in one of the most severe environments in Australia.

Gija Dictionary opens by introducing Gija language and Country, with an excellent map illustrating the extent of Gija Country’s approximately 30,000 square kilometres. Individual chapters deal with spelling and pronunciation, word classes, grammar and, importantly, Gija relationships. The core of the book, the Gija-to-English dictionary, defines in excess of 5000 words and phrases, and a separate and more succinct English-to-Gija word-finder identifies the Gija terms for more than 3500 English words.

But merely listing the contents doesn’t do justice to the effort and innovative thinking that have gone into producing a dictionary useful to Gija speakers, to future Gija learners, and to teachers, health workers and others interested in learning Gija.

Importantly, the introductory chapters explain the conceptual underpinnings of the Gija language: the fact, for example, that topographical directions (upstream/downstream; uphill/downhill) are just as important as cardinal directions. Interspersed through the text are more than ninety photos of current and past community members, local wildlife and significant locations, each labelled with a phrase in Gija, thus encouraging readers to look up the words to interpret the photo.

Not surprisingly, the dictionary is replete with vocabulary that reflects the social and cultural concerns of traditional Gija speakers, including their outdoor lives and focus on being on Country. Often, Gija terms have no equivalent word in English: for example, the English-to-Gija word-finder lists around twenty terms for different actions associated with the concept “walk.” Or, to pick terms almost at random, galayi means to shade your eyes with a hand while looking at something; galayyimarran refers to being in the brightness at sunrise or sunset; dooloo means to make smoke as a signal or as part of a smoking ceremony.

The word-finder also demonstrates the centrality of spears to traditional Gija life. It lists five different types of spear and six different types of spearhead, along with terms for using spears, such as hooking onto a woomera, straightening a spear, and throwing a spear at someone. My favourite is the word bililib: to drag a spear surreptitiously with your toes.

In Gija culture, the relationship between speakers is always significant. The Gija Dictionary’s definition of garij, calling someone’s name aloud, notes that this is considered an action with serious consequences depending on your relationship with the person named. It also includes a short explanation of the terms used in joking relationships between individuals denoted as ganggayi.

Were I to use any of the swear words listed, Gija speakers would respond with an interjection warri-warri if I was swearing at my parent or uncle or aunt, or yigelany if I was swearing at my brother or sister. If I swore at my brother- or sister-in-law, they would make a kissing noise and two tsk tsk clicks. They would then look away, use their hand to signal me to stop swearing, and then move their hands to block their ears.

Just as the dictionary reflects Gija culture for Gija speakers and learners, it provides a window that allows non-Indigenous readers to glimpse the Gija way of experiencing the world. Gija speakers’ grafting of new meanings onto old terms to incorporate non-Indigenous categories and technologies demonstrates their culture’s inherent dynamism.

Examples of Gija linguistic repurposing abound in the dictionary. For example, it identifies two words for police officer: mernmerdgaleny (literally, one who is good at tying up) and ngerlabany (having string or rope). In a similar vein, the word dimal, for boat, appears to be an appropriation of the English word “steamer.” A note explains that this is an old word used by Gija people, derived from the Aboriginal pronunciation of steamer and referring to the steam ships that transported Aboriginal prisoners to Rottnest Island.

Or take the word lendij, which means either to write or to read, but also to pressure flake a stone. The word came to mean writing because the old people saw it as a similar action to pressure flaking stone spearheads with a small hard stick called a mangadany. The transition from writing to reading followed naturally.

Other words have similarly been adapted. Ngoorr-ngoorrgalill means car (good at growling), with similar variants for car key and car engine. Wingini, which originally meant to spin around and around on the spot, now refers to being drunk. With a gender change, the term for wedge-tailed eagle (wirli-wirlingarnany) refers to an aeroplane (wirli-wirlingarnal). The word for photograph, ngaaloom, is repurposed from the word for shade and shadow.

What these words show is that Gija speakers, while anxious to maintain their language, have been prepared to incorporate non-Indigenous technological, cultural and institutional concepts within the Gija language. This engagement and accommodation has always been strategic, aimed at conceding what can’t successfully be defended, but also reflects a determination to find ways to protect what is important to Gija culture. The dictionary’s presentation of a unique Gija language, culture and worldview provides tangible proof that Australians inhabit a multiverse rather than a narrow social, economic and cultural universe.

While Australian English has similarly incorporated Indigenous vocabulary (boomerang, kangaroo), it is not obvious, at least to me, that this extends to the widespread adoption of such fundamental Indigenous notions as deep respect for Country and the power of reciprocity in cementing ongoing relationships. For all the talk of pursuing social justice and reconciliation with First Nations, mainstream Australia appears unable to acknowledge the extent of the loss suffered by Aboriginal people as a result of colonisation.

Most importantly, the nation appears unable to see — really see — that Indigenous people like the Gija have been prepared to make extraordinary compromises in order to bring the endemic violence of the frontier wars to an end and, later, to survive the upheaval of the equal-wages decision in the 1960s, which led to mass dismissals of Aboriginal pastoral workers and the forced removal of their families from stations.

It is an extraordinary paradox that while the few hundred Gija speakers are among the poorest and most disadvantaged Australians, at least a dozen Gija speakers are represented in international art galleries from Paris to New York, and in every capital city in Australia.

While other schools of Indigenous art have equivalent international reputations, Gija artists certainly hold their own. A reproduction of a work by Gija artist Lena Nyadbi is etched on the roof of the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris and can be seen from the Eiffel Tower. Internationally known artists such as Paddy Jaminji, Queenie McKenzie, Rusty Peters, Rover Thomas and Paddy Bedford (all of whom are now deceased but contributed to and inhabit the Gija Dictionary) are the subjects of published biographies or catalogues dedicated to their art.

In putting the East Kimberley on the international art map, these artists have also put Australia on the map. The core element in their success was their knowledge of Country and the intellectual capital inherent in Gija “ways of being,” both reflected in the Gija language.

Yet the demographics of the Kimberley are changing. Modern transport, communications technology, regional economic developments, educational opportunities and even sporting opportunities have expanded the horizons of young Gija speakers. The future of Kimberley languages is no longer guaranteed. If the Gija language does disappear, we will all lose not just a language but also an alternative worldview, a way of seeing and inhabiting the world that reflects and emerged from 60,000 years of living on this land.

At its most fundamental level, as an assertion of the legitimacy of Gija perspectives and worldview, the Gija Dictionary represents the next stage in the Gija’s 140-year quest to make their way into the future on their own terms. Its publication is an opportunity for the nation to acknowledge the inherent legitimacy of an alternative Gija worldview and to recognise the strategic compromises and accommodations imposed upon, and made by, Gija people.

Of course, the Gija are not alone in this respect. Hundreds of First Nations have experienced similar histories since 1788. Such an acknowledgement must involve — at the very least — taking effective action to repay younger First Nations generations with the skills that will assist them to continue living successfully in an increasingly multicultural Australia and world, along with substantive financial and policy commitment to language support and maintenance.

First Nations’ languages are a strategic cultural asset for the Australian nation and its people, yet they all confront existential risks. If reconciliation means anything, it means ensuring the survival of these intellectual and cultural assets. The value of the Gija Dictionary is that it is a modest but determined and tangible step in that direction.

Within two years, the nation may have a constitutionally enshrined Indigenous Voice. By 2050, will the Indigenous Voice be limited to communicating in English, or might it youwoori (speak loudly), gooyoorrgboo (speak with power to change Country), wiyawoog (speak or sing to ward off danger) or even just jarrag Gija (speak in Gija)? •

Gija Dictionary
By Frances Kofod, Eileen Bray, Rusty Peters, Joe Blythe and Anna Crane | Aboriginal Studies Press | $34.95 | 430 pages

The post A dictionary for the future appeared first on Inside Story.

That would be a stunning swing of 8 per cent against Dominic Perrottet’s government — a government one could argue is the most progressive and competent the Coalition has produced in the past decade, certainly relative to its counterparts federally, or in Victoria or Queensland.

Four days later, a Resolve poll for the Sydney Morning Herald came up with roughly similar findings, though on those figures the swing seems to be more like 6.5 per cent. It would still be curtains. The bookies give the Coalition’s last government on the mainland just a 20 per cent chance of holding onto office when the voters deliver judgement on 25 March.

If that proves right, it would be a dramatic illustration of how far the Liberal Party has fallen. At its peak in 2014, the Coalition ran every government in Australia except for South Australia (where it won the election on votes but lost it on the seats) and the ACT (where it hasn’t won an election since 1998).

The Abbott government’s 2014 budget of broken promises marked the turning point. Since then the Coalition has lost one government after another.

Three of those governments fell after a single term. Six months after Abbott’s budget, Victoria led the way, following four years dominated by the Coalition infighting that brought down premier Ted Baillieu. Queensland followed two months later, with premier Campbell Newman, the hero of its 2012 election win, losing his own seat in a 14 per cent statewide swing.

The polls suggested Abbott’s own government would also be booted out after a single term, but Liberal MPs forestalled that by dumping him and installing Malcolm Turnbull to win them the 2016 election.

Coalition governments continued to fall: Northern Territory voters dumped the Country Liberal Party government in 2016, leaving it with just two seats; the following year Mark McGowan began his remarkable reign by ousting the Coalition government in Western Australia.

In South Australia, by contrast, the Liberals finally broke through after sixteen years in opposition to win power in 2018. But that government too lasted just one term, and Labor emphatically returned to power last March — two months before voters finally sent the federal Coalition on its way.

But the NSW Coalition government should surely be less vulnerable. While the Morrison government showed no appetite for tackling climate change, NSW treasurer and energy minister Matt Kean has been a national leader in pushing the pace of decarbonisation. No government in Australia is more subject to integrity watchdogs than the NSW government is to its own ICAC. And, with some exceptions (water, for instance), it has been more a reformist government than a reactionary one. On gambling reform, it is far more progressive than Labor.

But this election cycle has become merciless for the Coalition parties. They began it with seven of Australia’s nine federal, state and territory governments. They now have just two, and if the NSW government falls on 25 March, they will be left with just one.

It’s worth recalling that latest cycle, and what it means for the Coalition parties. South Australia’s Liberal government fell in March last year, the federal Coalition government was voted out in May, and the Victorian Liberals received another thrashing from voters in November. In 2021, the Western Australian Liberals were left with just two seats in the Legislative Assembly and the Nationals replaced them as the official opposition.

2020 saw Queensland’s Labor government re-elected with an increased majority, leaving the Liberals with just five seats in Brisbane. The Labor–Greens government was given a sixth term in the ACT, while in the Northern Territory Labor was re-elected for a second term.

The one victory for the Coalition in that time was in Tasmania, where former premier Peter Gutwein called an early election in 2021 and narrowly retained his majority. If Dominic Perrottet loses in March, Gutwein’s successor, Jeremy Rockliff, will lead Australia’s only Liberal government. He doesn’t have to face the voters until early 2025.

Being out of government makes everything harder for political parties. They have far fewer staffers to call on, few public servants to provide policy assistance, less fundraising power and a bigger challenge finding things out. Talented people don’t waste their energies on a party destined for opposition, so the opposition parties are left with rusted-on supporters and branch stackers’ recruits.

But cycles change. In the last years of the Howard government, Labor controlled every state and territory government in Australia. Then, with the Rudd government still at the peak of its popularity, Western Australians voted out their Labor government. Two years later Victorians did the same, and by early 2014 Labor had only two governments left.

The next political cycle began with the Andrews government taking power in Victoria in November 2014. If the Perrottet government is voted out, that cycle will culminate on 25 March.

But would that also imply that Labor is now at the top of its cycle? That it will be all downhill for Labor from here, and the Coalition will soon start taking back the governments it has lost?

Not necessarily. A looming Coalition revival would be a reasonable expectation if you assumed that its losses of government reflected cyclical factors alone: bad luck, changing political fashions, one-off factors, and in the NSW case, the wear and tear of twelve years in government.

But if that were so, we should be seeing signs of it in the state that was first to switch its allegiance to Labor. And those signs should have been apparent in November’s election there. As we shall see, though, there was little if any sign of a Liberal comeback.

It’s early days yet for the Albanese government. We’ve seen many governments enjoy an extended honeymoon before crashing — the Rudd government, for example — but eight months after the election, all the polls suggest it’s the Coalition that has lost a lot of ground.

Labor won the 21 May election with a tad over 52 per cent of the two-party vote. The latest Resolve poll in Tuesday’s Age/Sydney Morning Herald implied that the figure has jumped to 60 per cent since the election. Peter Dutton’s poll ratings remain far behind Anthony Albanese’s.

In this Labor cycle, the Coalition lost its first state government just eight months after reaching its peak of running seven of the nine governments. But the Coalition’s next cycle might not begin anytime soon.

After New South Wales votes it will be almost a year and a half before the next election anywhere in Australia, and then there will be a bunch of them: the Northern Territory, the ACT and Queensland in the second half of 2024, and then Western Australia, Tasmania and federally in the first half of 2025. While you’d think the Coalition will surely win one of them, it could face a long wait before its own cycle gets going.

Why?

First, since 2000, the Coalition has mostly been in government in Canberra, but Labor has dominated government at state and territory level. So far this century, in the states and territories, Labor has been in power for roughly three-quarters of the time, and the Coalition for just one-quarter. Outside New South Wales and Tasmania, Labor has become the natural party of government, and the Liberals/Nationals/LNP/CLP the natural parties of opposition.

In Victoria, the Coalition has been in power for just four of the past twenty-three years. In Queensland, three. In South Australia, six. In the Northern Territory, five and a half, and in the ACT, the Liberals have had less than two years in office and twenty-one in opposition.

Maybe that’s logical. The federal government’s main jobs are economic management, social security and foreign relations — and on two of those, voters have a conservative bias. The states, by contrast, are mainly responsible for running the services we rely on: hospitals, schools, roads and public transport. On those issues, voters have a bias towards improving services. Keeping the budget in the black seems to have gone out of fashion.

But former NSW premier and federal Liberal president Nick Greiner put it well when he said the Liberals’ problem is that its activist base is well to the right of its voter base. (Just as the Greens’ activist base is well to the left of its voter base.) And the longer a party is out of power, the more deep-seated that becomes. Failure breeds more failure.

Take the ACT Liberals. In its first twelve years of self-government the ACT mostly had Liberal governments. Red Hill pharmacist Kate Carnell was parachuted in to become party leader. She won two elections, presenting a moderate, modern face that Canberra voters could relate to. But in 2001, the Libs lost office, went into opposition, and stayed there.

By 2023, it’s come to feel as though the Labor–Greens coalition is the permanent government of the ACT, and the Liberals are the permanent opposition.

Could the same be happening in Victoria? There, the Coalition parties have won a majority of Victoria’s seats in just one of the last sixteen elections, federal or state. For a Liberal Party that once governed the state alone for twenty-seven years straight, defeat has come to be seen as normal.

The Coalition’s one victory was at the 2010 state election under another moderate, modern Liberal, Ted Baillieu. But in truth they were not ready to govern, were profoundly disunited and had no coherent agenda. When voters turfed them out in 2014, there was little to show for their four years in power.

Love him or loathe him, Daniel Andrews has been full of ambition to do things, above all investing in transport infrastructure and tackling cutting-edge social issues. In 2018 Labor was returned with a massive majority — so large that we all assumed 2022 would see a swing back to the Coalition.

That assumption seemed certain after the government’s mishandling of Covid. It imposed harsh, unpopular lockdowns that effectively closed down Melbourne for eight months, then changed course 180 degrees and dropped all controls as the death toll from Covid soared. More than one in 1000 Victorians have now died of the disease — 76 per cent more than in the rest of Australia.

Surely the 2022 Victorian election should have been the start of a new cycle of Liberal renewal. But no. At face value, the Libs made no progress at all. Labor had fifty-five seats in the old Assembly, the Coalition twenty-seven, and the Greens and independents three each. In the new one, Labor has fifty-six, the Coalition twenty-eight (assuming it retains Narracan at Saturday’s delayed election), and the Greens four. Labor won easily — and while the Nationals gained three seats, the Liberals went backwards.

But there are nuances to that narrative — and in politics, nuances matter. One reason why the Albanese government is riding so high is that it has the freedom of having a clear majority in the House of Representatives. But that majority came so close to being a minority.

If fewer than 500 votes in the relevant booths had changed hands, the Liberals’ Andrew Constance would have won the federal seat of Gilmore from Labor, the Greens’ Steph Hodgins-May would now be the member for Macnamara — and Labor would be a minority government, negotiating every bill with the crossbenches or the Coalition. Small changes, big difference.

For Victoria, nuance one: The pre-election redistribution of boundaries, on the Victorian Electoral Commission’s estimates, gave Labor a net gain of three seats (because Melbourne had grown rapidly, and Labor held most of the seats with swollen enrolments). That was the real starting point: so Labor lost two seats, and the Coalition gained two. Not much difference, sure, but there was some movement the Coalition’s way, however inadequate.

Nuance two: As in the federal election, Labor was lucky. A shift of just 350 votes in the relevant booths would have seen the Greens take Northcote and the Liberals win Pakenham and Bass. Instead of the seats going from 58–26–4 to 56–28–4, they would have ended up as 53–30–5. Not much difference there either, but it would have shown clear movement from Labor to the Coalition.

Nuance three: On the votes, there certainly was movement. For the eighty-six seats contested by both sides at the last two elections, Labor’s share of the two-party-preferred vote fell from 57.5 per cent in 2018 to 54.8 per cent this time. That’s a swing of 2.7 per cent to the Coalition.

But in the twenty-five marginal seats — those where the election is decided — it was a very different story. The average swing from Labor to the Coalition there was just 0.3 per cent. The Coalition won four seats that were notionally Labor’s on the new boundaries (Caulfield, Hawthorn, Nepean and Morwell), while Labor won three seats that were notionally the Coalition’s (Bayswater, Bass and Glen Waverley).

(Labor also lost Richmond to the Greens and the Coalition won Shepparton from independent Suzanna Sheed. That’s why, in net terms, Labor lost two seats, and the Coalition gained two).

Mostly, the big swings to the Coalition were in safe Labor seats in Melbourne’s western and northern suburbs, where it had no chance of winning: seats like Greenvale (15.1 per cent swing to the Liberals), Mill Park (13.5), St Albans (12.4), Thomastown (11.4) and Kororoit (11.1).

Across the nineteen middle and outer suburbs northwest of the Yarra, the average swing to the Coalition was 7.1 per cent. But it won none of them, and even after those swings, only two of them were even mildly marginal.

To win a majority in the Assembly, the Coalition needed to make a net gain of nineteen seats. On the traditional pendulum, admittedly a rough measure, that required a swing of 10.4 per cent.

At the 2026 election, to win a majority, it will need to make a net gain of seventeen seats. On the pendulum, that would require a swing of 8.1 per cent. No opposition has gained a swing of that size since 1955, when Labor split in two.

The start of a cycle that will see Australia swing back to Coalition governments? I think not.

At this election, twelve Labor seats were marginal against the Coalition. At the 2026 election, only eight will be. Most of the seats it needs to gain to win office will need to be won by swings of 6 to 10 per cent.

These are normally classified as “fairly safe” seats. If Labor is still riding high with voters in 2026, they won’t be threatened. But if it loses support in the next four years, as governments often do in their third terms, some could come under threat. Labor would have far more territory to defend.

Nuance four: A significant development was lost in the focus on Labor’s triumph and the Liberals’ woes. This election saw the Greens almost double their territory. Richmond was the only seat they picked up, but they came close to winning five other seats: Northcote (lost by 0.2 per cent), Pascoe Vale (2.0), Preston (2.1), Footscray (4.2) and Albert Park (4.5).

One in ten seats in the Assembly, all in the inner suburbs, are now either held by the Greens or within their reach. That’s a position they’ve never been in before, anywhere in Australia.

In the Legislative Council, they now hold the balance of power, winning four seats, up from one in 2018. Labor will have to negotiate with them on any legislation the Coalition opposes.

Their first-preference vote rose just slightly, from 10.7 per cent to 11.5. But there’s a simple reason for that which media commentators ignored: at this election there were three times as many minor-party candidates as last time. Animal Justice and Family First ran in every seat, and the Freedom Party in most of them. Those candidates took votes from all other parties. As the table shows, the minor parties’ vote more than doubled, from 5.2 per cent last time to 11.7 per cent.

Note: while the independents’ vote fell by 0.6 per cent, the Liberals by 0.8 per cent and Labor’s by 5.8 per cent, the Greens’ vote rose by 0.8 per cent. They clearly did the best of the major players.

We can compare apples with apples by looking at the vote for the three main parties after minor-party preferences. The comparison is limited by the fact that only in twenty-seven seats were Labor, Liberals and Greens in the final three in both 2018 and 2022 and the commission distributed everyone else’s preferences between them. (The VEC has promised that this time it will eventually distribute all preferences in all seats. Thank you, at last.)

When just Labor, Liberals and Greens were left in those twenty-seven seats, the Liberal vote was unchanged from 2018. But Labor’s vote was down 3.2 per cent, while the Greens’ vote rose by 3.2 per cent. In the new marginal seats of Footscray, Pascoe Vale and Preston, the swing from Labor to Greens was three times that size.

But isn’t that just because the Liberals changed their preferences from Labor to Greens? No. These are three-party figures: the Liberal preferences hadn’t been distributed at this stage. And note: when they were, they didn’t change the outcome in a single seat, not even Richmond. As the VEC has repeatedly shown, most inner-suburban Liberals don’t follow their party’s how-to-vote card.

Where Liberal preferences were distributed, they lifted the Greens’ two-party vote by an average of 4.5 per cent. The Greens were slowly expanding their territory even when the Liberals preferenced Labor, but in 2026 that 4.5 per cent would make it far easier for them to keep doing so. And conversely, Labor would breathe a huge sigh of relief if the Liberals preferenced them instead.

In war and politics, they say, the enemy of my enemy is my friend. Helping the Greens win Labor seats brings the Coalition no closer to government, as the Greens would always support Labor. But making Labor fight on two fronts dilutes its campaign resources: and of Labor’s thirteen most marginal seats after this election, in five its opponent is the Greens. If the Liberals redirect preferences to Labor in 2026, the only one Labor need worry about would be Northcote.

The Greens often declare war on themselves, and do or say silly things that discourage you from taking them seriously. But they have stood up for principles that matter to many Australians — tackling climate change seriously, treating refugees humanely, ending persecution of whistleblowers — which is why they have become the first party since Federation to establish itself as a lasting independent alternative to the two major parties.

The Country Party, now the Nationals, began as an independent group but abandoned that to form what has been a permanent coalition with the Liberals. In the last term of the NSW Coalition government, their one public stand on principle seemed to be to defend the interests of land developers against koalas.

The DLP and the Australian Democrats each lasted a generation and won significant support as independent alternatives to the two majors. But neither established a territorial base that could win them lower house seats, and eventually they withered away.

The Greens have carved out their own territory by making themselves the party of young voters in the inner suburbs. In those nine seats in inner Melbourne, they won 38.7 per cent of the three-party vote this time, ahead of Labor with 38.4 per cent and the Liberals with 22.9 per cent. At the federal election, they also won all three seats in inner Brisbane.

And the young, and the inner suburbs, just keep growing. It’s a good constituency to have.

New South Wales has become the Greens’ weakest state. At the federal election they polled just 10 per cent there, compared with 13.3 per cent in the rest of Australia. While they are now competitive in nine state seats in Melbourne, in 2019 they were competitive in just two seats in Sydney (Balmain and Newtown, both safe Green seats) and two in the hippie north of the state (winning Ballina, just losing Lismore). This state election will test them too.

For Victoria, the bottom line is that the Liberals have lost not only the 2022 election but probably the 2026 one as well. What happens then will be determined by the events of the next four years, and how voters respond to them. But things would have to go very badly for Labor for the Coalition to emerge with a majority.

For Australia, the bottom line is that if the Coalition loses what many see as its best government of recent years then it could be a long road back to power. And if the Greens’ MPs, senators and activists manage to avoid alienating their potential voters, it’s possible that the ACT will not be the only parliament in which the successor to a Labor government is a Labor–Greens one. •

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One popular one is that by-election wins portend general election results. They simply don’t, because by-election voters aren’t deciding who will form government, and that frees them to be influenced by all sorts of other things. But while commentators might understand this at one level, many still can’t resist overlaying by-election swings onto state or national pendulums to produce high drama.

Another is that leaders’ personal ratings in the polls matter more than voting intentions. As in “that 53 per cent lead is well and good, but you can’t win with such a low preferred prime minister/leader satisfaction rating.” It’s rubbish. In fact, if there is a relationship it’s the other way around: for a given voting intention figure it’s better for the leader to have a low personal rating than a high one, because the latter can artificially inflate party support. But this one too won’t go away. Very often it is wielded by a leader’s internal enemies.

(Just one federal Australian election in polling history might be cited to support that view: Bill Shorten’s low ratings in 2019. But the surprise of Labor’s defeat was an opinion poll fail; the polls were simply wrong, right up to election day, and we don’t know how long they’d been wrong for.)

Another classic: “Disunity is death!” Except when it isn’t (in 2019, for example).

And that voters “reward” governments for jobs well done. This is pertinent in the Covid era, of course, when all our governments have accrued goodwill. But I reckon voters look forwards, not backwards, and that a fine performance is only relevant because of what it suggests about the future. With Covid, it’ll be about what is happening at the time of the election, and what looks likely in the months and years ahead.

Like by-elections, plotting state election results onto the federal pendulum is a pointless pastime, too. But again it makes good copy.

Which brings us to the persistent idea that popular state premiers generate support for their federal counterparts. Right now, some expect rampaging Western Australian Mark McGowan to deliver votes for Anthony Albanese at the next federal election — perhaps enough for that state alone to deliver a Labor victory.

Just this year McGowan clocked up the biggest election win — federal, state or territory — since Federation. His zero-tolerance attitude to border crossings in arguably the country’s most parochial state (Queensland and Tasmania are also in contention) has delivered both low case numbers and, along with Commonwealth largesse, economic health. While the other states are mostly slowly relaxing their boundaries, Western Australia’s remain sealed. In the ongoing stoush with the feds (who want McGowan to quickly join the rest of us) there’s no doubt on whose side the WA majority sits.

On top of that, Scott Morrison’s standing over there is dire, so it is said, and come March, April or May, voters will back their guy against the prime minister.

Do the polls support this expectation? Nationally, they tend to have the federal opposition on 53 or 54 per cent after preferences, a swing of about five percentage points since the last election. In Western Australia the number is also around 53 or 54, or a swing of around nine points. (See Pollbludger on the most recent Newspoll.) So that’s some mild evidence for the idea, although it’s nothing like state Labor’s 69 per cent eight months ago.

But there are opinion polls, and then there are elections. They are not the same thing. One is trying to estimate the other by asking people to imagine a certain ritual, known as an election, is held today. In some circumstances the response to that hypothetical is more realistic than in others.

In the thirty-nine federal elections since preferential voting was introduced, Western Australia has given Labor a majority of the two-party-preferred vote just eight times. And five of them were when the party was led by someone perceived as one of their own — John Curtin in 1943 and 1946, and Bob Hawke in 1983, 1984 and 1987. For a similar reason, the party in opposition didn’t do too badly in the state under Kim Beazley in 1998 (49.5) and 2001 (48.4). But it’s been downhill from there, fuelled by the mining boom, and in 2019 Labor recorded a miserable 44.5. (At the 2007 Kevin Rudd landslide the party only managed 46.7 per cent.)

Generally, across all jurisdictions, the electoral record shows that the idea of a popular local leader bringing votes to their federal counterpart is bunkum. To the contrary, the two have often worked against each other. In the Howard years, for example, we saw soaring Labor premiers, often with record wins under their belts, alongside comfortable Coalition victories federally. After the Rudd government took office in 2007, state Labor governments started dropping.

Queensland’s Peter Beattie in 2001 and South Australia’s Mike Rann in 2004 clocked up their state parties’ biggest wins in history, achieving two-party-preferred votes in the high fifties. It didn’t stop those states thrashing federal Labor in the same years, giving them 45.1 and 45.6 per cent respectively. In both cases the federal vote took place months after a state contest in which Coalition parties had been reduced to a rump.

These are extreme examples. But popular premiers delivering the goods for federal counterparts? It. Just. Doesn’t. Happen.

The historical polling record offers some evidence that those high-flying locals boost support for federal counterparts. But only in the surveys, and it can crash as the federal campaign starts and minds start to move towards the contest at hand, and matters such as economic security.

And so, by the time of the election next year, if the new Omicron strain allows it, Western Australia’s borders will again be reasonably porous. Covid restrictions will largely be scaled back and cross-jurisdictional bickering mostly a thing of the past.

As usual, the Coalition’s key message for sandgropers will be about Labor’s secret plan to steal their mineral royalties, force them to quickly decarbonise, and perhaps dud them on the GST to boot.

Voters will know that McGowan won’t take any nonsense from Scott Morrison, but would he stand up as aggressively against an Albanese government?

So expect Labor’s WA surge to dissipate as election day approaches. Off such a low base last time, there should be a decent swing to the opposition, but not enough to even hit the 50–50 vote mark.

A federal Labor victory, if it comes, will be off net gains spread across most of the states. •

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Led by the nation’s most popular premier, Mark McGowan, WA Labor has won at least fifty of the fifty-nine seats in the Legislative Assembly — ten more than its previously biggest-ever win in 2017 — and is favoured to win three more. The Nationals look to have won four (or at most five) seats while the Liberals languish on just two (with two others in doubt). Both are left struggling to achieve party status, with the Nationals leader, Mia Davies, the most likely candidate for opposition leader.

Opinion polls predicting a massive Labor win proved correct. The party received 59 per cent of the primary vote, up 17 per cent from 2017, and 69 per cent of the two-party-preferred vote. There have been other big wins in recent Australian political history — think Campbell Newman’s victory in Queensland in 2012 and Barry O’Farrell’s demolition of the NSW Labor government in 2011 — but McGowan’s share of seats (between 85 and 90 per cent) and two-party-preferred vote is higher, and didn’t involve turfing out an unpopular government.

To add icing to Labor’s cake, the party looks virtually certain to win an unprecedented Legislative Council majority in its own right. The state’s upper house has long been a conservative bastion, backed by significant rural vote weighting. But that was not enough to stop the McGowan juggernaut, with Labor likely to win twenty-two or even twenty-three of the Council’s thirty-six seats. One casualty is the Greens, who might be reduced to just one seat (down from four). Labor’s majority should enable it to pass its legislative program unchallenged, and give it the opportunity to end electoral malapportionment and reform the current system of above-the-line group ticket voting.

Labor’s re-election was regarded as a foregone conclusion — two terms is normal for WA governments — but its strong handling of Covid-19, combined with the state’s traditional independent-mindedness (or parochialism, depending on your point of view), a soaring iron ore price, and buoyant state finances all helped boost McGowan’s popularity.

Added to that was the Liberal Party’s woeful performance. Having cycled through four leaders in as many years, it achieved another record of sorts on Saturday when its new leader, the thirty-four-year-old Zak Kirkup, lost his own seat — the first time this has happened to a leader of a major party in eighty-eight years. With a primary vote of just 21 per cent, the party also lost former leader Liza Harvey’s seat, and several formerly rock-solid Liberal electorates in Perth’s affluent riverside and coastal areas.

Although Kirkup has been energetic and articulate since becoming leader in November, the Liberal campaign was unusual, to say the least, and failed to put any significant pressure on the government. In fact, the Liberals somehow managed to make themselves the focus of most of the campaign, rather than targeting areas where Labor might be vulnerable.

The Liberal campaign commenced with the surprise announcement of an ambitious green energy policy. This might have wrong-footed the government but it also jolted many Liberal candidates and traditional supporters. It was soon overshadowed by Kirkup’s effectively conceding defeat almost three weeks from the election, shifting the party’s message to warning about the dangers of Labor’s winning “total control” and urging people to keep the government accountable. This attempt to shore up the Liberal base looks to have failed completely. Other problems included the controversial views of several candidates; Kirkup’s admission that he wouldn’t return to politics if he lost his own seat; and a shambolic press conference on the party’s election costings just before polling day.

By contrast, Labor rolled out a steady stream of relatively low-key election promises focused mainly on jobs and economic diversification, and centred its campaign on McGowan’s leadership and the contrast with the Liberals’ neophyte leader.

The result leaves both parties with plenty to think about. With three cabinet members and the speaker having retired, Labor has openings for new ministerial talent, though keeping the expanded backbench occupied and satisfied will require deft management. Winning control of the Legislative Council will remove any excuse for failing to tackle thorny legislative issues, including updated Aboriginal heritage laws and tougher campaign financing laws. The need to deliver on the expanded Metronet suburban rail network and other big-ticket items, and to ease pressure on social housing and public hospitals will also be priorities. Finally, given the parlous state of parliamentary opposition, the premier will need to resist signs of arrogance or overreach.

For its part, the Liberal Party must undertake some deep soul-searching. The influence on candidate preselections of factional powerbrokers with links to conservative churches has been a turn-off for many traditional party backers in business and the broader community. A lack of parliamentary resourcing will also put a strain on the party’s ability to regroup and be competitive at the 2025 election, let alone to assist its federal counterparts in the election due by mid 2022.

With eleven Liberal members currently sitting in the House of Representatives, and just five Labor members, Western Australia is important to Scott Morrison’s plans to retain power at the next federal election. While direct crossovers between state and federal elections are rare, those that do exist are primarily negative for the Liberals. The federal government’s initial intervention in support of Clive Palmer’s High Court case against the state’s border closures gave WA Labor a free kick in 2020; a resurgent Labor and a dispirited Liberal organisation will not make things any easier for the prime minister in 2021. •

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McGowan’s border restrictions are set to end soon after Saturday’s election, but his excitement got the better of him last week when he announced a possible extension to combat drug imports from the decadent east. (Hours later, he backtracked.)

Politically, the Covid crisis has been fantastic for Australia’s incumbent leaders. The wartime similes are apt: people clinging to authority in a time of danger, governments assuming a bigger role in our lives. If they stand up straight at a press conference, square their jaws and follow expert advice, even the least inspiring of leaders can enjoy their Churchillian moment.

So approval ratings have surged for the lot of them: the prime minister, six premiers and two chief ministers. But the dizziest heights (more than 90 per cent at one stage) have been reserved for McGowan, leader of the youngest administration in the country.

Surveys are one thing, election results another, but there the evidence is persuasive too. Last October’s ACT election saw Labor–Greens comfortably re-elected, with a 3 per cent swing against the Liberals that mostly washed through to the minor party. In the Northern Territory, a first-term Gunner Labor government that had been looking very shop-worn at the end of 2019 wound up romping home with 54 per cent of the two-party-preferred vote. And in Queensland, Annastacia Palaszczuk achieved a third term with a tidy swing.

The McGowan government didn’t need Covid-19 — the virus simply provided tailwind for an already runaway train. The most recent Newspoll has WA Labor on a mindboggling 68 per cent after preferences. So election night will be short and brutal.

Or will it? Can new Liberal leader Zak Kirkup reduce the bloodbath? He isn’t weighed down by the politically unwise Covid-19 positions espoused by his predecessor, who resigned in November. Much has been made of the fact that Kirkup all but conceded defeat at the beginning of the campaign, but that’s just taking to its logical extreme the usual claim by oppositions that they face an uphill battle. Logically, his plea to voters not to give the government unchecked power only applies to the Legislative Council, but the Liberals would hope the message creates a general inclination to minimise the government’s majority. It’s worth a try.

What about the federal implications of that one- tenth of the national electorate? There really aren’t many; there rarely are. While it is natural for federal politicians to take heart from colleagues’ success at state/territory level (and vice versa), and while commentators will extrapolate and project from one to the other, second-tier results don’t usually portend federal ones. If there is a relationship, it’s inverse: state and territory parties do better when their colleagues are in opposition federally.

Often the most useful lesson to be divined from an election is whether the present moment is a good or bad time for governments of either stripe to face the voters. And we know the answer to that right now.

Still, an early election would not be a walkover for the federal government. If Scott Morrison does go early with the crisis still upon us, the cynicism would be obvious to voters — especially given the possible health risk of voting. And if he waits until the danger is over, well, to continue the war comparison, Winston Churchill enjoyed huge approval in 1945, but the voters kicked him out anyway.

Note also that we’ve seen only Labor governments face their electorates in the past year. And while Covid has been difficult for oppositions of both persuasions, the Liberal/ Nationals have particularly struggled, with a portion of their bases, and even their party rooms, bristling under the restrictions and the fiscal laxity, and dragging their leaders to politically unwise positions.

Labor opposition leaders have not suffered the same tension. Rather, the friendly fire is along the lines of “Stand for something!” Business as usual, but even more so.

In fact, much of the Labor base is quite happy with the enhanced role of government, particularly the fiscal largesse, and wouldn’t mind if it continued forever. The political danger for Labor lies in succumbing to these demands.

So, whatever happens to Mark McGowan this weekend, federal Labor’s biggest obstacle when we next vote federally is likely to be the usual one: the extent to which breezy talk about spending comes back to bite it when voters are contemplating whom to trust with the economy for the next three years. •

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A combination of premier Mark McGowan’s record popularity levels (at 83 per cent, the highest in Newspoll history) and the turmoil among the Liberals (who recently installed thirty-three-year-old first-term MP Zak Kirkup as opposition leader) makes victory for Labor at the 13 March state election close to certain.

But despite the government’s dominance in the lower house, its attempts to update the electoral system — described by former WA Labor leader Jim McGinty as “an absolute affront to anyone who believes in democracy” — continue to fall victim to the non-government majority in the state’s upper house, the Legislative Council, and its own lack of ambition. Modest changes to the political donation and campaign expenditure rules failed to pass the Legislative Council in December 2020, just before parliament was prorogued.

The proposed rules — common to most other states, and also operating to a lesser extent federally — would have revealed the identity of anyone donating $1000 or more to a political party, banned some foreign donations, and capped campaign spending for political parties and other entities (albeit at a much more generous level than similar legislation in Queensland and New South Wales).

Despite the government’s massive lower house majority, these changes failed to elicit cross-party support in the Legislative Council. They won’t receive consideration again until after the election.

This raises the spectre that Clive Palmer, who is locked in various legal battles with the state government and with Premier McGowan, will reprise his notorious blanket advertising campaign as the election draws nearer. It also means that Western Australia, the most China-exposed economy in the nation, remains vulnerable to millions of dollars in donations from wealthy figures aligned with the Chinese Communist Party, as occurred in other jurisdictions before foreign donations were banned.

But the shortcomings of Western Australia’s system run deeper than political financing. In a chicken-and-egg dilemma that has characterised the state’s politics for decades, the reforms most needed are the very ones that threaten the existing membership of the highly unrepresentative Legislative Council.

The structural imbalance — or “malapportionment” — between city and country in the upper house has a long history. Following the last major attempt to tackle the issue, in 1986, the WA Legislative Council was divided into six regions (three in the metropolitan area and three in the regions), each electing multiple members via a system of proportional representation similar to the Australian Senate’s.

Also like the Senate, these metropolitan and country regions were allocated the same number of representatives despite vast differences in their voter numbers, just as Tasmania receives the same number of senators as New South Wales despite having less than one-tenth its population.

In Western Australia, this rural weighting has become more extreme over time. Much-heralded one-vote one-value reforms in 2005 only improved the system in the Legislative Assembly. In the Council, regional vote weighting was not only retained but was also intensified by legislation and continuing population movements.

Today, each of the six regions returns six members, or MLCs, who represent as many as 400,000 electors (in metropolitan areas) or as few as 70,000 (in rural areas). Just one-tenth of enrolled electors — those from the Mining and Pastoral region and the Agricultural region — choose one-third of MLCs.

These rural and regional voters — and the parties representing them, including the Nationals and the Shooters, Fishers and Farmers — have far more political influence in state parliament than their population warrants, a fact exacerbated by the Mining and Pastoral region’s lower voter turnout.

Moreover, the Electoral Act specifies that the number of electors in the three metropolitan regions should be roughly equal but makes no such stipulation for the non-metropolitan regions. The South West region has around 240,000 electors, Agricultural around 100,000 and Mining and Pastoral around 70,000, yet each returns the same number of MLCs.

As a result, the WA Legislative Council has by far the most extreme malapportionment of any state or territory in Australia. Perth, the only city, contains around three-quarters of all enrolled electors but gets to choose only half the MLCs. This level of variance has no parallel in other state jurisdictions — or indeed internationally, except in Senates (like Australia’s) that include big and small states equally.

A number of reform proposals have shown that the regions can be retained while distributing voters more equally. A more ambitious alternative would be a single statewide electorate, as in the NSW and SA Legislative Councils. But most of these reforms require majority support in the Council itself. Given that the currently advantaged rural and regional members are unlikely to put themselves in the position of turkeys voting for Christmas, fixing the problem relies on an overwhelming, and unlikely, political realignment.

Compounding the problem is the Council’s voting-ticket system, which requires parties and aligned candidates to lodge a preference schedule, or “group voting ticket,” prior to the election, setting out how their preferences will be allocated when electors vote above the line rather than rank every candidate below the line.

With more than 90 per cent of votes cast above the line — a similar proportion to most places where this option exists — parties can game the system by directing their preferences. Micro-parties can win seats using promiscuous preference-trading deals and reaping the (essentially random) rewards that accrue to whoever is able to assemble the necessary quota for victory.

Federally, “preference whispering” of this kind led to the election of several micro-party candidates in 2013. Faced with those senators’ balance-of-power influence, the Turnbull government changed the Senate voting system to allow for preferential voting above the line (or the alternative of numbering at least twelve preferences below the line). These reforms, inspired by the NSW system, are widely seen as successful, and have been replicated in other states.

Western Australia, meanwhile, has stuck to the old system: a single-ticket vote above the line or a full ranking of candidates below it. With nearly all WA voters relying on parties to allocate their preferences for upper house seats, micro-parties are winning representation — and potentially the balance of power — with negligible public support.

At the 2017 election, micro-parties including Flux the System!, Fluoride Free WA and the Daylight Savings Party all attempted preference harvesting but failed to win any seats. A Liberal Democrat candidate was more successful, winning a Legislative Council seat with less than 4 per cent of the primary vote by harvesting preferences from all of those parties as well as from One Nation and the Australian Christians, among others.

Equally unexpected results — or worse — are likely at next month’s election. The voting-ticket preferences lodged by minor parties indicate renewed preference-harvesting deals. Flux the System!, a party advocating direct democracy, has renamed itself Liberals for Climate and may well benefit from the real Liberal Party’s surprise pledge to replace the state’s coal-fired power stations with a renewable alternative.

The big parties aren’t immune to this pragmatic free-for-all. Labor’s voting ticket for the Legislative Council has preferenced the Shooters, Fishers and Farmers Party ahead of the Greens in the two rural regions, while the Liberals have placed One Nation higher than expected on some of their lists. These arrangements echo the ill-fated agreement between the Liberals and One Nation at the 2017 state election, which delivered no benefits to the Liberals but helped One Nation secure three seats in the upper house.

The most obvious and overdue reform, using the Senate and the upper houses of New South Wales and South Australia as models, would be to allow WA voters to indicate their preferred parties above the line. Their true preferences among parties would be captured, undercutting preference harvesting by micro-parties. But a 2019 private member’s bill to do exactly this, introduced by the Greens, failed to progress in the Legislative Council.

And the post-election prospects? Premier McGowan said in January that changing the mix of city and country representatives in the upper house was not on the government’s agenda, despite having labelled the system “fundamentally unfair” in 2017. Both Labor and the Liberals appear comfortable with the status quo, with only the Greens publicly committed to one-vote one-value and the reform of voting tickets and donation disclosure. The iron law of electoral reform — that governments lose interest in reforming a flawed system once they have been elected under it — appears to have triumphed, despite the upper house’s non-government majority.

But there is a glimmer of hope for reformers. The record popularity of the McGowan Labor government in the polls — a two-party-preferred lead of 68 per cent to the Liberals’ 32 per cent, according to the latest Newspoll — means that Labor and the Greens could achieve a Legislative Council majority in addition to near total domination of the lower house.

This level of control would have obvious downsides for democratic accountability, but it would also offer the only chance, now or in the foreseeable future, to make the reforms necessary to Western Australia’s increasingly unrepresentative Legislative Council. •

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Langley Frederick George Hancock was born in Perth in 1909, the eldest son of pastoralist George Hancock and his South Australian–born wife Lilian. After gaining his leaving certificate — having proved “an able if not outstanding student,” according to the Australian Dictionary of Biography — he helped his father on the family’s sheep-farming property at Mulga Downs in the Pilbara. There he gained a bushman’s knowledge of the land and an amateur’s understanding of geology. At the end of the second world war, Hancock resumed a business partnership with a school friend, Peter Wright. The two men had merged their two prospecting companies into a partnership known as Hanwright in 1938.

In that same year, with Japan at war with China and wider conflict in the Pacific looming, prime minister Joseph Lyons placed an embargo on the export of Australian iron ore. To demonstrate the need to prevent sales overseas, Lyons commissioned a report on the extent of Australian iron ore deposits from his senior geologist, W.G. Woolnough. Woolnough obligingly reported that Australia’s accessible high-grade iron ore was sufficient only for the needs of the local steel industry. If exports were to continue, said Woolnough, the country might run out of ore in two generations. The Woolnough report created a myth, but such a powerful one that it governed resources policy for more than two decades.

Large but unconfirmed deposits of iron ore in the remote Pilbara region had been spoken of since the late nineteenth century. It was Hancock, pioneering a new technique for aerial prospecting, who established their existence in the 1950s. As he told the story, the epoch-making discovery occurred during a thunderstorm in November 1952: forced to fly his Auster aeroplane unusually low over the Hamersley Range, he noticed what looked to be significant deposits of iron ore. Whether true or embellished, the story helped turn Hancock into a household name.

The problem was that any iron ore that was present in the Pilbara was valueless unless it could be mined and exported. After the Liberal–Country Party Coalition came to power in Western Australia in 1959, Hancock worked closely with the state government to overturn the federal embargo. Among premier David Brand’s ministers was Charles Court, who would succeed Brand in 1974 to become one of the state’s most electorally successful premiers.

In 1960 Brand and Court, who was industry minister, forced the hand of the federal government by calling for tenders to mine and export a known iron ore deposit at Mount Goldsworthy, on the northern fringe of the Pilbara. Hanwright was among those bidding for the leases. With Australia suffering a significant balance-of-payments deficit, prime minister Robert Menzies announced a trial relaxation of the iron ore embargo to see if deposits of this potential export earner could be found.

Menzies was soon overwhelmed by the world-ranking discoveries in the Pilbara. Hancock had forged a partnership with the English chairman of Rio Tinto, Sir Val Duncan, who sent out a geologist to examine and confirm Hancock’s 1952 discoveries. Hancock told Duncan that the WA government was in acute need of revenue, and that Duncan should immediately seek a mining lease by promising to build a Western Australian steel industry.

In the meantime, Hancock had antagonised Brand and Court, who preferred an Anglo-American consortium over Hanwright to mine the deposits at Mount Goldsworthy. The two government figures were suspicious of Duncan’s association with Hancock and doubted Duncan’s capacity to create a steel industry in Western Australia. Hancock was disappointed when the state government rejected Duncan’s offer, but not defeated.

In 1962, the ninety-year-old global mining company Rio Tinto merged with the Zinc Corporation to create Rio Tinto Zinc and an Australian subsidiary, Conzinc Riotinto of Australia, or CRA. That year, Rio Tinto geologists made one of the greatest of all mineral discoveries when they found a rich iron ore mountain named Tom Price just outside the area Hancock had disclosed to Val Duncan.

CRA formed a partnership with the American steelmaker Kaiser Steel to mine Tom Price and took to the WA government a proposal for an iron ore export operation and ultimately a local steel industry. To ease the path to an agreement, CRA distanced itself from Hanwright by offering Hancock’s company a generous royalty deal of 2.5 per cent of the value of all iron ore sold in the area of his discoveries, including Mount Tom Price. That deal was the making of Hancock’s fortune.

But Hancock’s mining story didn’t end there. Charles Court had been busy helping establish an iron ore industry in Western Australia. Under agreements ratified by acts of parliament, four companies were building their own ports and railways. Together, Court believed, they would satisfy Japanese demand for Australian iron ore.

By 1964 the new Pilbara iron ore companies were established but had yet to build their mines, ports or railways. Hancock seized the opportunity by teaming up with the American industrial and shipping magnate, Daniel Ludwig. With Hancock in the wings, Ludwig approached Court with an ambitious and unexpected proposal.

Under what it called the Ludwig Plan, the company would mine other areas discovered by Hancock at Nimingarra and Yarrie and finance a super-port at Cape Keraudren that could accommodate 166,000-ton ships. Ludwig also undertook to service all other iron ore projects and lead the financing and construction of their roads and railways. This would bring together in one operation all the infrastructure for the iron ore mines in the Pilbara.

To Hancock’s lasting chagrin, Court rejected the offer, describing it as the “Ludwig Benefit.” Once again Hancock pressed on, alone among Pilbara operators in believing the market for Australian ore was nowhere near saturation. Between 1966 and 1968 he continued his aerial prospecting, staking out numerous mining tenements over large swathes of the Pilbara. These “temporary reserves” gave their owners the right to develop mineral deposits on terms and conditions ultimately approved by the state government. Hancock then brought in big foreign mining companies, such as Armco Steel Corporation, to develop his discoveries.

Hancock’s ambitious development plans started to clash fundamentally with those of Court, who believed that the Pilbara’s iron ore should be developed by a few mining companies operating under state government supervision. He regarded many of the temporary reserves staked out by Hancock as more logically belonging to what he called the established companies’ “areas of influence.” By contrast, Hancock believed that the finder of mineral deposits should determine how they were developed. In some ways, his struggle with Court resembled the fight of the squatters to graze sheep where they could despite the orderly plans of the governor of early Sydney, George Gipps.

By 1971 Hancock had established a weekly newspaper, the Sunday Independent, which swung all its political influence against Brand and Court. He succeeded in tipping that year’s state election in favour of John Tonkin’s Labor Party and casting his enemy, Court, into opposition.

Yet Tonkin’s government quickly came to side with Court over Hancock. With Court’s blessing, Tonkin cut the Gordian knot represented by Hancock’s numerous lease applications and half-negotiated agreements. He declared that Hancock could retain rights to areas known as McCamey’s Monster (now BHP’s Jimblebar mine), Rhodes Ridge and Western Ridge. All other areas claimed by Hancock, including the rich Angelas deposits, would revert to the state government.

Hancock derided Tonkin’s move as the “Great Claim Robbery” and challenged it, unsuccessfully, in the Supreme Court. This meant that Charles Court’s “spheres of influence” plan for the Pilbara would win out against Hancock’s grandiose development plans, including his proposed unified rail systems and the ports he envisaged being created using atomic explosions.

Court succeeded Tonkin as premier in 1974 and held power until 1982. Hancock never achieved his aim of actually owning a mine, but he was influential in conservative politics, calling for Western Australia’s secession from the Commonwealth and strongly supporting Joh Bjelke-Petersen’s government in Queensland.

Clive Palmer’s career parallels Hancock’s in many ways. Palmer, a Queenslander, made his fortune in Gold Coast real estate and developed close links with Queensland’s conservative parties. In the 1980s he branched out into nickel, coal and iron ore through his company Mineralogy, which went into partnership with Chinese company CITIC. Palmer eventually fell out with CITIC, whose owners took him to the Supreme Court of Western Australia and received $200 million in damages.

In 2010 Palmer joined forces with other mining magnates, including Twiggy Forrest and Lang Hancock’s daughter, Gina Rinehart, to successfully oppose Labor prime minister Kevin Rudd’s mining tax. By 2013 he had abandoned his links with the Queensland Liberal National Party and formed the Palmer United Party. At that year’s federal election he won the seat of Fairfax and his party won a number of Senate seats.

Palmer relaunched his party as the United Australia Party in 2018. Although he didn’t win any seats in the 2019 federal election, he spent more than $60 million on advertising, helping to tip a close election in favour of the incumbent Morrison government. The campaign included advertisements pointing to the danger to Australia posed by the Chinese Communist Party.

Now, in 2020, Palmer has confronted popular WA Labor premier Mark McGowan, just as Hancock challenged Charles Court in the 1960s and 1970s. In July, Palmer announced a court challenge to the WA government’s decision to close the state border during the Covid-19 pandemic. The “unconstitutional” border closure, Palmer alleged, would “destroy the lives of hundreds of thousands of people for decades.”

Perhaps recalling Palmer’s assistance during last year’s election campaign, the Morrison government initially supported the legal challenge. In August, however, it withdrew from the action. By then, McGowan was determined to wage what he called a war with Clive Palmer, “and it’s a war we intend to win.” McGowan’s popularity threatens Coalition seats in next year’s state election and possibly the next federal election.

Palmer wasn’t deterred from mounting an even more audacious legal action. Mineralogy was pressing an arbitration claim against decisions made in 2010 by the government of McGowan’s predecessor, Colin Barnett, about Palmer’s Balmoral South iron ore project. Palmer had wanted to develop the project as a mine and sell it to a Chinese-owned entity, a proposal Barnett refused in 2012. After six years of litigation, Palmer and his lawyers made the claim that his proposals had been unjustly refused, costing him billions of dollars.

In much the same way as Tonkin acted in 1971, with Charles Court’s support, McGowan’s government claimed that Western Australia faced the possibility of having to pay as much as $30 billion damages to Palmer. If successful, McGowan argued, hospitals, schools and police stations would have to close. To head off the prospect, McGowan rushed through legislation terminating Palmer’s legal claim, preventing him from lodging another and cancelling his right of appeal. Whether McGowan’s legislation will be as successful as Tonkin and Court’s against Lang Hancock remains to be seen.

What is clear from the cases of Hancock and Palmer is the enormous economic and political power of the mining industry, especially when it is exercised by charismatic entrepreneurs prepared to defend their interests in the business world, the political arena and the courts. Also evident is the WA government’s preparedness to use the power of the sovereign state to act retrospectively to cut those entrepreneurs down to size. •

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One of the book’s themes is that southern governments, whether state or national, are a long way away, and politicians and bureaucrats often know very little about the vast region they have nominal responsibility for. The sharp electoral swings against the Labor Party in northern Queensland seats certainly drew national attention to the region, confirming the widespread conviction that provincial Queensland is both distinctive and different.

Megarrity highlights the strong sense of regional identity in the Kimberley, the Top End and particularly North Queensland, which has hosted movements urging for a separate state since the nineteenth century. Even when the passion for separation subsides, there remains a continuing sense of being ignored and neglected.

Climate has always played a part in northerners’ sense of difference, and understandably so. The monsoonal swing from wet to dry and back again is not at all like the weather people experience in the temperate south. And in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries there was real uncertainty about the ability of white people to live and thrive north of the Tropic of Capricorn. Megarrity deftly deals with these abiding concerns.

And then there is politics. The recent election results will confirm in many minds that provincial Queensland is inimitably conservative. This was the view cemented in southern awareness by the long, idiosyncratic twenty-year reign of Joh Bjelke-Petersen between 1968 and 1987. But that twenty-year period obscures the longer-term electoral power of the Labor Party, which had governed without a break from 1915 to 1957 — only faltering when it split and the conservative Democratic Labor Party was born — and for twenty-five of the past thirty years. Megarrity astutely assesses the shifting political scene, and his observations of local politics, which he well understands, are particularly useful.

Townsville is of special interest at the moment because the electorate in which it sits, Herbert, was one of the seats won back from Labor by the Coalition. But the city’s political history is not what might be expected. It was at the centre of what was known as the “red north,” a reflection of its radical left-wing history rather than the colour of the locals’ sun-burnished necks. Fred Patterson, a local lawyer, won a neighbouring state seat in the 1940s as a communist and held it for two terms. Right up until the 1960s the powerful union movement was dominated by a group of capable communists who commanded a majority on the local Trades and Labour Council.

Both Megarrity and Richard Martin, in The Gulf Country, deal with the multifaceted question of race. In direct and indirect ways since the earliest years of colonial government, this has been the means by which the north has significantly influenced national politics. Settlement had begun and had taken root in the temperate south, and for many years the north was seen as a challenge for the other Australian colonies, which nominally exercised sovereignty there. The same challenge fell to the new federal government when it assumed control of South Australia’s Northern Territory. Of equal concern was the fact that the north reached far into the tropics, and into the neighbourhood of both Melanesian and Southeast Asian communities that demographically dwarfed Australia. An early enthusiasm for trade with the region gave way to a fear of invasion in the late nineteenth century.

But that was just the beginning. For generations white Australia fantasised ineffectually about peopling the north. Some doubted the capacity of white women to flourish in the tropics, and worried that men were already preponderant there. But when lonely men cohabited with non-European partners of whatever provenance, an equal anxiety arose about their “half-caste” offspring and the decline of the white race. And while everyone agreed that the north desperately needed people, those who did arrive were often undesirable.

Federation itself reflected these fears. The Pacific islanders were deported and even Italians who had moved into the cane fields were treated with hostility. But of even greater concern were the large populations of Chinese in North Queensland and the Territory, and the Japanese attracted to pearl diving in Broome and on Thursday Island. At the time of Federation, North Australia was a multiracial society and arguably a successful one.

Richard Martin’s book is the more sharply focused of the two, concentrating on the Gulf country in and around Burketown. It is, he explains, one of the most remote parts of the continent and one of the least known, “a place where Australia’s frontier past still feels alive.” Frontier violence and racial conflict take up much of his story, enlivened by valuable oral history collected over the years Martin spent in the region. An interesting chapter deals with Chinese families who have lived in the country since the nineteenth century and have in many cases married into the Aboriginal community.

Two important ideas emerge from Martin’s book. The first is that historical racial tension obscures the shared experiences and common identification with place — what he calls the overlapping senses of connection and belonging — that black and white residents have in common. As he says, the story he tells is “in many ways a shared story about the specificity, density and complexity of home in postcolonial Australia.” His second observation is that right now, across the north, Aboriginal communities are living on traditional land held under native title. It is their future that will determine how the north fares. Mining, with its fly-in fly-out workers, will be of far less importance. •

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Many archive collections are stored away and forgotten, but there was no rest for Western Australia’s Aboriginal archive. A.O. Neville, the chief protector of Aborigines from 1915 to 1936 and commissioner of native affairs from 1936 to 1940, was their principal creator. He turned the disorganised set of records he inherited into a finely tuned apparatus of surveillance and control. Installed in his office at 57 Murray Street, Perth, the wooden drawers and filing cabinets crammed with cards and files were a reassuring presence for Neville, signifying the expanse of his knowledge and the reach of his control over Aboriginal people. Armed with these records, Neville enforced the 1905 Aborigines Act with ferocity.

For Nyungar people in the south, this was catastrophic, threatening their independence, freedoms and way of life. Neville’s actions diminished their livelihood by controlling employment and wages, enforcing segregation, “civilising” their children in institutions, deciding where they could live and even whom they could marry. With the endorsement of his peers, Neville engineered a scenario of spiralling poverty that rippled out across the families and down the generations, causing broken spirits and arousing anger that spurred protest. As Elder Cliff Humphries explained in For Their Own Good, “We were a bunch of cast-offs in our own country.”

Families were a major focus of Neville’s duties and of his record system. As Mick Dodson wrote in 1994, Aboriginal kinship and family structures — the “fulcrum and the map of Indigenous law and power” — were primary targets of state intervention. Knowledge is power and the records were complicit in the “systematic violation” of families’ rights to remain together and to pass on Aboriginal knowledge and culture down the generations. Capturing this knowledge shifted authority on family matters from ancient Aboriginal lineages to government officers. The expanding family genealogies that calculated fractional degrees of Aboriginal descent constituted a “racial archive” as detailed as any of Francis Galton’s eugenic charts.

Paradoxically, once the records, now censored, were reopened in the 1980s they became a resource for Aboriginal people passionate to know more about their family histories. Administrative files were useful for general background on treatment and conditions, but Neville’s “personal files,” created to micromanage individuals, were brimming with the minutiae of their lives. Only direct descendants could access these files. They became tools of recovery connecting places and people, reuniting individuals with families, and adding details to family memories.

From the 1980s, writers negotiating between the archive and family stories produced major works combining both. But the records were also painful to read. Researchers struggled with the cold bureaucratic language, the all-pervading injustices, prejudice and racism, and fumed at the factual errors and gaps in information. Many wondered how useful these records, created by a punitive bureaucracy, really were. Author Stephen Kinnane used his grandmother’s personal files when he wrote Shadow Lines (2003), but explained in the book that it would have been “preferable” if the files and “the culture that created them also did not exist.”

Fortunately, this archive also captured treasures of ancestors’ words that are unmediated by colonial values and bureaucratic rules. These words speak out from deputations, interviews and testimonies, but the most treasured of all are the ancestors’ letters, which are the heart of our Australian Research Council–funded project, Ancestors’ Words, based at Curtin University. Searching through the administrative files, we locate, copy and respectfully return the letters to Elders of the writers’ families. In our yarning sessions with the Elders and in family and community gatherings the letters release new stories and memories to share.

We have identified over one hundred letters, and there are more to be found. They cover a broad range of topics: Aboriginal rights, complaints of mistreatment, surviving poverty, and family life. The letters’ visual power is striking. Some of the words are scored into the paper, made in haste and anger; others are in perfect script. In some you can almost hear the writer’s voice. In some cases employers wrote letters that the ancestors signed with an X.

Bearing in mind the power of the authorities, the tone is often polite and formal, sometimes confident and persuasive — but distress and anger always hover. James Kickett, Darryl Kickett’s great-grandfather, wrote indignantly to the “Aboriginal Protector”: “I would like to know if the police are justified in coming in by a back way, and going to my camp and shooting our dogs when we were absent, as I can prove the dogs were chained up… He shot three dogs altogether.” He signed another letter, “please be prompt and see I get justice.”

A distraught father, whose descendants we have not been able to identify, used the neatest handwriting and most respectful composition to appeal for the return of his son: “I have as much love for my wife and chuurldines [sic] as you have for yours. so if you have any feeling atole [sic] please send the boy back as quick as you can.” The response, allowing the boy’s return, was a roughly scribbled note in blue indelible pencil. The official correspondence provoked by the letters is a gift from the ancestors: written in file margins, police reports and official correspondence, it is tangible proof of the injustices perpetrated by their tormentors, inscribed in their own words.

Our project works closely with Nyungar people and respects Nyungar family and cultural law and the authority of Nyungar Elders. It is participatory and draws on Nyungar knowledge frameworks, histories and cultural protocols. Darryl Kickett follows genealogical connections to identify and contact the Elders. Their meetings become yarning sessions: telling stories from living memory, refiguring the records as their own knowledge, and setting their history straight. Discussions can be lengthy and passionate. A telegram in 1907 from a man named only as Chucky, asking if the local constable had “any right to take away my Rifle cannot kill kangaroo refuse to give it to me,” set off an hour of group discussion and storytelling across time and place: how the rifle was Chucky’s livelihood; how there was no work for him to support his family; how these actions undermined men’s authority; hunting in the old days; police abuse of their powers, then and now; and, finally, condemnation of the Northern Territory Intervention.

An important deputation letter from 1948 — the year when assimilation policy was introduced in Western Australia — was retrieved from a mammoth 200-page file. Written on faded ruled paper, it was signed by ancestors of the main Nyungar families in the Great Southern region; one of them, Elder Hazel Brown, who co-authored Kayang & Me (2005) with Kim Scott, is still alive. The letter was written by Walter G. Penny and protested against Gnowangerup Mission becoming a children’s institution after it had provided a home for Nyungar families for decades.

In August 2017, descendants of the signatories (many of whom grew up in the new mission’s dormitories) attended a community meeting that grew into two days and nights of storytelling and reminiscing. Our project team presented them with a copy of the letter, which is now displayed in the Gnowangerup Aboriginal Cultural Heritage Centre.

Responding to requests from Elders who had received their ancestors’ letters to visit the archive to view the original letters and learn how to access the files, we organised a workshop in Perth in October 2017 with the State Records Office. This generated discussion about negotiating community access and control of the records and how to develop training and resources for Elders and young people to use the archive.

These issues mirrored the finding of the 1997 Bringing Them Home report that the archives contain vital knowledge for the healing and survival of Aboriginal families and the recommendation that they should be returned to them according to human rights principles of self-determination, non-discrimination and cultural renewal. The Elders were also keen to learn how to make their own archives and performances by drawing on the letters, given they are the legal and moral copyright owners.

The issue of Aboriginal rights was a hot topic at the workshop, and the subject of more than half the letters recovered by the project. Aboriginal people were legally British subjects from the foundation of the colony in 1830 and Australian citizens from 1948, but were dealt with under the state’s discriminatory regimes. Neville rigorously implemented the 1905 Act without consideration of any other rights or entitlements. When William Harris and the Native Union publicly criticised Neville in a deputation to the premier in 1928, he responded by questioning their right to represent Aboriginal people. Exemptions remained the only way out, and they were rarely granted.

In this context, the controversy over politicians’ dual citizenship raging in the media in 2017 prompted some fiery discussion among workshop participants about their rights as citizens and First Peoples, and the unfinished business of a negotiated treaty that would uphold their rights.

Darryl Kickett interviewed Margaret Culbong in January 2018, and discussed a letter from the archive written by her grandfather, John Edward Parfitt. Margaret’s thoughts and memories, and the copy of her grandfather’s letter, are shared here with her permission. The insights from this exchange help us begin to appreciate the riches of storytelling that flow from working with the ancestors’ letters and their descendants. Mr Parfitt’s letter is only a few lines, but it speaks volumes about the origins of “the torment of our powerlessness” in the Uluru Statement.

Bridgetown August 29 1910

To the Inspector of Aborigines

I want you to grant me a permit to go into a public house because I am well liking in this town and I want you to grant me a Permit to go into a Public House. I am well liking in this town. I am ask you to Grant me a Permit. I am a half cast and I am a footballer and the chaps all way like me to go in with them to have a drink with. I all ways have work on hand and I am belong to the town.

Yours etc

John Edward Parfitt
Bridgetown

Darryl and Margaret were sitting in the front yard of her house in the cool shade at the table where she welcomed family and friends to sit and chat. Margaret began by saying that she really appreciated receiving her grandfather’s letter and felt very proud of him for writing it. But she was also sad to see in the file that he wasn’t recognised for his skills and abilities or as a valued member of his hometown of Bridgetown. She knew her grandfather was born there and was a good sportsman and his football photo had been mounted on the wall of the Bridgetown Hotel. Margaret then shared background family details about John Edward Parfitt and her relationship as his granddaughter.

John Edward Parfitt was born in Bridgetown in 1888 and he was buried in Narrogin in 1957. It seems that, at some stage, he moved from Bridgetown to Narrogin and stayed on there. He married Lottie Humes, the daughter of John Levi Humes and Ada Bennell, in 1942. How they found each other is not clear to Margaret. They had fourteen children and the eldest was Esther, Margaret’s mother. Esther married Lindsay Culbong and they had nine children, with Margaret being one of the eldest.

John was the son of Robert Parfitt and Lucy Ryan, an Aboriginal woman born in 1868 at Bridgetown. Robert was the son of Captain William Parfitt, an Englishman who married an Aboriginal woman, Marie. It is likely that she also belonged to the Bridgetown area. These strong connections to Bridgetown suggest the depth of emotions when he wrote in the letter that he belonged to the town.

Margaret has treasured memories of her grandfather from when she was growing up in Narrogin. He worked every day at the Trefort farm (now Hillside) out on Cuballing Road, riding to work bareback on his horse named Donald. Every afternoon, Margaret and her Aunt Sally ran to meet Grandfather as he rode down the hill and they’d fight over who could ride the horse the rest of the way home. Grandfather also had a kangaroo-dog named Speedy, which provided kangaroo meat for the family. The family camped on the Cuballing Road, just south of the Narrogin town boundary, on what Margaret thinks was crown land. The land bordered Trefort’s farm and the Fowlers’ property, where the family bought eggs and milk. They drew water from a well dug by Grandfather on the block. Margaret recalled that many attempts were made to shift Grandfather to the main native reserve in Narrogin, which was right next to the town rubbish dump. Grandfather held firm for years until a house came up in town.

Aboriginal people could not make decisions about how they lived, Margaret said, because government control over their lives was very strong. They just copped it. Poverty and racism were major problems for Nyungar families. Margaret remembered that her grandfather would help diffuse trouble between his adult sons and the police from time to time. She was so proud that he had set up the first community relations committee in Narrogin. He was well respected by everyone and was a very strong leader. He was also a valued farmhand and labourer and worked on Trefort’s farm for over ten years.

Margaret mentioned again how proud she was of her grandfather for writing the letter in 1910. This reminded her of the archives workshop in Perth and how much she enjoyed seeing the old files and letters. She believed the documents tried to define how the lives of Nyungar people were lived. She did not believe that they kept a true record of the families. The Native Welfare officers mixed up family relationships and incorrectly recorded first cousins as being married to each other. She had noticed this when she worked in Native Welfare in the 1960s, but when she challenged the information she was banned from reading the files.

We discussed how her grandfather’s example inspired Margaret, and how her father, Lindsay Culbong, who could not read or write, demanded that the department find a scholarship for her in Perth. The Kondinin Country Women’s Association supported her and she embarked on a nursing career that grew from nursing to leadership positions in Aboriginal health, promoting the establishment of many Aboriginal medical services. Margaret was also a member of the National Aboriginal Conference and acted as the chairperson for a time.

After this discussion, we turned to Mr Parfitt’s letter. We looked at it closely. We noted that it was handwritten. When I asked Margaret if this was his own hand she explained, “Yes, he would have written the letter as he was grown up by farmers in the Bridgetown area and he was taught to read and write by the farmers.” This was significant: Aboriginal literacy was rare then, and to be taught by the farmers suggests their respect for him. We noted that he wrote the letter in Bridgetown, that it was dated 29 August 1910 and was addressed to the “Inspector of Aborigines.” He was twenty-two years old. We discussed the points he raised about why he wrote the letter:

I want you to grant me a Permit to go into a Public House [hotel] I am a half cast

Why would he need a permit to enter a hotel and why did he call himself a half-caste? Margaret wondered. We sketched out the reasons: it had been prohibited to supply alcohol to “Aboriginal natives” in Western Australia since 1843, but the 1905 Act extended this to “half-castes” as well. All the other sections of the Act also applied to them. The minister could exempt from the Act those who achieved “a suitable degree of civilisation,” but this was rarely granted. Mr Parfitt may not have known any of this. The government did not inform Aboriginal people about their loss of rights under the 1905 Act; they learned when they broke a law and were punished.

Next we looked at the responses to Mr Parfitt’s letter from the file. We noted that they were sent from the Department of Aborigines and Fisheries in Perth. We saw that the chief protector of Aborigines interpreted the letter as a request for exemption, and that he believed that “half-castes” supplied “full-blooded Aborigines” with “liquor.” Mr Parfitt made no mention of exemption and only requested to enter the hotel to “have a drink.” There is no suggestion that the chief protector checked his status as a “half-caste” under the Act, being “any person with an Aboriginal mother and other than Aboriginal father.” He followed the procedure of requesting a report from the local police. His letter to the officer-in-charge at Bridgetown Police Station, dated 12 September 1910, prejudged Mr Parfitt and predetermined the constable’s negative response:

Unless you can give some very strong reasons why Parfitt should be exempted from the Aborigines Act I shall not for one moment entertain his application, as most of the trouble in connection with the full-blooded Aborigines being supplied with liquor comes through the half-castes.

Constable David McLean also assumed that the application was to obtain alcohol:

I am of the same opinion as yourself and cannot therefore recommend the application. I have had an uphill battle with local half-castes having blocked the hotel keepers from supplying them with strong drink and this is only an endeavour on their part to defeat me.

Neither man assessed the application on its merits. Instead they dumped Mr Parfitt into a generic category binding “half-caste” with “liquor.”

“After making due enquiries I cannot see my way clear to grant your request,” the chief protector wrote to Mr Parfitt on 28 September. The process discriminated against Mr Parfitt at every step. There were no procedures for establishing facts, for informed decision-making or for checking outcomes, as would be the case today. The government officers deliberately overlooked the information he provided about his good standing in the town, in explaining why he wanted to go into a hotel:

I am a footballer

The chaps all way like me to go in with them to have a drink

Margaret repeated how the photo in his football outfit was on display in the Bridgetown Hotel until recently, even after extensive renovations, showing that the community remembered him as a popular champion player. Not bad for someone who was refused service in the same hotel from 1910 after the police “blocked” supply and he was refused exemption from the Act.

This is just one of many files documenting how Aboriginal people who were eminently worthy of citizenship in any country were refused their rights solely on the grounds of race. Along with Margaret’s stories, it also shows how punitive controls and demeaning poverty made it impossible for families to achieve the necessary “suitable degree of civilisation” to escape the treadmill of discrimination.

The Nyungar population in 1901 was around 1200 people, thousands fewer than when the British arrived seven decades earlier. By 1936 it was counted at 2616. Only around 200 exemptions had been granted in the whole state by the early 1940s, as the authorities continued to regard them as “permits to obtain liquor” rather than legitimate claims to the applicants’ rights. Margaret said that throughout his life her grandfather remained a dignified person and did not allow the injustice he experienced to damage his spirit. She recalled that her grandmother, Lottie, and uncle, Peter Parfitt, were granted exemptions during the 1940s. This might have been after the war, when there was growing public support for Aboriginal rights led by Aboriginal men, this time returned servicemen, who were still campaigning to have a beer in a hotel with their mates.

Before, Margaret’s grandmother’s exemption was the one bright memory in the gloom of negative oppression that the 1905 Act created for her family and all the families of Aboriginal nations spread across Western Australia. Now, she also has all the feelings and memories that came from reading her grandfather’s file. The government responses to the letter clearly outraged Margaret; but the letter and responses also brought her a deeper understanding of the source of injustices she saw as a girl growing up with her grandfather, and then happening in her own life.

In her grandfather’s actions she saw the germ of her own life of protest and activism. The letter also helped Margaret to get to know her grandfather in profound new ways, and confirmed how important he still is to her.

Margaret has shown us the power of Nyungar ancestors’ letters, captured for so long in the archive and now set free to rejoin their descendants, and how this coming together honours the ancestors and Elders. The letters and the conversations spun around them, like Margaret and Darryl’s yarning, are gifts of revelation and generosity. Through stories and shared feelings they teach about the “structural nature” of problems raised in the Uluru Statement and how these came to be, how the exercise of power festers without integrity and accountability — and about the strong words and courage that helped Nyungar people survive.

This is the beating heart of the Ancestors’ Words project. •

This essay first appeared in Griffith Review 60: First Things First.

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The clearing of the forests for wheat was a concerted effort of destruction, subsidised by governments that enticed working people onto the land to cut down bush and burn it to ashes. Aspiring farmers willingly joined the rampage, fuelled by the promise of land and a profitable business. In practice, they found that they could earn more from clearing the land than growing crops on it, so the rural cycle turned from the hard graft of knocking over the bushland to the celebration of mighty fires, rather than the traditional round of sowing and reaping. When one area was cleared, they moved on to the next.

These days, the WA wheatbelt produces grain for export and looks like a profitable concern, but its history is a terrible story of the industrialisation of agriculture at the expense of the land, the people who lived there before settlement, the animals, birds and trees, and, ultimately, the people who cleared it.

Such a story might be told in a conventional geographical history, surveying changes to the landscape and the politics of settlement, but Hughes-d’Aeth is a literary critic, aware that the process had a series of literary witnesses. He traces the century-long history of the wheatbelt through the work of well-known writers including Albert Facey, Jack Davis, Dorothy Hewett, Elizabeth Jolley and John Kinsella – and some lesser-known, such as Cyril E. Goode, James Pollard and Barbara York Main. A few others – J.K. Ewers, Peter Cowan and Tom Flood – may be familiar to easterners interested in Australian literature but are hardly household names outside Western Australia.

Hughes-d’Aeth uses Albert Facey’s A Fortunate Life, not published until 1981, to provide an overview of this history. Facey’s family saw the wheatbelt clearing as an opportunity to rise from poverty to the ownership of land – that European dream. Like others from the eastern states, they were attracted west by the promise of the goldfields but found themselves working as labourers and suffering immense privation. As an eight-year-old, Facey walked 220 kilometres barefoot to get to his uncle’s holding, at what would become Wickepin. He tells a story of child slavery and neglect, but also gives an account of a general phenomenon – the movement of people in search of a fresh start on the land. His later experiences of the first world war, life as a soldier-settler, and ruin during the Great Depression are representative of life in the wheatbelt.

The enterprise of clearing the land had a moral dimension, Hughes-D’Aeth comments, a belief that the people as well as the land would be improved by this massive, grinding effort of labour. Of course, a literary tradition of pioneering and pastoral life already existed in the eastern states, where squatters rode their horses among rolling hills, growing wealthy from their sheep and cattle. It was romanticised – as writers such as Henry Lawson, Joseph Furphy and Barbara Baynton attested – but it adapted a longstanding notion that Australian rural life could be “pastoral” in the literary sense, lived in harmony with the natural world. This notion couldn’t stand a chance in the wheatbelt; Hughes d’Aeth thinks Steele Rudd’s stories of hopeless family labour on a selection are the closest equivalent to the experience there. As James Pollard presents it, farming the wheat was “a numbing and endless cycle of tasks, and not a moving and redemptive expression of life.”

In a range of poems and stories, Goode, Pollard and Ewers tried to reconcile pioneering and pastoral mythology with the lives of the “wheat men.” But their experiences led them to sometimes bitter reflections on the impossibility of the task. Goode’s poem “The Power Farmer’s Soliloquy” makes the contrast clear, with its images of roaring engines and grinding gears – a wheat farm was more like a mechanised factory than a place of communion with nature. He wrote his collection of poetry, The Grower of Golden Grain, in the decade before the Depression drove him from the land; he published it himself and sold it door to door on the streets of Melbourne.

These aspiring literary writers also turned to natural history as consolation. Pollard wrote a weekly nature column for the West Australian in the 1920s that elicited a response from readers wanting to learn about the birds, insects and plants they found in the remnant parcels of bush around them. Ewers, a school teacher, sought him out to share their mutual interests in nature and literature – with Ewers publishing two novels about the wheatbelt experience. It was clear to them that “nature” was not the farm.

Hughes-d’Aeth reads literary writing and history in a novel way, and provides new insights into both. Peter Cowan’s reticence can seem like a wilful refusal to let the reader near the essence of his novels and short stories, but Hughes-d’Aeth reads this “understated prose” as an expression of Cowan’s experience of the “amazingly barren open spaces” and the isolation of his years as an itinerant labourer among the wheat. Cowan was young enough not to know the land before it was cleared, and educated enough to recognise the modernity of the agricultural world in which he lived. “Nature” has no romantic resonance for him, and his work presents an alienated modernist view, appropriate to the monotonous land and work in the wheat.

Dorothy Hewett was also a child of the wheat country, in her case from one of the families who prospered there. Hughes-d’Aeth sees her story “The Wire Fences of Jarrabin” (first published in the Australian Women’s Weekly in 1957 as “My Mother Said, I Never Should”) as the first literary recognition of the social divisions and the segregation of Aboriginal people there, while her poem “Legend of the Green Country” finds a mythic dimension through her own family history. He regards her musical drama The Man from Mukinupin as the high point of her career because of the way it counterpoints the layers of myth with the realities of wheatbelt life, and introduces a sense of “tragic time.”

Yet it took Jack Davis, publishing after 1970, to speak for the notable absence from wheatbelt literature – the original inhabitants of the land. Davis was not a wheatbelt local – his people came from the Pilbara – but his nine months at the Moore River Native Settlement made him a crucial witness to the treatment of the Aboriginal children and teenagers who were removed to there (mainly from the north) in the 1920s. Moore River, now infamous for its appearance in the film Rabbit-Proof Fence, was also in wheat country, and Davis’s play No Sugar put its racist and mercenary principles on the public record. In some respects, his plays responded to Hewett’s Mukinupin by asserting that there were other invisible mythologies and other realities operating in wheatbelt society.

These connections between writers, including the importance of Judith Wright to Hewett and Kinsella, and of Oodgeroo Noonuccal to Davis, suggest an ongoing line of literary engagement with the Australian environment. The work of Randolph Stow, Henry Thoreau and William Wordsworth are also frequent touchstones through the book. Tom Flood, of course, is Hewett’s son, and her influence is clear in his novel Oceana Fine, while his work shares a generational shift towards postmodernist ambiguity with John Kinsella. In 2000, Kinsella and Hewett collaborated to produce Wheatlands, a collection of their poetry about the wheat country, with accompanying photographs.

It is Kinsella who offers a kind of conclusion to this literary witnessing of the damage of twentieth-century history. Growing up partly on a wheat farm with his father, partly in the city with his mother, Kinsella was always aware of the dual inheritance of the wheatbelt. He was the boy who cheerfully shot rabbits and trapped birds, and he acknowledges his own participation in the crime of destruction. As an adult, he finds some satisfaction in the emergence of the salt from beneath the surface of the land, as a sign of a return of a still powerful, if infertile, nature. In 2009, he moved back to live in Toodyay with his family, choosing to confront the dilemmas of the guilty human attempting reparation. This is symptomatic of the situation of all Australians who feel responsible for their environment, recognising that “the undisputed monarch of feral animals is the European human,” as Hughes-D’Aeth puts it. “In Kinsella’s poetry we have the wheatbelt functioning as an allegory for post-humanist despair.”

This is an expansive, monumental book – as lengthy as most literary histories of Australia, let alone a region. Hughes-d’Aeth gives a brief biography of each of his authors and reads their selected work closely and sympathetically. Though he can see the shortcomings of some of their writing, he gives such importance to their life experience and their testimony to a real world that these seem minor. He also takes into account the shifts in literary ideas and genre over time, moving from nature studies and memoir to stories, novels and poetry. It is a generous book in every sense, and a remarkable example of what literary criticism can do when it is not bound by narrow theories or tastes.

Of course, a conventional history could cover some of this ground – Hughes-D’Aeth refers to Geoffrey Bolton’s A Fine Country to Starve in,among others – but this literary evidence lets us see personal and emotional engagements with history. This kind of literary criticism amplifies the writing by putting it into a meaningful context. It demonstrates the centrality of literary writing to our understanding of ourselves.

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The usual deflection – that state elections are fought on local issues – simply doesn’t wash here. National issues, including the attempt to cut Sunday penalty rates and the distribution of GST revenues, figured high on voters’ lists of concerns. Federal and state issues also intersected with the Barnett government’s proposed privatisation of Western Power, which coincided damagingly with the federal debate about energy insecurity and rising power prices.

The Liberal Party had long been aware of the problems facing the government and its decidedly unpopular leader, Colin Barnett. With its private polling pointing to a train wreck, the swing of almost 16 per cent came as no surprise. “We saw it coming, no doubt about that. But there was nothing we could do,” a senior Liberal told me.

Of course, a key factor was the sudden downturn in the WA economy after the end of the mining investment bonanza, to which Barnett owed his eight-plus years as premier. The preference deal with One Nation, an act of pure desperation, backfired spectacularly among both Liberal and One Nation supporters – and the Nationals, at whose expense the deal was done, remain furious, with deputy prime minister Barnaby Joyce making no attempt to conceal his disgust.

The Liberals in the west, down to just thirteen seats in the Legislative Assembly (having lost eighteen), are numbed by the magnitude of the defeat, even if it was predicted. The election of former treasurer Mike Nahan as leader looks like a holding operation rather than a step towards the future. Nahan will be seventy at the time of the next election.

Party members remain angry that repeated attempts during the last term of government failed to remove Barnett, whose approval rating –in freefall since the 2013 election – had plummeted to just 28 per cent by late last year. At the time, the mild-mannered Labor leader, Mark McGowan, was enjoying a rating of 46 per cent.

With another round of poor federal polling for Malcolm Turnbull and the Coalition, the take-out messages from the west are both ominous and confusing. Western Australia has been the strongest state for the Liberals in recent federal elections, so the local setback is shaking national confidence.

Despite the strains in the Coalition caused by the One Nation dalliance, the prime minister is refusing to rule out a similar deal at the next federal election – a stance that has infuriated many in the party. Backbencher Tim Wilson was bluntest, calling One Nation “crazy.” Another federal Liberal MP, Andrew Hastie, weighed in with a warning that Western Australia, his home state, can no longer be taken for granted. According to Hastie, the state’s share of the GST must be increased.

Tony Abbott and other conservatives are publicly urging Turnbull to move to the right to counter the growing threat from One Nation. But other figures – including Wilson, a former human rights commissioner – take the opposite view. “The Liberal–National Coalition is at its best when it starts from its centre-right mainstream base and reaches into the mainstream middle – not when it legitimises the fringes,” Wilson said on the day after the WA election.

On the other side of the country, the outcome in the west almost certainly rules out an early election in Queensland this year. Labor is hoping One Nation will unravel in its home state by 2018, a view encouraged both by past experience and by the chaotic and contradictory campaign the party ran in Western Australia. The opposition Liberal National Party faces dilemmas posed by the possibility that One Nation will make inroads into its voter base. Should it seek to accommodate One Nation or oppose it? And will it be tempted by a preference deal in Labor-held seats?

For his part, Malcolm Turnbull is working to shore up his own position – but in a way that could be counterproductive. Shedding the Mr Reasonable tag, he has adopted a harsher, shriller tone, stepping up personal attacks on opposition leader Bill Shorten and the trade union movement generally. Coupled with his support for cutting Sunday penalty rates, this might serve his primary purpose of keeping the business community onside; but the generally unfavourable reaction suggests this might come at the expense of electoral support.

The prime minister needs to deliver more than ever to the business community – hence his championing of corporate tax cuts – because his power base there is all that stands between him and a restive conservative base in the parliamentary party. Whether this is good policy or merely a sop to his friends is debatable. Certainly, among economists there is considerable scepticism as to whether the cuts will actually work to deliver the much-vaunted jobs and growth.

The forthcoming budget will be a further test for the prime minister and for treasurer Scott Morrison. The ill-fated 2014 budget ruined the careers of Abbott and treasurer Joe Hockey, who ignored at their peril the maxim that politics is the art of the possible. Whether this year’s budget fares any better – and Turnbull’s hopes of retaining support from the big end of town and Liberal donors ride on it – remains to be seen. Morrison’s one-speed style of debate is scarcely adaptable to the negotiating table and Turnbull will have to consider concessions that won’t go down well with his power base.

On top of all this, another worry lingers in the minds of Liberals: the prime minister’s political judgement, as evidenced by his decision to call the 2016 double dissolution election that produced a Senate just as intractable, and perhaps even more so, than the old one. The Liberals, increasingly uneasy, are beginning to see another disaster looming, just as they did in the west but seemed powerless to avert. Truly, all the makings of a bitter and protracted winter of discontent are in place. •

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In the Netherlands, the PVV enjoyed a clear lead in opinion polls through most of 2016. Wilders was sufficiently confident that he dubbed Wednesday’s vote the start of a “patriotic spring” that would sweep across Europe, returning a host of outsiders opposed to immigration, Islam and European integration. Come election day, the party attracted just 13 per cent of the vote, well down on both polling and recent results in local and regional elections, and won twenty of the 150 seats in the House of Representatives. Although a gain of five seats makes it the second-largest party behind incumbent prime minister Mark Rutte’s centre-right People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy, the tally doesn’t reflect any particular popularity. In the Netherlands’ proportional electoral system, the PVV sits outside a fractured mainstream made up of a multitude of parties nonetheless united in their support for European integration, and looks likely to be excluded from the process of coalition-building.

PVV’s underwhelming result reinforces a persuasive analysis of populism by political scientist Jan-Werner Müller. As Müller argues, populists succeed only with the complicity of the political establishment: Brexit’s Nigel Farage needed the support of high-profile Conservative MPs like Boris Johnson and Michael Gove, and Donald Trump needed the Republican Party. Yet, as Müller explains, such complicity is rare: the governments of Hungary and Poland turned to populism only after being elected, and bipartisan opposition to a populist presidential candidate in Austria ensured the victory of a moderate, pro-EU Green. In the Netherlands, on the other hand, Wilders and his party have been politically isolated, and with last week’s result Müller’s thesis appears to hold.

Back in Australia, the Western Australian election delivered not just a change of government, but also an apparent backhander to One Nation. What looked to be a run-of-the-mill defeat of a tired government with a poor economic record was spiced up when the Liberals struck a preference deal with One Nation. The deal also came at the expense of the Liberals’ traditional ally, the National Party, although the relationship between the two parties has been weaker recently in Western Australia than in other states, with an outdated rural gerrymander strengthening the Nationals and encouraging more independent behaviour.

The gambit failed. Liberal support dropped markedly in the weeks between the preference announcement and the election, and the party went on to lose two-thirds of its 2013 vote and a third of its seats, with Labor winning government in a landslide. For its part, One Nation attracted just 4.9 per cent of the Legislative Assembly vote, well down on pre-election poll figures of up to 13 per cent and forecasts of a number of likely seats. In response, Hanson dubbed the preference deal “a mistake,” arguing that her party had suffered from both the stale government and voters’ limited understanding of the preferential system. The Liberals remain insistent that it was a pragmatic necessity, despite the former premier’s unease.

It has been suggested that the deal harmed both parties: that the Liberals were tainted by their association with a controversial fringe party, while One Nation compromised its own anti-political message by consorting with the establishment. But these results should be interpreted cautiously. One Nation ran in only thirty-nine of the fifty-seven Legislative Assembly seats, meaning its localised results, at an estimated 8.26 per cent, were substantially higher than the headline figure. It attracted a similar percentage in the Legislative Council, well up on its 2016 Senate result, and will secure a number of seats.

These are perfectly respectable results for a minor party, and the fact that they fell short of the opinion poll figures is no great surprise. Polls tend to overstate support for the one or two minor parties specifically mentioned by pollsters, because those named parties benefit from the hostility to major parties that is spread across dozens of small parties and independents on election day. All the WA result really highlights is that a minor party is exactly what One Nation continues to be, and that in the present circumstances its ideas remain of limited appeal.

Nor is the Barnett government’s demise surprising. All governments have a shelf life, and when yours has presided over the end of a once-in-a-generation mining boom, a $30 billion blowout in public debt and a collapse in house prices, and you decide to campaign on a deeply unpopular promise of electricity privatisation, your days are numbered. Fringe populists aren’t going to drag an exhausted, unpopular government over the line any more than an exhausted, unpopular government is going to open the electoral door for fringe populists.

What is interesting about the result is the light it throws on a key question raised by Müller’s analysis: why is it that the establishment embraces outsider populists and their politics? It may be that establishment politicians are cannily exploiting populist undercurrents for their own ends, or are perhaps forced into meeting populist demands by insurgent electoral threats. To some degree these are the same thing. Nor is reactive policy-making necessarily a bad thing in a democracy: the political class holds no monopoly on reason, as Scott Morrison’s serenading of a lump of coal amply highlights. (As a metaphor, “fiddling while Rome burns” has rarely been more apt.)

Indeed, the bulk of what’s called the Australian Settlement – the protections created by the early Commonwealth and developed by Menzies and Whitlam into the contemporary Australian welfare system – reflects such a process. Though frequently driven by Labor, these policies were often supported, or at least tacitly accepted, by establishment conservatives, motivated both by electoral competition with their decidedly popular opponents and by existential, cold war–era fears of the popular appeal of communism in systems without such safeguards.

In any case, the Barnett government’s motivation – electoral desperation – was clear enough. There is a parallel here with Hanson’s first appearance on the Australian political stage, back in the late 1990s. Her continuing profile stems primarily from the response of John Howard, who adopted her ideas in a moment of panic and was lucky enough to have subsequent global events (and the tendency of the opposition and media to understate their impact) weld this into a myth of political genius. The consequences have been far-reaching, with the grand narrative of contemporary Australian politics resting on decidedly shaky foundations.

Broadly, this is the argument: in a feat of masterful political strategy, John Howard saw that a section of the Australian electorate, particularly in Labor’s electoral base, was alienated by large-scale migration (and especially unauthorised migration) and had peeled off to One Nation. By appealing to that constituency, he both undermined the Labor opposition and neutralised a rising threat from the right.

Yet this characterisation fundamentally ignores the realities of the time. Howard was meandering towards defeat in 1998 not because of One Nation but because he was perceived to stand for nothing and to have achieved little. He was returned to power from a minority of the popular vote thanks only to structural quirks of the electoral system. The next election, in 2001, looked no brighter until global events granted him purpose (though the political class errs heavily in crediting the Tampa rather than the 11 September attacks for the electoral boost).

Once Iraq had been exposed as a disaster and the potency of the “war on terror” narrative had petered out, the Australian public was quite content to turf Howard out in favour of an alternative so identical in other respects that Kevin Rudd’s differentiation hinged on just two key policies: repealing the WorkChoices industrial relations policy and dismantling the apparently fundamental border protection policy. While border protection would receive a new lease of life with Tony Abbott’s 2013 “Stop the Boats” campaign, Abbott’s own collapse in popularity – despite having followed through on that pledge – again belied the issue’s supposed electoral importance. Yet therein lies the assumed relevance of Hanson and One Nation.

Policy is undoubtedly important, but voter behaviour in this country is predicated on how competent the sitting government is perceived to be. That perception derives directly from voters’ feelings about their own wellbeing, which they base on the health of the economy (and hence job markets) and of the welfare, healthcare and education systems. Hence, the endurance of the Australian Settlement. Yet these factors are becoming more difficult to manage in a world of weak economies exposed to global instability. By so thoroughly embracing neoliberalism and abrogating policy control to the market, establishment parties have diminished their capacity to demonstrate purpose and have hence undermined their own raison d’être. This is where populism comes in.

With its capacity to promise a return to the old ways without giving up the benefits of the new, and with no consideration of how to deliver, populism neatly sidesteps the constraints of reality. When populists do occasionally win power, these contradictions rise to the surface – as the ongoing dramas that are Brexit and Trump demonstrate – and they are able to offer little beyond a continual shifting of blame. Misdirection only lasts so long, however, because populists in power lose their capacity to position themselves against the establishment. Unless populists can develop a position sufficiently coherent and sustainable as to transcend the confines of populism itself, their appeal remains as limited as their efficacy, usually in the short term but always in the long.

We are left with a strange and delicate balance, with populists of sufficient strength to scare an establishment in decline, yet no capacity to replace it in form or function. And so, in the face of their own fading relevance and popularity, the old parties must hold their nerve, even at the price of electoral oblivion. To France and Germany we now turn – or, in our own little corner, to Queensland, and to the depths to which a desperate federal government may yet stoop. •

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Federal opposition leader Bill Shorten is an obvious beneficiary, and not simply because he is the federal leader of the party that won a landslide victory on Saturday. Premier-elect Mark McGowan, elected state Labor leader in January 2012, was a relatively long-term opposition leader. He had lost one election, in 2013 – hardly his fault after only a year in the job – but hung on to the party leadership and used the next four years to position himself for a credible run at the premiership.

While the NSW Labor right would no doubt have ditched McGowan after his 2013 loss (or maybe even before it), the success of WA Labor’s more patient approach has implications for the federal party and for Shorten. After five years in the job, McGowan was a known quantity: for better or worse, voters knew him as well as they can an opposition leader. And while he is clearly neither charismatic nor a great orator (hardly a novelty in state politics), Labor’s consistent poll lead suggested that the party was electable with him as leader. The danger of being defined by one’s opponents (see Mark Latham in the 2004 federal election) had essentially been neutralised.

Given McGowan’s massive victory, last March’s attempted putsch by Stephen Smith to replace him from outside the parliament now looks more farcical than ever. Presumably Smith, who demonstrated the lack of any necessary correlation between conventional good looks and political judgement, is not waiting by the phone for an offer of well-paid consulting work in the new government.

Bill Shorten is in a comparable, though not identical, situation. He has been through one election and, unlike McGowan’s first, actually won extra votes and extra seats. Federal Labor has been ahead in the polls for quite some time, and while Shorten is clearly charismatically challenged and has a unique style of voice modulation, he is both a known quantity and a given for those expressing a preference for Labor in the polls.

The notion that Labor would be even further ahead with a different leader – a view advanced mainly by Labor partisans rather than the uncommitted voters who decide elections – is simply untestable. What is clearer is that a change of leader would remind voters of the Rudd–Gillard–Rudd fiasco and suggest that the party has learnt nothing from its previous self-indulgence. Rudd was dumped in 2010 when Labor was leading 52–48 in the polls, and we all know how that worked out. The party’s recent stability and comparative unity (certainly when contrasted with the Coalition) are electoral pluses.

Labor’s current situation resembles neither 1983 nor 2006–07, when it changed leaders in order to turn a possible victory into a likely one. In the first case, Bob Hawke was a known political celebrity at no risk of being defined by his opponents. Kevin Rudd was less well known than Hawke had been, but his ubiquitous television presence ensured him a more than adequate popular image among swinging voters. Both Hawke and Rudd won substantial victories, which suggested that Hayden and Beazley would probably have won anyway.

By contrast, there is no Hawke or Rudd on the current Labor frontbench. While certain names suggest themselves as potential leaders (Albanese, Plibersek, Bowen), they are comparatively unknown to the electorate and would be vulnerable to definition by their opponents. Moreover, suitability for the job of opposition leader is rarely predictable in advance: only work experience counts.

So, barring any revelations that might cripple Shorten’s credibility, federal Labor is probably best served by following the example of stability provided by WA Labor and Mark McGowan. If the electorate is set on a change of government, history tells us that as long as the opposition leader meets a basic electability threshold, victory is likely. For evidence that the threshold can be quite low, see Tony Abbott.

More attention has focused on the performance of Pauline Hanson’s One Nation and its federal implications. Pre-election polling appeared to ignore the fact that One Nation was not contesting all lower house seats, and therefore tended to inflate the vote in individual lower house seats. But that doesn’t detract from the reality of a recorded drop in support during the last week of the campaign.

A more accurate measure of One Nation’s support can be garnered from upper house results, where the party contested all six regions. Its figure of 7.5 per cent is (predictably) superior to its lower house effort (4.7 per cent) and close to its average in lower house seats contested (around 8 per cent). All these figures are a far cry from the 15 per cent predicted in earlier polls, but the upper house vote provides an interesting comparison with the WA Senate vote in 2016. On that occasion, One Nation secured 4 per cent. So, in a comparable contest with the party on all ballot papers, it has nearly doubled its vote in eight months, albeit from a low base.

Even if the Liberal–One Nation preference deal hadn’t generated cultural repugnance among moderate conservatives, the Liberals seem to have overlooked the relative inability of One Nation to discipline its preferences. In times past, the Democratic Labor Party (assisted by elements of the Catholic Church) would deliver around 90 per cent of its preferences to the Liberal–Country Party coalition, and even the Greens average round 80 per cent to Labor. For both organisational reasons (an inability to staff all polling places) and ideological ones (not all of its supporters are disgruntled Liberals), One Nation will struggle to deliver the goods. Liberal Party strategists will need to take this into account when considering the value of a deal for future elections, state and federal. Unless One Nation can deliver around 70 per cent or better, it is probably not worth the pain. •

Author’s note: election figures are from the WA Electoral Commission website and may change marginally as the count continues.

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And it’s not just a warning for Turnbull. It’s hard to think of any state government today that can expect to be re-elected. Gladys Berejiklian is too new to be suffering the blowtorch of failed expectations, but in every other state the latest polls show governments either trailing, or with a precariously narrow lead. We do not live in a forgiving age.

The WA result confirms, yet again, that the vast bulk of Australians are not on the far right of the political spectrum, but somewhere around the middle. If the Liberal Party won’t look after them and their priorities, the Labor Party will. If the federal Coalition wants to have a third term in government, it must learn that lesson, and apply it.

The 2017 budget gives it another chance to reboot, this time committed to solving problems and not merely to finding ways to exploit them politically. We’ll come back to that.

In turn, Turnbull’s recent experience sends a warning shot across the bows of former naval officer Mark McGowan. When the goodwill of a honeymoon gives you political capital, you either use it or lose it. This is a time to do the hard things. You will never again have so much momentum with which to dispel opposition. There will never again be a better time to take on a battle, whether your opponents are on your own side of politics, on the other side, or both.

And one problem that could loom large over his new government is that it will be seriously outnumbered in the upper house, the Legislative Council. While Labor will control the Legislative Assembly with two-thirds of the seats, as the count stands now, it looks likely to win only fourteen of the thirty-six seats in the Council. The Coalition parties between them would also win fourteen – even though they polled roughly 32 per cent of the Council vote while Labor won 42 per cent.

Why the discrepancy? Because the Legislative Council of Western Australia is the last parliamentary chamber in Australia that is still gerrymandered – or, to be more precise, elected under a system in which rural votes are worth far more than city votes – to create a conservative chamber.

If McGowan has any ambition to break that system, as other Labor premiers have done in other states, he should act now, while he has the wind in his sails. We’ll come back to that too.

Premier McGowan will have his hands full getting on top of the vast enterprise that is a state government. He has pledged to abandon the controversial Roe 8 freeway extension now being built through Perth’s southern suburbs; if the Andrews government’s similar pledge to extricate itself from the East West Link is any guide, that’s likely to be messy, and expensive. He has made a couple of hundred campaign promises, quite a few of them directed at Bunbury, the seat where Labor won a 23 per cent swing on Saturday. He’s got to make sure he keeps them.

Having ruled out the easy way of fixing the budget deficit, by pledging to keep Western Power in public ownership, he and his treasurer, Ben Wyatt, now have to fix it the hard way – the hardest way of all for a Labor government, through spending cuts. At the same time, they are promising a host of new spending to “create vital new jobs,” “put patients first,” create “world class public transport,” etc., etc.

How will they do it? Every opposition promises to cut government spending on advertising and consultants; same here. This mob has also promised to cut the number of SES executive-level jobs in the public service. Okay, all of that saves $140 million a year. The deficit at last count was $3.4 billion. So only $3.3 billion to go... almost there!

McGowan has also copied the usual Liberal trick by promising an inquiry into the Barnett government’s spending. One assumes that this is intended to make a public case for ending some of that spending. The Grants Commission’s decision on the carve-up of 2017–18 GST revenue between the states is due any day now. Presumably that will start the process of giving Western Australia more revenue in recognition of its weakened economy – but the budget estimates will already have factored that in.

(May I add a postscript to a piece I wrote a couple of years ago on Western Australia’s complaints about its low share of the GST. My view is that the Barnett government was the author of its own problems with the state’s declining GST share, and was fiscally reckless in embarking on so much spending when its revenue boom couldn’t last. But thinking about it since, I would add one thing.

There is a real problem when the Grants Commission decides a state’s fair share based on its estimated needs three years ago. For example, the commission will estimate WA’s share in 2017–18 (when it is coming out of recession) on an average of its estimated needs for 2013­–14 (when it was booming), 2014–15 (when it turned around) and 2015–16 (when it went into recession). Its figures are so outdated that it keeps taking money from states when they most need it, and then showering it on them when they don’t.

Commission chair Greg Smith, the author of dividend imputation in his days at Treasury, is a man of creative mind. He and his colleagues need to come up with the best way to address this problem, and make the commission’s estimates more contemporaneous without significantly hurting their accuracy.)

Much has been said and written about what Labor’s victory means. I just want to add a couple of things.

First, it provided more proof of the accuracy of Australia’s opinion polls, and of Galaxy/Newspoll in particular. People who ridicule our polls by pointing to the failures of polls in the United States and Britain are mistaken. Our system of compulsory voting makes it far more likely that our polls will be right, and with few exceptions they consistently are. Thank you, pollsters.

Second, it is worth remembering that the polls had been showing for months that Labor was heading for a landslide victory. Commentators have identified so many campaign mistakes by the Coalition – Barnett’s refusal to hand over the leadership, the sudden decision to privatise Western Power, the preference deal with One Nation – that perhaps we should be surprised they didn’t lose by more.

The Coalition will probably end up with about twenty seats out of fifty-nine. (At present, the score is Labor thirty-six, Coalition sixteen, with seven seats still too close to call.) It’s a big loss, but not one of Queensland dimensions. The swing was huge, but the actual vote was, at best, only slightly above Labor’s previous highs.

Most of the seats the Liberals lost were seats that Labor usually wins when it takes government. This result was different, though, because it was Labor’s first win since its last government abolished the gerrymander in the Assembly and redrew the boundaries, which had favoured the Coalition, to reflect the principle of “one vote, one value” (apart from allowing smaller enrolments in the outback).

So its majority this time was much bigger than those enjoyed by the Labor governments of Brian Burke (Labor premier in the 1980s) or Geoff Gallop (premier in the 2000s). But its vote was not much bigger. In 1986 Burke’s team won 54.1 per cent of the two-party-preferred vote; in 2001, Gallop was elected with 52.9 per cent. We won’t know the two–party-preferred vote this time for weeks, but the polls agreed that it was 54–46 in Labor’s favour.

If you look back over the last fifty years of state elections in Western Australia, the result that sticks out was not Saturday’s poll, but the 2013 election. The Coalition then won 57.3 per cent of the two-party vote, easily the most one-sided result the state has seen since the war. Western Australia usually votes for the Coalition in federal elections, but not at state level. Of the past fourteen state elections, the Coalition and Labor have won seven each. The reason the swing this time was so gigantic was primarily because the 2013 result was an outlier.

But Labor’s reform of the gerrymander a decade ago was for the Assembly only. Labor and the Greens could never agree on what to do about the gerrymander in the upper house. So it remains, one of the most atrocious in Australia.

If you live in Kalgoorlie, the mining towns or the outback, your vote for the upper house is worth six times as much as a vote in Perth. If you live in the state’s vast farming area, your votes is worth four times as much as a Perth vote. And if you live in the southwest, it’s worth twice as much.

Of the thirty-six Council members, half are elected by the 75 per cent of Western Australians who live in Perth, and half by the 25 per cent who live in the rest of the state. Western Australians vote in six Senate-style electorates – three in Perth and three in the rest of the state – choosing six members each for a single term. But the outback electorate has only 68,480 voters, and the farming one 102,748, while the three in Perth average roughly 400,000 each.

It is not only the most durable rural gerrymander Australia has known, but one of the most extreme. In other states, the gerrymanders have gradually been removed – apart from a bipartisan agreement to allow lower enrolments in a handful of vast outback seats in Queensland – because the Coalition parties there accept that it is morally wrong to rig the electoral system in favour of one group of voters and against another. It is one of the things that makes Australia different from the United States.

And the gerrymander is the reason why Labor’s landslide win on Saturday will still leave it without the numbers in the upper house. While the final results will not be clear for several weeks, Antony Green’s wonderful election calculator suggests that, as of Sunday night, the parties of the left were heading for just seventeen of the thirty-six seats, despite their smashing victory, while the parties of the right won nineteen seats, despite their smashing defeat. This is not the way democracy should work.

As of Monday, the opposition benches in WA’s new Legislative Council looked like including Liberals (ten), Nationals (four), One Nation (two), Shooters (two) and a Liberal Democrat, as well as three Greens. That gives Labor a few potential partners to negotiate with.

But it could become difficult, particularly if the Liberals play hardball. It could become very difficult indeed.

In the Senate, at face value, we allow an even bigger departure from “one vote, one value” by giving each state the same numbers of senators, regardless of size. But that has virtually no political impact, because each state tends to vote in a similar way – and to the extent that they have consistent preferences for one side or the other, they cancel each other out.

It’s a very different story in the west. On the votes as they stand, the 75 per cent of voters living in Perth will elect ten members from the left and eight from the right to their half of the chamber, while the 25 per cent of voters living in regional Western Australia will elect only seven from the left and eleven from the right to their half.

And it’s always like that. This was perhaps Labor’s best vote for fifty years, and it still was only good enough to give it as many seats as the Coalition parties it thrashed. Something is wrong here.

Suppose everyone’s vote had the same weight. In a chamber of twenty-four members, Labor would have ten or eleven seats, and the Coalition nine or ten. The government would still be a minority, but with the Greens, it would have at least half the seats, and even without them, it would be in a better position to negotiate its legislation through the Council.

If you believe in democracy, you can’t think that would be unfair. With a bit over half the vote counted, Labor has won 41.6 per cent of votes for the Council while the Coalition parties won just 31.7 per cent. (The Greens have won 8.1 per cent, One Nation 7.5 and the Shooters just 2.2 per cent.)

Labor plans to cap campaign spending, require continuous disclosure of donations and lower the threshold for reporting them, and perform other fine-tuning of the electoral system. That’s all good, but its electoral reform policy does need to tackle the elephant in the room that ensures conservative control of the upper house. No doubt it will have to bend the one vote, one value principle a bit in deference to the outback, but even shifting the electorates to four in Perth and two in the country would be a significant improvement.

A further issue: how was a Liberal Democrat elected? Because of two flaws in the electoral laws, which were fixed last year federally with reforms (led by finance minister Mathias Cormann) that the Barnett government failed to copy into WA law.

First, in five of the six upper house regions, the Liberal Democrats polled between 0.7 and 1.3 per cent per cent. In all of them, they had drawn places in the bottom half of the ballot paper, well behind the Liberals. But in South Metropolitan, they were in the top half of the ballot paper, ahead of the Liberals – and surprise, surprise, they polled 4.3 per cent. One can fairly assume that, once again, a minority of voters mistook them for the Liberal Party. 

They then harvested the work of “preference whisperer” Glenn Druery, who was employed by five micro-parties to organise preference tickets to maximise their election chances. Once again, Druery did an excellent job, but it was only in South Metropolitan, and only thanks to that mistaken identity, that one of his parties actually won enough votes to reap the rewards.

Among other things, Senator Cormann’s reforms minimised the risk of mistaken identity by requiring that party logos appear with their names on the ballot paper. They also ended the manipulation of preferences by abolishing group voting tickets, and instead allowed voters to make their own decisions on preferences. On any fair judgement, these reforms improved the integrity of our voting system. McGowan should include them in his electoral reforms – not just to attract Liberal and One Nation support, but because they are the right thing to do.

And, as Macbeth put it so well, “If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well it were done quickly.”

Finally, the lessons for the Coalition at federal level should be obvious. You’ve seen your friend led in a tumbrel past the hooting crowds. You’ve seen how the guillotine works. That will be your fate soon enough if you continue to block, on ideological grounds, every reform that could actually fix the nation’s problems. That’s the job you were voted in to do, and you are not doing it.

On some key issues – fixing the budget, getting energy investment flowing – that will require bipartisanship, and this Labor opposition is not into bipartisanship either. But if the government goes about it the right way, Labor will conclude that it has no choice but to join up.

I have suggested before that repairing the budget might be framed as the central narrative. To quote myself, “It would give both parties room to evacuate their established policy positions and tackle issues that we need to tackle.” That includes housing affordability, climate change, energy security, rising health bills, our cruel treatment of refugees – and, of course, getting the budget back into balance.

All those issues can be tackled in ways that help close the budget deficit, significantly, without harming the economy. They could also free up resources for a national infrastructure program and to help struggling Australians instead of taking welfare benefits away from them.

The 2017 budget is an opportunity for the Turnbull government to reboot. It should reflect a new mentality: one focused on solving problems rather than trying to exploit them, one that recognises that the bulk of Australians are not on the far right of the political agenda but in the centre. •

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With the party now controlling a large chunk of the Senate crossbench, the Malcolm Turnbull who opined before last year’s election that “Pauline Hanson is not a welcome presence on the Australian political scene” has been replaced by a more nuanced, equivocal individual.

In desperation, Western Australia’s Liberal Party has entered a preference deal with One Nation for tomorrow’s election, which at time of writing is being roundly viewed – through the prism of the published polls, aided by Liberal leaks – as a disaster for the Libs. (An unexpected result at the ballot box would transform it into a work of genius and wonder, of course.)

Much is made of the supposed contrast between today’s convictionless Liberals and John Howard’s “insistence” back in the late 1990s and early 2000s that One Nation be put last on how-to-vote cards, but that involves generous employment of the airbrush.

People with long enough memories will recall prime minister Howard’s reluctance to disagree publicly even with Hanson’s pronouncements on Asian immigration and Asians in general. He was certainly not at the forefront of his party’s move to put One Nation at the bottom of the ticket, instead being dragged there reluctantly after other Liberals (including deputy leader Peter Costello) announced their intentions – and especially after the June 1998 Queensland election result saw many urban Liberal supporters vote Labor out of abhorrence of the state Coalition’s preference deal with the minor party. (Behind the scenes, as we subsequently learnt, Howard had sicked Tony Abbott onto Hanson.)

Back then, Howard was the subject of some ferocious editorials in Asian newspapers about his cosying up to Hanson. There’s none of that today, perhaps because Turnbull does put on the record his opposition to her utterances from time to time. And Hanson’s vitriol has shifted from “Asians” to “Muslims,” which is unlikely to greatly offend our largest trading partner, China, at least.

One Nation only contested one-in-ten lower house seats last year; the party’s primary votes for the Senate, 4.3 per cent nationally and 9.2 per cent in Hanson’s home state of Queensland, were lower than the levels it reached in 1998 and 2001. The party has a record four Senate spots today mostly because 2016 was a double-dissolution election (and partly thanks to the changed voting procedure for electing senators). Under a half-Senate election, only one One Nation senator would have been certain of election – exactly the number who won in 1998.

And you still need to go back to 1998 to find the party’s best polling, when it peaked at 13 per cent in Newspoll.

Much current analysis casts “Hanson supporters” as the equivalent of “Trump supporters” in America, but that needs breaking down. Donald Trump received 46 per cent of the national vote, which obviously dwarfs anything One Nation could hope to achieve. Importantly, he hijacked the Republican Party and rode it to power. As a minor party candidate or independent insurgent he would not have got within cooee of the Oval Office.

So when people refer to “Trump supporters” – Hillary Clinton’s disastrous “deplorables” formulation during the campaign is an example – they presumably have in mind the hardcore minority who adore him. The bulk of his vote came from people who backed him simply because he was the Republican candidate – including the majority who voted for someone else in the primaries – and many did so through clenched teeth. Trump was, after all, the most unpopular presidential candidate in polling history, and is currently the least-approved of newly installed presidents.

That’s why, despite the hype, most high-income voters supported Trump, and Clinton was the favourite among low-income ones. But the enduring Republican–Democrat divide was narrower than usual, thanks in particular to those members of the much-hyped “white working class” who turned out in droves and swung big to the Republicans.

It’s this small minority of the voting public that can best be compared with One Nation supporters.

Fairfax columnist Peter FitzSimons recently began an article by quoting “a respected political operative” who had assured him late last year that “Pauline Hanson will be prime minister within three years.” If this unnamed quotee truly is an “operative,” you have to pity the party for whom he or she operates. (“Respected” – let’s not even go there.)

A Hanson prime ministership could only conceivably come about if she, like Trump, was first installed as leader of a major party, which is all but impossible.

This week Hanson told Channel 7 she expected One Nation to win three seats in Western Australia’s Legislative Council (fair enough) and two in the Legislative Assembly (ludicrous). High expectations are fine for sustaining campaign oxygen, but eventually, when the votes are in, there must be a reckoning.

Recriminations flowing from a poorer-than-anticipated One Nation showing could be one of the highlights of Sunday’s post-mortem. •

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But some things are eerily familiar to the east-coast-dweller’s eye, and none more so than the politics of the Roe 8 freight link. The parallels between that imbroglio and Victoria’s infamous East West Link saga, for instance, are too many to count. An enormously controversial inner-city toll road provoking rolling protests, “direct action” and court challenges; contracts signed with an election only months away, despite declarations by the opposition that they won’t go ahead with the project; sweaty state Labor leaders telling the press pack they will rip up said contracts if they win office (which, when they made those pledges, looked entirely likely); tussles with the feds over redirecting Commonwealth dollars promised to the projects… the more one looks, the uncannier things get. Sydney’s WestConnex is not far below on the déjà vu spectrum, but Roe 8 and East West are so incredibly alike it’s worth asking what exactly is going on here.

Well, what indeed? Why are these inner-city road projects crashing into elections again and again, and becoming the subject of messy politicking and brinkmanship? One common denominator is the Abbott government. Eager to go down in history as “the infrastructure prime minister,” Abbott pumped billions into a score of inner-city road projects within months of winning government. At the same time, he made a point of shunning public transport projects, even those deemed a higher priority by Infrastructure Australia, the independent umpire.

This change in Commonwealth priorities saw a bunch of projects leap the funding queue, despite many having not been fully planned or costed. With the states desperately reliant on Canberra to get any project rolling, all they could do was try to make up the time and get sods turned by the next election. According to this account, what we saw in Victoria and are seeing now in Western Australia is really an aftershock of Abbott’s brief but consequential time in the Lodge.

It’s a temptingly simple explanation, but it assumes some pretty debatable points, including the idea that power has become so centralised in Canberra, and especially the prime minister’s office, that whoever sits in the PM’s chair essentially dictates what happens at every level of government. Put a roads man in the chair and we get a massive realignment of policy and resources to favour roads; switch to an avid rail fan and we get a recalibration with some money shifting back to public transport. The PM says jump and the entire Australian political system asks how high.

In reality, these controversial schemes are the product of the enormous mess of bureaucracy and lobby groups, political imperatives and economic limitations that get between any leader and the rolling-out of a policy. It takes a lot of momentum and collaboration to turn a leader’s idea into reality, and often a lot changes in the process. Indeed, navigating a policy or a project through this maze of interests and institutions, players and processes can be so torturous and require such political dexterity that they often simply never make it through to the other side.

This seems to be the fate of more and more policy initiatives these days, whether it’s greyhounds in New South Wales, abortion law reform in Queensland, or pokies, negative gearing or carbon pricing in Canberra. Mobilising opposition to a project has never been easier, thanks to social media, and the fragmentation of the two-party system in recent decades has multiplied the number of fronts on which a project can be attacked. It has probably never been harder to pitch a project and get it through to the ribbon-cutting.

If that is indeed the underlying problem with all these infrastructure fiascos, then we’ve been thinking all wrong about infrastructure reform for the past ten years. Since Kevin Rudd took over the leadership of the Labor Party in the lead-up to the 2007 election, the big push has been to depoliticise infrastructure, to get it away from politicians and into the hands of independent experts. Not only has that push failed utterly – politicians have bypassed the new processes and authorities set up to make infrastructure non-political – but the thinking behind it is profoundly mistaken about the nature of infrastructure.

Infrastructure is inherently political. It involves the allocation of public resources (even when private capital features heavily) and appropriates space in the name of the common good. And once projects are announced, they necessarily have to run a political gauntlet to make it to completion. A thumbs-up from the brains trust at Infrastructure Australia, or one of the state-level authorities, will never change the fact that projects require political momentum to get up. Good politics – careful building of support, cobbling together coalitions, bringing together stakeholders and so on – is the foundation for good infrastructure. Until we accept that, expect to see more East West Links and Roe 8s on the horizon. •

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Baird’s 2015 election campaign in New South Wales featured a pledge to lease 49 per cent of the state’s electricity transmission and distribution network to a private operator for ninety-nine years. Applauded by many commentators for his honesty and courage, the NSW premier swept back to power and set about fulfilling that promise.

You won’t be surprised to hear that the full story isn’t quite as simple, not even in New South Wales. There have been times when electricity privatisation has proved to be pure political poison in that state. In 1997, premier Bob Carr and treasurer Michael Egan were forced to abandon plans for a power sell-off after a divisive clash with the extra-parliamentary Labor Party. They unblushingly turned around and used opposition to the Liberal Party’s electricity privatisation policy to help win the 1999 election. Carr’s successor, Morris Iemma, initiated a push that would finally privatise the state’s generators and retail electricity businesses, but he destroyed his premiership and weakened the government in the process.

It’s true that Barry O’Farrell, who led the Coalition to a massive victory in 2011, privatised major assets such as ports without the same level of controversy. But his approach was incremental and non-ideological, and his wariness of further electricity privatisation ruled it out during the government’s first term.

Baird, who succeeded O’Farrell in 2014, was a different type of politician. In some ways he was not a politician at all, rather a reformer who saw politics as a slightly distasteful means to a worthy end. A true believer in small government and market forces, he was convinced that privatisation was in the state’s long-term interest and was determined to pursue it regardless of the political cost. He openly acknowledged that it could end his career – and, indeed, polling repeatedly showed that the majority of voters opposed selling off electricity assets.

But Baird had some things going for him. His government was seeking re-election for the first time and was relatively fresh and popular, particularly compared to a Labor Party still tainted by the cloud of corruption surrounding former minister Eddie Obeid. Baird himself was travelling extremely well in the polls. The gamble paid off, and the government was returned – but at a cost. It lost seventeen seats and Labor more than doubled its numbers from fourteen to thirty-four. If Baird hadn’t run on privatisation, the opposition might not now be in with a chance at the 2019 poll. Electricity privatisation didn’t throw Baird a lifeline; he hauled it aboard against the tide.

In contrast, Barnett is leading an unpopular government and must combat the time-for-change factor. Privatisation is guaranteed to make powerful enemies, especially in the unions, and few electoral friends. (A statewide ReachTel poll last week found that 58.7 per cent of respondents either disagreed or strongly disagreed with the sell-off plan.) It might allow Barnett to pork-barrel without facing the old cry of “Where’s the money coming from?” but voters tend to be increasingly cynical about politicians’ promises. Some will think that if they vote against the government, Labor will deliver the goodies anyway. And arguing that the sale proceeds are needed to reduce major debt also raises the inevitable response: who got us into this mess in the first place?

The swing of the electoral pendulum is not inevitable, and long-term governments can renew themselves. One way of doing this is by bringing in a new leader with fresh appeal. The WA Liberals have obviously rejected this option. Another method is via policy rejuvenation; by emphasising increasingly discredited free-market policies, the government has rejected this one too.

All over the world, the tide has turned against the Reagan–Thatcher policies of the 1980s. In the wake of Donald Trump’s presidency, some US conservatives have undertaken the quixotic task of trying to create a philosophical backdrop to the on-stage antics. According to reporter Kelefa Sanneh, in an article in the New Yorker, one advocate of “Trumpism” hassaid that he was frustrated by the Republican Party’s “devotion to laissez-faire economics (or, in his description, ‘free market uber alles’) which left Republican politicians ill-prepared to address rising inequality.” Regulatory interventions can be defensible not only “on narrowly economic grounds but as expressions of a country’s determination to preserve its own ways of life,” according to this long-time conservative, “and as evidence of the fundamental principle that the citizenry has the right to ignore economic experts, especially when their track records are dubious.”

In Australia, it is the federal opposition under Bill Shorten, rather than the Coalition, that’s benefiting from this tendency by espousing an economic populist approach that even 1930s NSW Labor demagogue Jack Lang wouldn’t be ashamed to propound.

In his policy speech on 19 February, WA opposition leader Mark McGowan showed that he has picked up on the trend. “We will keep Western Power in public hands,” he promised. “We will do so to keep jobs in WA. To keep an essential revenue stream for our government. To stop it from falling into foreign ownership. To keep service standards up. And to keep power bills down for WA families. WA is in desperate need of a fresh approach. Of new leadership.”

Politics in the twenty-first century is increasingly unpredictable and Barnett may yet win a third term. Nonetheless, the conservative parties in Australia need to realise that free trade, market-liberal economics and small government in an unadulterated form have had their day. The gains have been great but the tanks squashed a lot of innocent bystanders. •

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One variable is the unpredictability of campaigning. A word out of place or unexpected economic news – good or bad – could well have a significant impact on the political pendulum. But two other factors are combining to make it tough for Liberal Colin Barnett to become the first WA premier to achieve a third consecutive victory since four-year terms were introduced in 1989.

The first is the “It’s time” factor. Barnett has been premier since September 2008, making him the state’s fifth-longest-serving leader. He has seen five prime ministers come, and four prime ministers go. He trails Labor leader Mark McGowan in the “preferred premier” polls and shares with many leaders the problem of being perceived as “arrogant.” Certainly he has no claims to be populist, but his supporters see him as a strong leader.

The reality is that, aged sixty-six years, he would have preferred to hand over the leadership twelve months ago. But by then the obvious successors had disappeared. Christian Porter, who had served as treasurer and attorney-general, jumped ship into the federal arena and is now social services minister. The accident-prone Troy Buswell, another treasurer, committed one indiscretion too many and quit politics. Barnett was left with no obvious heir.

The second factor is the impact of WA’s roller-coaster economy on state finances. Barnett, a trained economist, initially boasted that he would never preside over a budget deficit. That was back in the days of billion-dollar surpluses. This year the budget deficit is tipped to be north of $3 billion, with state debt pushing beyond $30 billion. Debt was just over one-tenth of that amount when he took over in 2008.

In fairness to the premier, his term has coincided with a slump in royalty revenue following the crash in world prices for resources, as well as the collapse in the state’s returns from the goods and services tax. The latter will cost Western Australia about $3.5 billion this year compared to the amount it would receive if the GST pool were redistributed on a population basis. Regardless of the merits of the Commonwealth Grants Commission’s formula for spreading GST proceeds, that amount would leave a big hole in any budget.

By comparison, Mark McGowan has been a steady hand on the Labor tiller since gaining the leadership in January 2012. He was a minister in the last Labor government and oversaw the approval of Barrow Island as the base for the massive Gorgon LNG project, as well as the successful introduction of small wine bars in the state.

A naval lawyer before entering politics, the forty-nine-year-old McGowan survived an audacious challenge to his leadership from former foreign affairs minister Stephen Smith early last year. Although he isn’t in parliament, Smith offered himself as an alternative leader with the vision to take the party into government. Put to the test, his supporters vanished and the challenge evaporated, but not before McGowan’s leadership got up a fresh head of steam.

With unemployment nudging 7 per cent – the highest level for years – the economy, the state’s finances and jobs are key election issues. “An economy in transition” has been the government’s mantra for the past twelve months as it seeks to find new employment opportunities. Barnett has taken over the tourism portfolio and promoted the potential for more jobs throughout the state.

Labor has produced a comprehensive jobs policy that also includes a boost for tourism. But this comes with a questionable pledge to revive the manufacturing sector, including a promise to restore the state’s rail-car industry to provide rolling stock for a planned $2 billion–plus expansion of the suburban rail system.

The government damned the policy – “a nice idea” – with faint praise, adding that a major export market would be needed to guarantee efficiencies. McGowan responded by stating that Western Australia buys carriages made in Victoria and Queensland, and if those states can do it then so can Western Australia.

Privatisation is also shaping as a key issue. The Liberals are keen to push through the sale of several publicly owned assets, including a partial privatisation of Western Power – the poles and wires – estimated to raise a potential $11 billion. The Liberals would use the bulk of this money to retire debt and the rest for infrastructure. The TAB is also likely to go on the market if the Liberals have their way.

An issue infuriating environmentalists is the Perth Freight Link, designed to improve the connection of the Roe Highway to the port of Fremantle. Strong protests have been aroused by the fact that, when complete, it will run through part of a wetlands region.

National Party leader Brendon Grylls, meanwhile, has attracted the ire of mining giants Rio Tinto and BHP Billiton over his plan to increase the charge for extracting iron ore from 25c per tonne, which was set in the 1960s, to $5. He says the revenue would go a long way to solving the government’s budget problems. But he has received no support from the other parties, and the mining lobby has unleashed a ferocious $2 million advertising campaign claiming that the policy, if implemented, would make the industry less competitive and cost thousands of jobs.

Grylls is fighting for his political life in the seat of Pilbara, in the heart of iron ore country. But he is also aiming to head off the assault on the regional vote by One Nation, which polled 55,000 of the state’s Senate votes last year without really trying. Now the party is planning a major assault in the state poll, and support – especially in regional areas – is growing.

That’s why the Liberals have controversially agreed to preference One Nation ahead of the Nationals candidates in three non-metropolitan upper house regions, in return for One Nation preferences in the Legislative Assembly. That’s in stark contrast to the 2001 election, when the Liberals placed One Nation candidates last. (One Nation reciprocated by placing most sitting members last, and Labor won.)

The Liberals-One Nation preference deal has drawn strong criticism, especially from Labor and the Greens. But growing support for One Nation could prove to be the surprise packet when the votes are counted. And if the Liberals can get enough One Nation preferences to get them over the line, its criticism they'd be happy to wear.

Labor must win ten seats this time, with a uniform swing of 10 per cent, to gain power. It’s a tall order, but in a dynamic political climate, anything is possible. •

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The last election, way back in March 2013, saw Labor’s worst result in decades. From that statewide two-party-preferred vote of just 42.7 per cent, the only way is up. Surveys consistently have Labor ahead, most recently on around 52 to the government’s 48. Plotting that swing on the electoral pendulum (assuming it’s a uniform swing, or more precisely a net uniform swing) produces a touch-and-go result.

If Liberal premier Colin Barnett survives, it will be with the support of the Nationals. With the surprise 2008 change of government, Western Australia became the first state or territory to breach the wall-to-wall dominance Labor had at the time, and as a vocal and popular opponent of the Rudd and Gillard government’s mining tax and carbon price, Barnett became an inspiration to Coalition supporters across the nation.

But longevity in office, a deflated mining boom, a sputtering economy, rising unemployment and – an under-appreciated factor – the 2013 change in federal government have all taken their toll. The once-reluctant leader survived a leadership spill four months ago and now limps to his attempted second re-election. Betting markets – not the great predictors they’re sometimes hyped to be, but efficient distillers of general expectations – give him a 25 per cent chance of surviving.

On the other side, things haven’t all been plain sailing either. Last March, former foreign affairs minister Stephen Smith launched a bizarre, very public attempt to ambush McGowan. Embarrassing to watch, it collapsed almost before it had begun. Smith’s Campbell Newman–like plan, apparently, was to lead the opposition from outside parliament until election day.

If the high-profile former member for the federal seat of Perth was counting on the standard two-stage demolition job, that’s been looking less likely by the day. What kept McGowan in place, approaching five years in the job, was a series of healthy public opinion polls. Not only has Labor remained ahead on two-party-preferred voting intentions, but first-preference support, at least in the second half of last year, has also been solid, and McGowan leads Barnett in approval ratings and preferred premier.

This data squashed the standard Labor backroom leader-toppling script: “Yes, we’re ahead after preferences, but primary support is too low, mate, and those personal ratings show we can’t win under [insert name of leader].”

So, barring the unexpected (which can’t be ruled out – a week is a long time and all that), the immaculate Smith coiffure will probably be seen once again on the ABC commentary panel rather than finalising a speech to the party faithful. There, he will explain (as he always does) that the seat-by-seat results “will come down to incumbency”: electorates with sitting Coalition MPs will be more likely to hold out against the swing than others.

As usual, he will be half-right, or correct but only as far as his argument goes. It is more accurate to say that changes in incumbency since the last election will make the difference.

On average, electorates with MPs retiring in 2017 (and taking their personal vote with them) will perform relatively poorly for their party. Conversely, those with Liberal members elected at the 2013 election will do comparatively well on average, thanks to the generation of new personal votes (aka the “sophomore surge”).

This will be complicated by the redistribution undertaken during this term. To give a sense of its impact, folks like the ABC’s Antony Green estimate post-redistribution margins based on votes at the last state election in 2013. (You can see Antony’s pendulum on his ABC blog.) When those 2013 results include personal votes for a sitting MP who now represents another seat (because a portion of the electorate has been cut away), the numbers are also skewed somewhat.

For these and other reasons, pendulums should never be read as indicating the order in which seats will fall. On the Liberal side of the pendulum, seats taken from Labor last time (indicated by a “+”) should in total swing back to Labor by a smaller amount than the rest of the state. And those seats, unsurprisingly, are mostly marginal. Bunbury and Dawesville (both in the 12 to 13 margin range), and any further seats vacated by Liberal retirements before 17 March should collectively swing big to the opposition.

Western Australia is a conservative state. It has not returned a federal Labor two-party-preferred majority in thirty years. It put in the Coalition’s highest vote of any state at last year’s federal election. During last decade’s state/territory Labor heyday, WA Labor’s performance was the most modest.

As well, I am one of the minuscule minority of election watchers who believe that, for a given set of opinion poll voting intentions, it’s better for a party leader to register low personal ratings than high ones. High ratings artificially inflate pre-election voting-intention figures. So, in my view, those numbers that have kept McGowan in place bode poorly for the sustainability of Labor support through to 17 March.

The wild card will be Pauline Hanson’s One Nation, which is polling as much as 10 per cent. While it’s unlikely to take any lower house seats, the party’s preference recommendations may well decide the overall outcome. Past analysis strongly suggests that a fair swag of One Nation voters follow how-to-vote cards. (Major-party supporters share this characteristic, Greens ones much less so.)

Back in 2001, Labor scraped into office under Geoff Gallop because One Nation preferenced against all sitting major party MPs, almost two-thirds of whom were in the Coalition.

In 2016, the difference between One Nation preferencing Labor and preferencing the Coalition in a seat where the minor party attracts 10 per cent support will probably amount to 1 or 2 per cent – and perhaps as much as 3 per cent – of the two-party-preferred vote. It is not yet known how many Legislative Assembly electorates the party will stand in.

Hanson’s anti-immigrant rhetoric hasn’t moderated since her first stint, but her ire has largely shifted from Asians to Muslims. This might make the prospect of preference-swapping less problematic for the WA Liberals, particularly given the state’s important relationship with China – and with India under the current government.

One thing is for sure: both sides of politics will be sweating on One Nation’s how-to-vote cards. •

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No one could control the timing. But the unexpected death of the Liberal incumbent, Don Randall, has provided the prime minister with a challenge he doesn’t need at this stage, and given opposition leader Bill Shorten an opportunity he didn’t expect. The result has the potential to shape Australia’s political landscape for the twelve months up to the likely date of the next federal election.

On paper, Canning, which takes in Perth’s outer southeastern suburbs and extends south through rural areas to Mandurah, is a safe Liberal seat. Randall’s margin at the 2013 election was 11.8 per cent. But in the by-election context, that margin is deceiving, for three reasons.

The first is that federal Labor was seriously unpopular in Western Australia at the time. The state was still smarting over the hasty introduction of the mining tax, which was cleverly promoted by the Liberals as an attack on Western Australians and their economy. The resource sector donated generously to the Liberal campaign.

Federal Labor was so on the nose, in fact, that its leaders had been told to stay away from the WA state election earlier in 2013. They did, but Liberal premier Colin Barnett’s government was still returned with a strong majority.

The second factor relates to Don Randall. A Liberal backbench maverick, he had to be pulled into line several times for going “too far” on various issues. This didn’t do him any harm among his constituents, though. And when he was a leading light in the unsuccessful party-room spill motion in February on Tony Abbott’s leadership, the local member’s star shone brightly in Canning.

The prime minister described the challenge as a “near death” experience, and promised to lift his game. He did. But questions about his leadership have returned, and they will partly be answered by the Canning result.

The third factor is that Labor effectively gave up on the seat last time. Light on for campaign funds, and effectively on the nose with voters, the party’s effort was perfunctory at best.

Add in the fact that almost 10,000 new voters have enrolled in Canning since 2013, and the seat looks like a potential can of worms for both the major parties, though the Liberals have most to lose. The seat has changed hands a number of times over the past thirty years. But Randall, having won it in 2001 from Labor’s Jane Gerick, saw off a strong challenge from former state Labor minister Alannah MacTiernan (now the federal member for Perth) in 2010, and consolidated strongly three years later.

Not surprisingly, both major parties have opted for strong candidates. No party hacks were given a look-in here. The Liberals were first out of the blocks, endorsing a thirty-two-year-old SAS captain, Andrew Hastie, ahead of six challengers. Labor followed quickly, anointing lawyer Matthew Keogh, who then resigned as president of the WA Law Society. Keogh was selected unopposed after two publicly announced rivals withdrew.

Despite the recent publicity given to the lack of female representation in parliament, both sides chose well-qualified men, neither of whom has been living in the electorate. Both in fact come from the inner suburbs, although Hastie, who quit the SAS when endorsed, promptly said he would move to Canning.

Keogh was not to be outdone. When Bill Shorten flew to Perth the day after parliament adjourned, they met for a media event at morning tea at the candidate’s parents’ house in Kelmscott. In the electorate, of course.

So what are the issues? This is where it gets a bit tricky for the parties. Don’t expect the electors of Canning to light up on matters such as same-sex marriage. In fact the only mention the latter might get is from Tony Abbott, along the lines of “under Labor the politicians will decide, under the Coalition you (the voters) will decide.”

The early signs are that Canning will be fought on bread-and-butter issues. Both sides have stressed the significance of jobs. A high proportion of voters are, or have been, fly in, fly out workers in the resources sector. It’s well documented that the steam has come out of the construction phase of many projects in Western Australia’s north. Many FIFOs have either been sacked or had their hours – and pay – cut. Confidence has been hit. The Liberals have also called for a “robust law and order approach” to drug related issues, especially linked with the use of ice.

Expectations are high that the PM will unveil a few “sweeteners” on the jobs front. He was expected to announce more defence work for the shipbuilding company Austal during a visit to its Henderson site early in the campaign. There was plenty of praise, but no contracts.

More government work would go down a treat in Canning. Several WA Liberals, including senator Linda Reynolds, have been pushing the naval shipbuilding barrow. It would be a surprise if Abbott ignored it. Primary producers are prominent in other areas, including agriculture, and the mining of gold at Boddington and bauxite in the Darling Range.

An issue likely to work in Labor’s favour is the standing of Colin Barnett’s Coalition government, which has governed the state since 2008. Initially, Western Australia’s economy was booming, with the nation’s tightest job market and strong state budget surpluses. But they’ve all gone, along with the coveted AAA credit rating.

Although Barnett governs with a healthy majority, the most recent Newspoll on state support had Labor ahead in two-party-preferred terms, 52 to 48 per cent, a big shift from the 57–43 Liberal lead at the last election. Labor leader Mark McGowan is seen as the “better premier” by 44 per cent of respondents, while 38 per cent prefer Barnett, and Canning is already bookended by the Labor-held state seats of Armadale, in the north, and Mandurah, in the south.

Critics say the by-election is a referendum on Tony Abbott’s leadership. It certainly is a major test, and one he can’t afford to fail. He appeared with Andrew Hastie early in the campaign, but foreign affairs minister Julie Bishop is tipped to do the lion’s share of the Liberal campaigning, based on her personal standing in the west.

Bill Shorten occupies Paul Keating’s favourite position – “one out, one back” – which he borrowed from horseracing. He’s been presented with the “sit” this time: pursue the issues Labor thinks will resonate with the voters of Canning and, at the same time, hope that Tony Abbott stumbles. The high-profile Alannah MacTiernan, whose state seat was part of Canning, is expected to be heavily involved in Labor’s campaign.

The last federal by-election in Western Australia held in similar circumstances was in Fremantle in 1945 following the death of wartime prime minister John Curtin. Labor retained the seat with Kim Beazley senior as the new member.

Newspoll’s recent Canning survey suggested an early swing in voting intentions to Labor of 10 per cent – enticingly short of Randall’s 2013 margin. That effectively places the 19 September poll result on a knife edge.  

And the same could be said for Tony Abbott’s leadership. Undoubtedly there will be a significant anti-government swing, as the Liberal vote comes down from the 2013 high. It could produce another near-death experience or – in political terms – worse, for the prime minister. •

The post Another near death experience for Tony Abbott, or worse? appeared first on Inside Story.

Moreover, the decision comes as the WA budget is being clobbered by plunging iron ore prices. That could cost it $3 billion of revenue in the year ahead, a 10 per cent drop in its entire income. Not surprisingly, Western Australia wants to change the way the grants are calculated.

But hold your tears. As we will see, there are good reasons for the apparent injustice.

First, the rule Western Australia wants to change is the one that’s given it more than $7 billion over the past four years that would have gone to the other states if the GST money had been distributed in the way it now urges.

Second, the system it wants to overthrow – in which the Commonwealth Grants Commission proposes how federal money should be split among the states, based on their relative needs – has subsidised Western Australia by tens of billions of dollars (in today’s money) over the decades, and that money has come from the taxpayers of New South Wales and Victoria.

Third, Western Australia’s actions since 2011 suggest that once it saw that the system would begin working against its interests, it set about escalating the stakes to the point where the distribution of grants would seem manifestly unfair and the system would be scrapped.

Federal treasurer Joe Hockey is sympathetic to Western Australia’s plight. At a media conference last Thursday after meeting state treasurers, he said the state had been hit by “a perfect storm” – a poor GST deal combined with a plunge in iron ore royalties. While keeping his options open and weighing up the pros and cons of overruling the Grants Commission, Hockey’s closing words showed which way he was leaning:

Frankly, the fundamental question is: does it really help the Federation for the first time to have a state receiving 30 cents in the dollar from the GST that is contributed by its citizens?… It might be next year 20 cents, it might be less, but at what point do you say well, this is just a little bit unfair, particularly given what they are going through with their own royalty dropoff in iron ore?

Hockey is certainly right about the perfect storm. In 2013–14, iron ore royalties gave the WA government $5.3 billion, roughly 20 per cent of its revenue. Premier Colin Barnett and his ministers assumed the iron ore price would remain at about A$140 per tonne, and set about merrily spending money in all directions.

They were not the only ones who got it wrong. The Reserve Bank, federal Treasury and the mining companies all assumed that while iron ore prices had gone up in the lift they would, at worst, come down by the stairs.

Now the spot price has plunged to US$47 (a bit over A$60) a tonne. If it stays there, instead of raking in $6 billion in iron ore royalties next year, as it had anticipated, Western Australia will get about $3 billion at best. It has been prodigal in its assumptions and its spending. Now winter has come; the state government is out of money and so, like the grasshopper in Aesop’s fable, it is asking its neighbours, the ants, to give it some of theirs.

The problem is that the distribution of the GST revenues is a zero-sum game. To change the rules to give more money to one state means taking that money from other states. Hockey is entitled by law to overrule the Grants Commission’s judgement in this way, but no government has done so since 1981.

Hockey refuses to discuss his options publicly. But one change being considered is simply to maintain each state’s share of the GST at current levels. That would give Western Australia an extra $494 million in 2015–16, New South Wales an extra $517 million, the Australian Capital Territory an extra $129 million, and the Northern Territory an extra $56 million. The losers would be Queensland ($556 million), South Australia ($284 million), Tasmania ($225 million) and Victoria ($131 million).

Cynics among you might have noticed that, apart from the ACT, the prospective winners under this plan are all Coalition-run states. And apart from Tasmania, the prospective losers are all Labor-run states. A federal treasurer could always find something extra for Tasmania, and take something from the ACT, if he were so inclined.

But the politics of changing the Grants Commission’s recommendations are fraught: above all, because, as Hockey acknowledged, the commission and the other states have made a strong case for why Western Australia should not be given any more than recommended.

Essentially, the commission’s job is to propose how the $57.2 billion the GST is forecast to raise in 2015–16 should be split between the states and territories in a way that ensures each government has the same capacity to provide services to its citizens, whether it does so or not. To this end, the commission compares each government’s spending, cost structure and revenue base in minute detail, making thousands of estimates, then works out what each state needs from the GST to give it the same capacity as the rest.

Until recently, Western Australia had won heavily from this process for seventy years. It was never heard to complain how unfair it was that New South Wales and Victoria should have to subsidise it.

But then came the mining boom. Global iron ore prices doubled, trebled, quadrupled, then quintupled. The state’s iron ore royalties had already soared, from $305 million in 2003–04 to a forecast $2.7 billion in 2010–11, when premier Colin Barnett and then treasurer Christian Porter decided to bump them even higher.

One of the dumb things about Labor’s mining tax was that it reimbursed companies for the royalties they paid the states. That meant, in effect, that if a state raised the royalty rate, the Commonwealth, not the mining companies, paid the bill.

Barnett and Porter seized their chance. They abruptly ended the royalty concessions previously given to BHP and Rio, and doubled the royalty on iron ore “fines” (iron ore in powder form) to the same rate as on lumps of ore. In the four years to 2013–14, iron ore royalties almost trebled and the WA government enjoyed by far the highest per capita revenues in Australia.

Isn’t that what the Grants Commission is meant to even out? Yes, that is exactly what it is doing. The problem is that it bases its findings on an average of its estimates of each state’s relative needs over the past three years. For 2015–16, this means Western Australia’s entitlement is based on its relative needs in 2011–12, 2012–13 and 2013–14.

Barnett and Porter knew that, in effect, the money they raised from higher royalty rates would be theirs only for a few years, and then the Grants Commission would redistribute it away to the other states. The soaring iron ore prices meant that, even with no change in royalty rates, Western Australia’s revenues would be by far the highest of any state. Instead of receiving extra money from New South Wales and Victorian taxpayers, as in the past, it would replace them as the biggest donor state. Had iron ore prices remained in the stratosphere, as most forecast, its royalties would end up being shared with all the other states.

Instead of accepting that, they decided to raise the royalties much higher still, hoping to force a change to that system so they could keep most of the money. When they lifted the royalties in early 2011, Porter estimated that by 2014–15 Western Australia would get only 33 per cent of its per capita share of the GST revenue (in fact, it got 38 per cent). He knew something like this would be the outcome.

“So why did WA do it?” I wrote in the Age at the time. “I suspect it’s a deliberate strategy to change the Grants Commission formulas, by raising the stakes so high that they become politically unworkable.”

I was not alone in that view, and time has confirmed it. When Mike Baird as NSW treasurer and premier tried to get the states to agree to lower the exemption limit for online GST transactions – which Hockey estimates could yield them “billions” in extra revenue – Western Australia refused. It didn’t want to make the revenue cake bigger. It just wanted a bigger share of the cake as it is.

But isn’t it entitled to that bigger share? After all, as Joe Hockey says, 30 cents in the dollar is not much to get back, and its share next year could be even less.

No, says the Grants Commission in its report, with considerable force: “The Commission estimates that over the mining boom, prior to the reduction in its iron ore royalty revenues in 2014–15, Western Australia received around $7 billion additional GST revenue than it would have if fully contemporaneous assessments had been in place.”

The commission specifically warned against taking iron ore royalties out of the equation by which GST entitlements are assessed, saying that to do so “risks the coherence of the system as a whole.”

We can sympathise with current WA treasurer Mike Nahan, who has inherited his predecessors’ mistakes. But in the end, Hockey should tell Western Australia it has to deal with its own problems, as Victoria did in the 1990–91 recession.

It will have to cut some programs, put off some infrastructure works, raise some taxes and run a bigger deficit. Worse things have happened. And eventually, the Grants Commission formulas will rescue it, as they have done in the past. •

The post The true story of Western Australia and the GST appeared first on Inside Story.

As the sun rises, the aroma of wood smoke and frying bacon mingles with the subtle scent of the eucalyptus and melaleuca. Soon the noise of axe biting into wood joins the chatter of the miners, the thumping of the buck rabbits. This is a landscape already bearing the imprint of colonisation but about to undergo a more visibly dramatic transformation, as government policy and popular aspirations together mobilise an army of settlers to eat away at the “wilderness.”

Wheatbelt farms established in the twentieth century were to provide an independent living for hardworking families and grain for hungry millions, as well as wealth and respect for the state and its denizens. From around 70,000 acres in 1890, the area under crop in Western Australia had exploded to almost five million acres by 1930.

Such reckless occupation left wheatbelt families vulnerable – to prices that fell and rain that failed, to salt and locusts and boredom. The earth that remained when the bushland was consumed was also left vulnerable – to salt, erosion and abandonment. No amount of optimism, investment or technology would enable the vision of bountiful fields dotted with smiling homesteads and bustling villages to be realised in a low-nutrient environment, so far from large markets: only large-scale industrialised farming would make the wheatbelt a viable economic proposition.

After the devastation of the droughts of the 1930s, the intensification of industrial farming increased. The approach worked for a while, but its success is always provisional in these lands. Now, the industrial paradigm is facing a bleak future. Utterly dependent on fossil fuels and agrochemical inputs to grow crops and conserve the soil, while demanding ever greater economies of scale that whittle away at its social sustainability, it is not clear that the industrialised wheatbelt will survive the next century as a social and economic unit. Wheatbelt communities are trying to develop ways of living on the land that respect its fragility and work with its strengths, though they are doing so at a time when the region no longer plays a central role in the state’s imagined future, and political support has ebbed.

Today, though home to only around 135,000 people, the Western Australian wheatbelt is visible from space. Lying across the southwest corner of the continent, the light beige-green farmland eats into dark green forest to the west and blush-brown shrubland to the northeast. White chains of salt lakes and saline watercourses run like stretch marks across the lumpy and freckled skin of this old land. In one section, the division to the east is marked by a long, straight line, as if the wheatbelt had been cut out with a knife rather than nibbled away. Here, where it follows the State Barrier Fence of Western Australia (previously the “No. 1 Rabbit Proof Fence”), the line extends strikingly into the atmosphere: clouds form over the native vegetation on one side, while the sun beats down from clear skies over wheatfields on the other. Less rain now falls on the cleared land west of the fence. Consuming the bushland has had significant local climatic effects, as well as contributing to the global climate change that is increasing frosts and reducing rainfall across the region.

In 2012, the statistical region that encompasses most of the wheatbelt was home to more vehicles than people and more men than women. The population density was two-thirds of a person per square kilometre, about the same as the Yamal–Nenets Autonomous Area in the Arctic zone of western Siberia.

Yet in 2012–13, just under half of Australia’s total cereal exports came from here, including 8.5 million tonnes of wheat, most of which was sent to Indonesia, South Korea, Japan, Iraq and Iran. Western Australia is the principal source of wheat for Japanese and Korean udon noodles. On average, the annual wheat crop produced by the region is around the same as that of Italy and accounts for about 1 per cent of total global wheat production. The economic significance of wheat to Western Australia has greatly surpassed its contribution to two ideals: populating the land and world nutrition.

Just after the commencement of the rush to the Eastern Goldfields, when Western Australia was still a net importer of wheat, the West Australian Settler’s Guide and Farmer’s Handbook conveyed a clear sense of optimism about the colony’s potential: “Western Australia may be likened to a huge pie, the crust of which has only, as yet, been nibbled around the edges… We want Jack Horners here to pull out the plums, and plums there are undoubtedly for men of all avocations.” One of the most desirable commodities to be extracted from the pie was wheat – essential to the staff of life, it commanded good prices on international markets. The most desirable Jack Horners were white and of limited means: men who would not run large pastoral estates or speculate on the land, but occupy and transform it. Before the first world war, such “bona fide” settlers were enticed to become wheat farmers with cheap land, railways, credit and subsidised conditional immigration. As the gold industry began employing fewer men, the government saw the project of transforming empty wilderness into wheat farms as a solution to the state’s growing unemployment problem; later, it would be seen as a means to reward – and disperse – returned soldiers.

The region was never really an “empty” wilderness. For generations, it had been managed by Aboriginal people to provide food and other necessities. They ate from the landscape they shaped – through use of fire – without consuming it whole. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the region’s Aboriginal people were mostly living in the bush as they had for generations. They knew how to use the land to sustain themselves.

As the government-subsidised settlement continued, some Aboriginal families found employment on pastoral stations and combined station work with traditional economic and cultural activities. While the pastoral economy could accommodate many traditional Aboriginal practices, those opportunities began to evaporate as land was cleared, fenced and worked by settler families. Some were able to make a living within the new agricultural economy – clearing, fencing, pulling poison, or taking on seeding and harvesting work – and others hunted kangaroos or trapped possum for skins, or collected mallet bark for tanning. Some worked on the construction of the roads and railways that would extend their dispossession, while a few became farmers.

By the 1920s many were sent, or drawn through lack of alternatives, to reserves, missions or “native settlements” – spartan, unsympathetic institutions that further marginalised them, while maintaining them as cheap labour for the white landholders who had displaced them. In spite of the privations, many Aboriginal families sustained their amicable relationships with white settlers. They also preserved some knowledge of traditional culture and language. Increasingly, however, the experience was one of segregation and pauperisation, intensifying as the bushland that had been their succour for so long was cleared and much of the remainder, deprived of its traditional managers, became wilderness.

Clearing was hard work, but it had to be accomplished rapidly to satisfy conditional purchase requirements. Trees were ringbarked or felled, shrubs flattened with horse-drawn rollers. The lot was then burned in summer, ready for seeding in autumn. The bushland was devoured voraciously: in the eleven years from 1903 to 1914, the state’s wheat acreage increased more than tenfold to 1.4 million acres. Yet it was felt that more could be achieved.

During this period farmers began to organise politically, establishing the Country Party to oppose organised labour and secure increased support for agricultural development. Visions for the wheatbelt started to unravel as early as 1911, when drought hit the eastern and northern areas. John Payne, of Perenjori in the northern wheatbelt, remembered that when conditions worsened in 1914 his father “put his head in his hands and he cried there for a long time.” For many new farmers, crop failure one year meant a lack of money to buy seed wheat for the next. A 1934 royal commission reported that a “total abandonment of farms” took place in the Lake Brown district in 1914–16. Hoping to avert mass abandonment of farms and consequent losses on state investment, the government established the Industries Assistance Board, which propped up the wheat industry through several indifferent seasons and the severe drought of 1914, until conditions improved after the war.

The wheatbelt was never self-sustaining. Though it consumed the labour of countless families and beasts, the region would never have been created as a “wheatbelt” had it not been for the redirection of state resources to provide infrastructure for farmers to establish their enterprises, and to give support when environmental or economic conditions were less than favourable.

Throughout this period there was no clear wheat frontier; rather, land was taken up in a complex pattern determined by soils, railways, rainfall and other factors. After 1906, land for selection was mapped and classified as first-, second- or third-class according to its agricultural potential: the original classification and valuation forms held by the State Records Office show fingers of red second-class or uncoloured third-class land extending into the first-class lands shaded blue. Blocks were to contain a minimum amount of first-class land, though most included some land of each class.

Some of the forms show ominous black patches. These are the poison lands, home to the Gastrolobium and Oxylobium species that sprang up in succulent, deadly profusion, especially after land was cleared and burned. Native mammals were largely immune to the toxin in these plants, but even small amounts could readily kill sheep, cattle and horses. Such land was avoided by all but the most desperate, optimistic or well-resourced.

As the first-class land close to railways was taken up, settlers pushed out into areas many miles from railways, then lobbied and hoped that a spur line would come their way. The land itself shaped railway routes through its features of elevation and drainage, though social and political factors were also critical. Development therefore occurred over widely scattered areas, producing numerous isolated farms and small, dispersed communities. This pattern arguably increased settler vulnerability to economic and psychological hardship.

After the war, development efforts were redoubled, though by 1920 it was understood that virtually all of the first-class land with adequate rainfall and within twelve miles of a railway had been “alienated” – allocated by the government to farmers. Much of the land that remained was therefore marginal, comprised largely of “light lands,” treeless areas characterised by sandy soils that extended throughout the wheatbelt. From 1922 these lands, where accessible by rail, sold for as little as one shilling per acre, and by 1928 more than five million acres had been alienated. There was little understanding of how best to farm the light lands. New settlers who depended entirely on them were especially vulnerable to climatic and economic change, and turnover of farms was high.

By 1931, Western Australia was exporting forty-two thousand bushels (1544 tonnes) of wheat, mainly to Great Britain, but also to India, Italy, South Africa and Egypt. But the provision of cheap wheat to the Empire (and beyond) came at a high cost to both the land and the people. The folly of such optimistic development was revealed when, in the 1930s, wheat prices crashed, followed by a succession of dry seasons and plagues of rabbits, emus and wild turnip. Hundreds walked away from their properties; others were, once again, bailed out by the state.

Llewellyn Walder, previously an inspector for the Agricultural Bank, recalled of the eastern wheatbelt that “only a very few farmers remained there. The bulk of the people just walked away with whatever they could carry.” These and other outer areas were later declared marginal and reconstructed into larger farms, with a focus on stock rather than wheat. A similar conjunction of circumstances wreaked havoc in the central plains of the United States, where overworked lands became the Dust Bowl, with devastating consequences for people and the environment.

Some of the farmers who had sufficient capital and luck to survive the trials of the 1930s sought to expand and diversify their operations by more efficient exploitation of light lands. They experimented with applications of copper and zinc on sandy areas within their holdings and after the war they collaborated with agricultural scientists. In the 1940s and 50s, their findings were translated through work on government research stations and private farms to light lands elsewhere in the wheatbelt. In 1962, the Age described the light lands around Esperance as “a wasteland… until after the second world war, when science changed despair into something infinitely encouraging. Catalysts in this transformation were trace elements.”

The rhetoric here echoed that of E.F. Smart who, in 1960, produced a booklet describing the development of his 87,000-acre farm on light lands at Mingenew, entitled Western Australian Wasteland Transformed!. Premier David Brand lauded Smart for his “vigorous large-scale attack on the problem of light-land development,” while Smart himself emphasised the necessity of developing such lands, stating that otherwise “we run the risk of having it done by intruders. There are millions of people to the north of our continent who are cramped for space and opportunity, and these idle lands will beckon them unless we occupy them and make them productive.” By this time, the preference for the “small man” was waning, though whiteness was still a requirement for prospective landholders.

Western Australia was one of the few parts of the developed world to undertake land clearing on a massive scale after the second world war. Rapid mechanisation transformed and accelerated the consumption of the remaining wilderness. From 1946, bulldozers were used to push over and heap up trees for burning, while crawler tractors dragging logs or chains made short work of mallee and low shrubs. In one southern mallee area, a contractor using bulldozer drivers working in shifts was flattening four hundred hectares every twenty-four hours.

As before, the state government facilitated the process. It developed eleven hundred farms for returned servicemen, many in project areas on the light lands in the far south of the emerging wheatbelt. From 1958, the government offered remaining crown land in this area for sale under conditional purchase arrangements at a rate of more than a million acres a year. Many of the “new land farmers” who flocked to the cheapest agricultural land in Australia had never farmed before: Jerramungup farmer Ian Mangan recalled that “the guy who got the block next door to us actually owned a ladies dress shop in Wollongong. He arrived here with obviously no experience whatsoever.” The prospect of development on an even larger scale also roused that peculiarly Western Australian enthusiasm for development agreements between the state and big business.

The government entered into such an agreement with the Chase Syndicate, an American group that included high-profile celebrities such as film star Robert Cummings and TV personality Art Linkletter, to develop around 600,000 hectares of sand plains near remote Esperance. The government was to classify and survey blocks and build access roads, as well as an abattoir and fertiliser factory, while the syndicate was to develop half of the planned 650 new farms to production stage and sell half of them within fifteen years.

The syndicate soon failed, partly because of faulty clearing and sowing methods, and the agreement was renegotiated with the Esperance Land and Development Company, a joint Australian–American venture that was to develop a total of 1.4 million acres. In both the United States and Australia, this was an era of high modernist agriculture, characterised by a preference for large, planned projects that could – at least in theory – be conducted as technical exercises.

The environment was imagined as uniform, and made as close to the ideal as possible through large-scale clearing and implementation of international industrialised farming practices involving mechanisation, monoculture and massive scale. However, these practices could not transcend the messy reality of salt, dust and drought.

In 1949, there were 6.48 million hectares of cleared land on farms; by 1969 the cleared area had more than doubled to 13.77 million hectares. While economic and climatic conditions were favourable, farming proceeded apace. But from 1969, drought and a glut of wheat on international markets, which led to the introduction of wheat quotas, together brought land releases to an abrupt halt. Farmers across the wheatbelt, especially in the newly established areas, struggled throughout the 1970s: the pie turned out to be too salty, too dry, and Jack Horner’s wheat bags were difficult to sell.

Another period of consolidation followed, in which many marginal farms were bought up by bigger neighbours. Government assistance was again forthcoming, though in a more limited form than in previous harsh times. Drought-relief loans were made available, exceeding $25 million in the wake of the 1976–78 drought. Yet the staunchly pro-development coalition government of Charles Court was not deterred from further expanding the wheatbelt, announcing in 1980 that three million hectares of land would be released for agriculture in the far south coast area around Ravensthorpe.

It took until 1984 for the newly elected Labor government to declare a moratorium on further mass land releases, and another two decades before land clearing would be effectively regulated. In that time, numerous Landcare and natural resource management groups, along with individual farmers, began to ameliorate the damage by commencing revegetation projects.

Faced with growing economic pressures as well as problems of salinity, erosion and other forms of land degradation, wheatbelt farmers increasingly looked for ways to maintain efficient production while conserving the soil. Some turned to oil mallees for biofuel to diversify farm income and reduce wind erosion and salinity; by 2013, over thirty million trees had been planted across the state, many in the wheatbelt. Construction of an integrated mallee processing plant that would produce eucalyptus oil, activated charcoal and heat for electricity generation was completed at Narrogin in 2006, but closed in 2011. With little political will to develop the industry, farmers were left with trees but no market for them.

Another popular strategy was minimum tillage farming, which protected the soil from erosion while reducing the costs associated with frequent cultivation. The development of herbicides during the second world war provided an alternative to ploughing in preparation for seeding. New technologies enabling single-pass seeding were also developed, some locally. On his wheatbelt farm in 1974, Ray Harrington and his brother David worked on developing hardened knifepoints that could be used to seed directly into crop stubble, to reduce soil disturbance and compaction.

Recalling their efforts to devise a system for cultivating only the soil under the seed rows, Ray said, “We knew we needed to try something different and tried to think what we would like if we were crop seeds, deciding that would be a nice environment underneath for the young roots to grow into.” A few more farmers began to experiment with minimum tillage in the 1980s. By 1995, one-in-ten Western Australian grain growers were using these practices and as many as 35 per cent in south coastal light lands. In conserving soil moisture, minimum tillage proved more drought-resistant than conventional tillage and so enabled farming to continue in areas subject to declining rainfall – including the South West of Western Australia. But these systems are now being undermined by herbicide-resistant weeds, and scientists and farmers are again seeking solutions to the problem of how to use the soil without consuming it.

Some wheatbelt communities are looking beyond agriculture, turning, for example, to tourism and the arts to diversify and reinvigorate local economies. In 1992, with only thirty-five children enrolled at the local school and businesses struggling, the eastern wheatbelt town of Hyden was in decline; seven years later, however, there were sixty-five students and around twenty new businesses. The key to this revitalisation was community action to establish partnerships with government and invest in diversification. The region’s grain, beef and wool farmers put forward the funds to construct a hotel, motel and caravan park to service visitors to local attractions, such as the impressive geological formation known as Wave Rock.

By 1999, tourism was bringing $5 million a year into Hyden and employing sixty local people, though sheep and cattle production remained the mainstay of the local economy. A Hyden Business Development Company, established with seed funding from local farmers, enabled new businesses in the area – plumbers, auto electricians and metal fabricators – to start up with subsidised rentals and community loans for equipment. The town now also boasts a telecentre, retirement village and youth housing, and hosts a popular annual rock music festival, the Wave Rock Weekender.

Lake Grace has undergone a similar transformation, including the establishment of the Regional Artspace, which supports a flourishing arts community and connects the town with the wider state and national arts scenes. These towns are fortunate to have had the capacity to invest in their future: not all wheatbelt settlements are so placed.

While the wheatbelt was established, and sometimes sustained, on the back of government largesse, in the wake of a more neoliberal policy orientation communities are having to compete for government funds to supplement the self-funding of projects intended to achieve diversification for social and economic sustainability.

From 2008, the National Party held the balance of power in the Western Australian parliament and used its position to implement its “Royalties for Regions” policy, by which a quarter of the state’s mining and petroleum royalty payments were to be spent on projects and initiatives in regional areas. Under the scheme, communities apply for funding in a competitive process. Premier Colin Barnett described the program as “outstanding” and claimed that “no government in Australian history had such a dramatic and direct effect on regional communities.”

In every competition there are winners and losers. A June 2014 report found that many funded projects were not required to demonstrate long-term sustainability, and evaluations were focused on the infrastructure and services delivered rather than the achievement of intended long-term outcomes. The contribution of this program to wheatbelt sustainability is at present unclear.

In 2014, the Aboriginal people of the wheatbelt remained in a disadvantaged position, though many hope that ongoing negotiations with the state government, aimed at resolving native title claims over the greater southwest, will provide legal recognition of their status as traditional owners of the land and provide ongoing support for Aboriginal economic development in the region.

The “wilderness” that is now the wheatbelt was eaten as the result of an inappropriate vision for the region. This vision motivated a small army of prospective farmers and resourced them to cut, burn, plough and sow until the land, and indeed the climate, had been transformed. Through technological ingenuity and consolidation of business operations, and with considerable state aid, farming has evolved in response to environmental and economic challenges in a way that has enabled us to keep eating the wilderness. The government gave the wheatbelt its start and bailed it out whenever it was in trouble; for Western Australia, it was too big to fail. Now, when the problems it faces are greater than ever, political support is precarious.

In the twenty-first century, as many wheatbelt communities struggle to protect their integrity and sustainability, the food produced by the region is becoming a critical global resource. The question is whether communities have sufficient capacity to transition to more sustainable production models and develop the social sustainability required to address the challenges ahead, or whether the future, along with the wilderness, has already been consumed. •

This essay appears in Griffith Review 47: Looking West, where a fully referenced version is available.

The post How to eat a wilderness appeared first on Inside Story.

It’s almost seventy years since an Australian federal government held power without a majority in the House of Representatives. But minority governments have been much more common in the states and territories, particularly over the past two decades. Since 1990, minority governments have held office for at least a short period in all six states and in both territories. Tasmania, Western Australia, the Australian Capital Territory and the Northern Territory are currently governed by parties that don’t have an absolute majority of MPs.

Over the past week in Inside Story we’ve published articles about three well-known minority governments – Victoria’s (1999–2002), South Australia’s (2002–06) and Tasmania’s (since March this year). Each of the three was – or, in Tasmania’s case, has so far been – more successful than expected, and in at least one case significant long-term parliamentary reform has resulted. Some other minority governments have been just as successful; a few have ended in failure and acrimony. Drawing heavily on two sources – Brian Costar and Jennifer Curtin’s book, Rebels with a Cause: Independents in Australian Politics, and Gareth Griffith’s report for the NSW Parliamentary Library Research Service, Minority Governments in Australia 1989–2009: Accords, Charters and Agreements – here’s an overview of those governments.

Tasmania: Uneasy alliances

This two-decade period opens and closes with minority governments in the same state, Tasmania – the first headed by Michael Field and the latest by David Bartlett.

For seven years from 1982 Robin Gray had headed a majority Liberal government that’s best remembered for its promise to dam the Franklin River. At the state election in May 1989, well after that battle was over, the Liberals lost their absolute majority and five Green Independents – among them Bob Brown, then a Tasmanian MP – took the balance of power. Not surprisingly, the Greens refused to support Gray, instead signing an accord with the Labor Party that gave opposition leader Michael Field the numbers he needed to govern. “When an attempt to bribe a Labor member to cross the floor – and save Gray’s government – was exposed, the political atmosphere became superheated,” write Costar and Curtin. “Gray lost a confidence motion on 29 June, resigned and was replaced by Michael Field.” They go on:

In hindsight, the accord contained the seeds of its own destruction by being too detailed and prescriptive. The Greens demanded too much and Labor was naive to believe it could deliver on those demands… Of the accord’s seventeen discrete clauses only one dealt exclusively with parliamentary reform. Ten clauses made very specific environmental demands. Section 9, for example, stated that “the state export woodchip quota will not exceed 2.8889 million tonnes per annum.” Other sections dealt with independents’ access to ministers and public servants which, while reasonable in themselves, were presented in an uncompromising tone. Some demands, such as the one that called for the “abolition of subsidised liquor to ministers,” were relatively trivial.

De facto independent leader Bob Brown was correct to state in the foreword to the accord that the Greens had gained “access to and influence on the whole range of government decisions” but, by being so concerned with detail, the document betrayed a lack of necessary trust between the parties.

The parliamentary reforms spelt out in the accord were less detailed than the other clauses but equally ambitious. Foreshadowing themes that run through many of the agreements struck by independents and small parties in similar circumstances, they included “a total review of parliamentary procedures and standing orders,” “the creation of new parliamentary committees including estimates committees,” a provision guaranteeing Green Independent members “pre-cabinet consultation on legislation” and another promising consultation on appointments to selection panels for heads of public service departments. Little of this program was locked in during the life of the accord.

The agreement’s successes included significant improvements in coastal management and marine parks, but the growing hostility between the independents and Labor limited the scope and longevity of reforms. According to the political scientist Steven Reynolds, the accord broke down “over issues of forestry management, bringing to a head clashes that began with education policy issues not long after the accord was signed. It was formally dissolved in September 1991 when the ALP increased export woodchip quotas in specific violation of the accord.” The Greens continued to support Field’s government over his opposition counterpart until the February 1992 election, which Labor lost.

Four years later, the Tasmanian parliament once again lacked a majority party. Liberal leader Ray Groom had promised during the campaign that he would only head a majority government, and Labor also refused to enter into an agreement with the Greens. Groom resigned and his deputy, Tony Rundle, took over and came to a workable arrangement with the Greens that allowed the Liberals to take power. Griffith writes:

This second period of minority government was not based on either an accord or even a “confidence and supply agreement.” Instead, it was founded on the twin rocks of the personality differences between the Labor and Greens leaders (Michael Field and Christine Milne), on one side, and on an “open door” policy adopted by Premier Rundle towards the Greens, on the other. This policy permitted the minor party to pursue its agenda on such issues as an apology for Indigenous Tasmanians and homosexual law reform.

In an attempt to gain a majority, Rundle announced a snap election in July 1998. The major parties had already combined forces to reduce the size of the Legislative Assembly from thirty-five to twenty-five members; this made it more difficult for minor parties by raising the required quota of votes under Tasmania’s voting system from 12.5 per cent to 16.7 per cent. Rundle lost the election and was succeeded as premier by Labor’s Jim Bacon. “Despite achieving some policy outcomes favourable to the Greens,” write Costar and Curtin, “the Tasmanian accord came to be associated with political instability; its foundering provided a pretext for the major parties to entrench their dominance.”

Despite the reduced parliament, the Greens once again managed to capture the balance of power earlier this year. Although the Labor premier, David Bartlett, had ruled out minority government during the campaign, the post-election negotiations eventually led to a novel outcome: no formal agreement between Labor and the Greens as a party; two Green MPs to sit in the Labor cabinet; and the government reliant on the support of the Greens inside cabinet and at least one Green outside cabinet to pass its legislation. Kate Crowley discussed the agreement, and its success to date, last Monday in Inside Story.

New South Wales: The fabulous fiftieth

As the first Labor–Green accord in Tasmania was breaking down, Nick Greiner’s government in New South Wales suddenly found itself without a majority. After a crushing defeat for Labor in 1988, the Liberal–National Coalition had seemed assured of victory in May 1991. But the final result, Coalition forty-nine, Labor Party forty-six, and four independents, gave one of the independents – Tony Windsor, John Hatton, Clover Moore or Peter Macdonald – the power to extend Greiner’s period in office. Windsor declared his support for the government. But the situation quickly became more complicated when the Liberal Party lost a by-election and the government needed the support of at least two more MPs. Greiner began negotiating with the other three independents about the terms under which they might support his government, and the outcome was a memorandum of understanding, signed on 31 October 1991. According to Costar and Curtin:

Like Tasmania’s accord, the NSW agreement was a very detailed and specific document. But almost all of its nineteen pages sought to enhance accountability of the government to parliament and people; it was policy-prescriptive only in the legal and constitutional areas of freedom of information, the powers of the ombudsman and the auditor-general, defamation laws and whistleblower protection. Significantly the memo had nothing to say about regional and rural New South Wales, reflecting the fact that Moore and Macdonald held Sydney seats and Hatton, while he represented a regional constituency, had made his parliamentary reputation as an anti-corruption campaigner.

Among the reforms implemented under the agreement were a referendum on four-year parliamentary terms (which was held and passed), a referendum on independence of the judiciary (also passed) and the introduction of parliamentary estimates committees and whistleblower protection for public servants. Indeed, argues the political scientist Rodney Smith in his book Against the Machines: Minor Parties and Independents in New South Wales, “most of the reforms were achieved in some part, easily making the ‘fabulous fiftieth parliament’ the period in which independents played the greatest legislative role since 1910.”

In a speech in June 2003, independent MP Clover Moore acknowledged the reforms of parliamentary procedures during this period, but added, “Since the return of majority government following the 1995 election, some of the parliamentary reforms we achieved have been watered down or effectively set aside” – a point also made by NSW parliamentary researchers David Clune and Gareth Griffith in their book, Decision and Deliberation: The Parliament of NSW, 1856–2003.

Unlike the fate suffered by premiers Field and Rundle in Tasmania, it wasn’t a breakdown in the minority government’s relations with the non-party MPs that eventually brought down the government – or at least not directly. Costar and Curtin take up the story:

In October 1991 the former education minister, Terry Metherell, who had not been included in the new Greiner cabinet, resigned from the Liberal Party to sit as an independent. He later accepted an unadvertised position with the Environment Protection Authority, precipitating a by-election in his seat of Davidson that was won easily by the Liberal candidate. Greiner was accused of subverting normal public-service recruitment procedures to induce Metherell’s resignation and improve the government’s position in parliament. The independents insisted on referring the matter to ICAC, the Independent Commission Against Corruption, and threatened to support a no-confidence motion if the premier did not stand aside. For its part, ICAC ruled Greiner’s behaviour to be “corrupt” (a finding that was later overturned by the NSW Supreme Court) and he was forced to resign; his successor, John Fahey, presided over a minority government supported by the independents until the Coalition narrowly lost the 1995 election.

The circumstances of the 1995 election revealed the level of hostility towards the independents in both major parties. Greiner (now out of parliament) wrote personally to all voters in the electorates of Manly, Bligh and South Coast urging them not to support the independents, describing the trio as the power “alcoholics” of NSW politics. “Dirty tricks” campaigns were alleged to have taken place in Bligh and Manly, and Clover Moore described the campaign as the “nastiest” she had experienced. With the election result in the balance (Labor eventually won by one seat), the major parties seriously considered contriving another election rather than dealing with the independents.

The amount of vitriol heaped on the independents by the major parties and sections of the media suggests that they might well have achieved their accountability objectives. Certainly the success of the referendums on four-year parliaments and judicial independence put at the 1995 election suggests this was the case. The referendums were part of the independents’ agenda and, despite a distinct lack of enthusiasm from the major parties, they secured Yes votes of 66 per cent and 76 per cent respectively.

Queensland: Two very different independents

After thirty-three years in opposition, Labor returned to power in Queensland in 1989. Three years later, with the corruption of the Bjelke-Petersen years still fresh in people’s minds, Premier Wayne Goss and his colleagues won a second election. The expectation was that Labor would win for a third time at the July 1995 election. Partly as a result of its controversial plan to build a freeway through an environmentally sensitive corridor in Brisbane, though, Labor lost nine seats, giving it a majority of just one over the combined numbers of the Coalition and the newly elected independent, Liz Cunningham. Labor had won the seat of Mundingburra by just fourteen votes; after the inevitable challenge and several months in the Court of Disputed Returns, the Liberal candidate Frank Tanti won the seat at a by-election in February 1996.

“For the first time in the state’s history,” writes the political scientist John Wanna, “a single independent held the balance of power between two equally matched opponents. Parliament as an institution began to matter, for the first time in living memory.” That one member of parliament was Liz Cunningham, who – at a media conference convened under a large tree in Gladstone – declared her support for the Coalition and its leader, Rob Borbidge, on confidence motions and supply but reserved the right to vote on all other legislation as she saw fit. She sought no specific policy commitments from the Coalition but did receive additional staff.

Cunningham argued that her decision was justified for three reasons: it avoided another election; the Coalition had polled over 53 per cent of the two-party-preferred vote; and the agreement between herself and the government was “best for my local electorate and for the state as a whole…” As Costar and Curtin write, “Unlike the Tasmanian Greens, who had Labor over a barrel and knew it, Cunningham installed a Coalition government largely because she sympathised with its conservative social agenda and was prepared to hand it an executive blank cheque.”

Cunningham didn’t demand increased accountability and the Coalition didn’t offer it. In fact, write Costar and Curtin, “The Borbidge government proved controversial and cavalier in its notions of accountability. When the parliament passed a no-confidence vote in the attorney-general in August 1997, for example, the premier backed his colleague’s refusal to resign.” They go on:

Despite numerous gaffes and controversies the parliament ran full term, but the 1998 Queensland state election was to prove one of the most dramatic in modern Australian politics. In the best debut electoral performance by any new party since Labor began entering the colonial parliaments in the 1890s, the newly formed Pauline Hanson’s One Nation won eleven seats – five from the National Party and six from Labor. By winning six seats from the Liberals, the Labor Party, now led by Peter Beattie, emerged with 44 seats to the Coalition’s 42. Two independents were elected: Cunningham, again, and first-timer Peter Wellington, who won Nicklin from the Nationals and with whom Beattie began negotiations to form a minority government. These discussions culminated in a six-page letter of understanding from Beattie to Wellington dated 25 June 1998.

As Antony Green observed, “The only alternative would have been a ramshackle coalition of Liberal, National, One Nation and several independents. Wellington chose to back stability…” Reform of parliament, an ongoing budget surplus and detailed guidelines for ministerial travel and expenses were among the requests he made in return for his support. Beattie refused another proposal – the introduction of citizen-initiated referendums – but promised to hold community cabinet meetings outside Brisbane. Although he didn’t get everything he wanted, Wellington agreed to support Labor, and the new government stuck to its side of the bargain.

Wellington believes that minority government worked well. “[O]ne thing that happened was that every minister was on their toes, every shadow minister was on their toes, and every member of parliament was in parliament,” he told ABC Radio National’s The National Interest recently. “There was a real sort of hands-on, ‘We have to really understand what we are doing.’ But I suppose I was sort of in a desperate situation because my electorate was very conservative, and I’m thinking, ‘Well, I think I’ve done the right thing, but let’s see what happens in the next election, I may not be here after then.’”

He was back after the next election (and is still in parliament) but in the meantime the circumstances had changed. Beattie gained a parliamentary majority of one seat after a by-election in November 1998 and Wellington no longer held the balance of power.

The Australian Capital Territory: Hare-Clark on a Robson rotation

Earlier in 1998 voters in the Australian Capital Territory had gone to the polls faced with a choice between the incumbent chief minister, Kate Carnell, and the Labor opposition leader, Wayne Berry. Minority government had been a fact of life in the territory since it had gained self-government; legislation put forward by a cabinet of four government MPs was negotiated case-by-case through the Assembly. But this election yielded an even more interesting situation.

The succession of minority governments partly reflects the territory’s relatively small population, but more important is its unusual electoral system – initially the modified d’Hondt system and, since 1995, the Hare-Clark proportional representation system, which also operates in Tasmania. Candidates’ names are “rotated” on the ballot paper (using the Robson rotation method, to avoid the influence of the donkey vote) and how-to-vote cards cannot be distributed within a hundred metres of polling booths. Combined, these features tend to dilute the influence of parties over the composition of the Assembly. As the political scientist David L. Hughes writes, “Voters are more likely to choose their own combinations of individual candidates, rather than follow a strict party line in allocating preferences. As a result, the public profile of a candidate is very important, independents have a greater chance of election, and there is much greater competition between candidates within a party.”

Both major parties emerged from the 1998 election with six seats, with the balance held by the ACT Greens (one), the Osborne Independent Group (two), and the Moore Independents (one). To break the deadlock, Carnell offered the sole Moore Independent, Michael Moore, the job of health, housing and community services minister in a Liberal government. Moore negotiated an “unprecedented” arrangement with Carnell, “binding him to the conventions of collective cabinet solidarity only in relation to his own portfolio areas and the annual budget bills,” write Costar and Curtin.

This experiment in government was partly prompted by the findings of the Review of the Governance of the ACT, released in the same month, which had recommended increasing the number of ministers from four to five and pondered the possibility of “a looser coalition arrangement that would enable some cross-benchers to serve as ministers.”

One of Moore’s priorities was drug law reform, and in late 1999 his legislation to establish supervised drug-injecting rooms was passed by the Assembly. Although Carnell resigned in October 2000, Moore remained health minister until he retired from parliament in 2002. “I have achieved more in the three and a half years that I spent as a minister than the years I spent on the cross benches…” he said in 2001. “I make no bones about it, it was a trade-off and in accepting a ministry I did lose some of my independence, but not all of it by any means.” The Liberals continued as a minority government until the 2004 election, when Labor surprised observers by taking power in its own right.

As Norman Abjorensen argued in Inside Story last November, “it was probably an anomaly that the sixth assembly elections in 2004 returned the first majority government to the territory in its twenty years of self-government, an outcome that the champions of Hare-Clark had argued was next to impossible. But an exceptionally popular chief minister, Jon Stanhope, and an especially inept Liberal opposition delivered just that.”

Abjorensen’s article was published to coincide with the first anniversary of the ACT’s return to minority government – a Labor government with Greens backing – at the 2008 election. Labor won seven of the seventeen seats at that election and, with the Liberals holding six seats, needed the support of the four Green members to pass its legislation. The result was an agreement that included the Greens member Shane Rattenbury’s becoming Assembly speaker, and a series of parliamentary and policy reforms. Abjorensen wrote:

Parliamentary reform has ranked high on the Greens’ agenda and forms the first part of its two-part agreement with Labor. A key plank is the adoption of the Latimer House Principles on probity and accountability, so named after a Commonwealth conference at Latimer House, London, in 2004. At the root of the principles is a commitment to ensuring that the executive is held fully and firmly accountable to parliament, and that decision-making is transparent and takes proper regard of civil society.

The Labor Party does not pretend the relationship is an easy one. “They are not a party like us; they are four individuals,” says a senior party figure. “They are really a series of interest groups. And their staff come from those groups, so we have to keep very close tabs on what is happening, because the ground shifts.” Another common complaint from Labor is that the Greens are “manipulated” by the Liberals into thinking that government is a monolith and that ministers have only to snap their fingers to get action. Meredith Hunter [the ACT Greens’ leader] denies this, arguing that the Greens’ long-term deep community roots ensure an appreciation of government decision-making and that the Greens are under no illusions as to the complexities of government.

The second part of the agreement focuses on policy and – under the headings of climate change and energy, transport, waste, water, planning, housing, small business, justice, education and health – progress against stated objectives is regularly discussed not just between leaders but among all four Greens and the ministers they shadow. The state of play is then reported on the Greens’ website.

Another nine months later the relationship still seems in good shape.

Victoria: Prelude to a landslide

“The Kennett government went to the polls in September 1999 in a seemingly invincible position,” write Costar and Curtin. “As in New South Wales in 1995, the election result was a cliffhanger. Strong swings to Labor in country Victoria and the election of a third independent, Craig Ingram, in Gippsland East produced a hung parliament, the Coalition securing forty-three seats to Labor’s forty-one with the three independents holding the balance of power. The inconclusive result was complicated by the fact that the sitting member for Frankston East had died on polling day, triggering a supplementary election four weeks after the poll.”

The result, as Brian Costar and David Hayward described recently in Inside Story, was a minority Bracks Labor government with the support of the three independents. At the suggestion of a former premier of Victoria, Joan Kirner, one of the independents, Susan Davies, contacted Premier Peter Beattie and independent MP Peter Wellington in Queensland to obtain a copy of their 1998 agreement, on which the three then based their Independents’ Charter.

“This issue of the balance of power caused me some significant anxieties and significant grief,” said the third of the independents, Russell Savage, at a conference the following year. “Susan very quickly came up with an idea that was quite brilliant and that was to have a Charter and that would get the media off our backs… It is very easy to succumb to the obvious – well let’s get some significant development in our electorate… We believed that… was immoral because it was exactly how the Kennett-style government worked.” The independents had negotiated with both leaders, but found Kennett intransigent on key points.

Government accountability (including a restoration of the independence of the auditor-general), parliamentary reform and the rejuvenation of rural Victoria were the key elements of the agreement with Bracks. Costar and Hayward’s article recounts the three-year relationship between government and independents, and Labor’s growing popularity in the lead-up to the 2002 state election.

“The Frankston East result had revealed a change in electoral mood,” observes Antony Green, “and over the next eight months Labor won two extra-ordinary by-election victories, first winning the Burwood seat of former Premier Kennett, and later winning the rural Benalla seat previously held by Nationals leader and Deputy Premier Pat McNamara. The good news continued for Labor and at the 2002 election, Labor won its greatest ever victory in Victoria, for the first time winning a clear majority in the Legislative Council.”

Not surprisingly, the independents became less influential after 2002. “But they had managed to lock in a number of important parliamentary and electoral reforms, the most noteworthy being the changes to the Legislative Council, which have now become accepted policy,“ write Costar and Hayward. “Despite dire predictions, Victorian government and politics did not descend into instability or gridlock.” When he was asked to comment on that period on ABC Radio National’s The National Interest recently, Steve Bracks said:

I rate that as one of the best periods of government that I had of the period right through the eight years, and the three terms. We had to be on our toes, there was a lot of accountability, but also we had to explain properly what legislation meant, and what it meant to the broader public. Not just simply driving through your agenda because it happened to be a matter on which you were elected on, but to keep explaining, keep consulting, keep working it through. I enjoyed the periods on each parliamentary session where I sat down with the three independents and worked through the legislative agenda, where we’re going, providing support and assistance in understanding better the legislation so they could make decisions. So, in some ways, it was a moderation on your own party and I found that quite useful.

One of the three independents, Craig Ingram, still sits in the Victorian parliament. He told the Age this week, “Most of the outstanding reforms of parliament came as the result of minority governments. We got a significant change of direction in spending towards the regions. The most positive thing about this federal election is that there will be much greater focus on regional Australia.” During that period passenger trains returned to the Bairnsdale line (which runs into Ingram’s electorate), water allocations to the Snowy River and the Gippsland Lakes were increased, and the government promised that the Mitchell River would not be dammed. But another of the independents, Russell Savage, was less fortunate. “He speaks bitterly about betrayal as Labor broke its promises to him,” reports the Age. “Passenger trains never came back to Mildura. Its hospital remained in private hands, and then Labor chose the Mallee for a toxic dump, sealing his defeat in 2006. He has some pithy advice for Mr Windsor and Mr Oakeshott. ‘Don’t trust anything they say – get them to put it in writing,’ he says. ‘Watch your back all the time – from both sides.’”

South Australia: Shifting alliances

Minorities were a feature of South Australian politics throughout this period. Between 1989 and 1993 Labor formed a minority government with two “Independent Labor” members, losing to the Liberals in 1993. Four years later, an election swing forced the Liberals to rely on the support of a National MP and two independents to retain government over the period 1997–2002.

It’s at this point that the situation became even more interesting. After the February 2002 state election the House of Assembly had twenty-three Labor members, twenty Liberals and four independents. Labor needed the support of just one of those independents to take office. “When parliament resumed on 5 March 2002 [Liberal leader Rob] Kerin nominated independent Rory McEwen as Speaker and opposition leader Mike Rann nominated independent Peter Lewis,” write Costar and Curtin. “Lewis won in a secret ballot twenty-five votes to twenty-two.” They go on:

Peter Lewis had been a Liberal member of parliament for over twenty years. Since the 1970s he had been a gadfly within his party, advocating parliamentary reform and various rural and irrigation policies. Eventually – on 5 July 2000 – he was expelled from the Liberal party room, and he resigned from the party in October. Lewis contested his seat of Hammond at the 2002 election under the banner of the Community Leadership Independence Coalition and defeated the Liberal candidate by 822 votes. Prior to the poll Lewis gave contradictory indications of which party he might support in a hung parliament…

Between polling day and the first meeting of the new parliament, Peter Lewis negotiated a Compact for Good Government with the Labor Party. The compact drew heavily on agreements in other states and included mechanisms to improve ministerial accountability, reform parliament and assist rural South Australia. What was different in Lewis’s compact was his insistence that the government “pass an Act of Parliament and make other such arrangements as deemed necessary by the Speaker [Lewis] to meet such costs and facilitating such processes as may be involved in any aspects of the work related to the establishment of a Constitutional Convention…” The Convention was held in August 2003 and made a number of recommendations to be considered by the state parliament.

But the most remarkable of Rann’s initiatives was to appoint another independent, Rory McEwen, as his trade minister. Like Michael Moore in the ACT, McEwen remained an independent and was free to criticise the government of which he was a member. Norman Abjorensen described the events surrounding McEwen’s appointment, and the appointment of another non-Labor MP to Rann’s ministry, in a recent article for Inside Story.

Western Australia: The coalition that wasn’t

In early August 2008 the Labor WA premier, Alan Carpenter, called an early election for 6 September 2008. Unexpectedly, the election resulted in a hung parliament – twenty-eight Labor MPs, twenty-four Liberals, four Nationals and three independents. Since he’d taken over the leadership of the National Party in 2005, leader Brendon Grylls had pursued greater independence from the Liberal Party, and during the campaign he ruled out any Coalition agreement. Suddenly, with a hung parliament, Grylls and at least one independent were in a position to dictate terms.

The terms for winning National Party support were relatively simple: Labor or the Liberals needed to accept Grylls’s “royalties for the regions” plan, which had featured in the party’s election campaigning. Twenty-five per cent of the state’s mining and onshore petroleum royalties would be returned to regional Western Australia for use in infrastructure and community services via various programs. After a week of negotiations with both parties, Grylls struck his deal – essentially an informal coalition agreement – with the Liberal leader, Colin Barnett.

To add the necessary extra MP, the Liberals appointed one of the independents, Elizabeth Constable, as education, tourism and women’s interests minister. According to Gareth Griffith, she didn’t enter into a formal agreement with the new government, but it might be significant that the Liberals hadn’t contested her seat of Churchlands at the election. Griffith continues: “The other two independent members (Janet Woollard and John Bowler), who have not accepted government or parliamentary positions, have supported the Liberal minority government in the main. Indeed, it was not until 6 May 2009 that the government lost its first vote on the floor of the Assembly…”

Like Rory McEwen and Karlene Maywald in South Australia, National Party ministers in Barnett’s government are free of the usual cabinet constraints in relation to certain issues. Naturally enough, in the WA case these relate mainly to regional issues, although matters of “conscience” are also covered by the agreement.

Northern Territory: The devil in the detail

In August 2009 a member of the NT parliament, Alison Anderson, resigned from the Labor Party over its Indigenous affairs policies, depriving the government of its majority. Ten days later the chief minister, Paul Henderson, struck a deal with the other NT independent, Gerry Wood, who would stay on the cross benches but support the government on supply and no-confidence motions. In return, the government pledged to honour the terms of a written agreement with the MP. According to Griffith:

The terms of this agreement are wide ranging, including substantial parliamentary and constitutional reforms, as well as other policy measures. Perhaps the most interesting constitutional aspect is the agreement to establish a cross-party Council of Territory Cooperation, comprising two government members, two opposition members and at least one independent. Among its objects would be to enhance inclusion and transparency in decision making. The Council would be empowered to conduct inquiries, either referred to it from the Assembly or self-referred, and to make recommendations on matters of public importance.

The government also agreed to reform parliamentary procedures, including reform of question time to allow more non-government questions.

An appendix to the agreement sets out specific policy commitments under a series of headings that indicate the level of detail in the document. These include prison location, caravan legislation, property law reform, lands and planning issues, the environment protection authority, public housing, natural resources and the environment, a strategic Indigenous housing and infrastructure program, youth, rural area issues, special education, local government and “miscellaneous.” Writing earlier this year, Griffith says that the implementation of this program “remains in its early stages.”

AS THESE examples show, the states and territories have already explored many of the relationships that could develop between the Gillard government and the Greens and independents over the next three years. As the prime minister made clear on the 7.30 Report earlier this week, the government is already looking at the experience of at least two states, South Australia and Victoria, and Steve Bracks was an adviser to Labor during the recent negotiations with the three independents. Bracks’s experience – and those of a remarkably high proportion of the state and territory minority governments – suggest that Labor might not be facing quite as fraught an experience over the next three years as many commentators have predicted. •

The post The fabulous fiftieth NSW parliament, and other minority governments appeared first on Inside Story.

SOME COMMENTATORS see the Greens victory in last Saturday’s Fremantle state by-election as an ominous sign for a Labor Party juggling the conflicting demands of its inner urban and outer suburban support bases. This may be so, but several caveats need to be borne in mind.

In its candidate selection, Western Australian Labor seemed to exceed even the usual level of ineptitude the party brings to the task. Conventionally, a local government–based candidate represents good value, even if party membership is bestowed at the eleventh hour. In this case, however, the mayor in question not only lacked an obvious progressive political identity, but struggled to repudiate allegations that his pedigree was, in fact, anti-Labor. Piled onto this was his mayoral identification with pro-development elements in the local area: anathema to Labor’s substantial anti-development base in a seat such as Fremantle, and manna from heaven for the Greens.

Just as there are now some state and federal seats where the electoral contest is effectively between the Coalition (usually the National Party) and high-profile (usually conservative) independents, there is a clutch of seats where the contest is effectively moving towards Labor versus Greens. Fremantle follows the federal seat of Cunningham, where a “safe” Labor seat was lost to the Greens in 2002. Interestingly, Labor was in opposition in both instances, and party optimists will point out that Cunningham reverted to Labor status at the ensuing federal election.

Leaving aside by-election idiosyncrasies and dubious candidate selection, what are the broader implications for the Labor versus Greens struggle? Clearly, there is a political dynamic at play here that, when simplified, pits an educated, environmentally conscious element, whose votes alternate between Labor and the Greens, against a pro-jobs, pro-development constituency whose votes alternate between Labor and Liberal.

In inner suburban seats like Fremantle, this is a no-contest. Unlike the Greens, though, Labor has to assemble a state or national majority in order to govern. Hence, a strategy that can deliver seats like Fremantle may prove counter-productive in marginal outer suburban seats where voters may resent being lectured by inner urban elites about sacrificing their four-wheel drives and plasma TVs for some greater good.

At the federal level, Labor’s task is complicated because it’s in government, confronting the inevitable policy compromises which are poison to its green-tinged supporters. By opting for a more graduated, measured approach on climate change, Labor runs the obvious risk of driving its hardcore environmentalist supporters into the embrace of Green candidates supporting environmental purity (although no such stampede has yet been detected in national polling). And, while these votes probably return as second preferences in outer suburban lower house seats, the scenario is more complex in multi-member upper house contests and in inner suburban lower house seats.

In the Senate, disgruntled Labor supporters can help elect Greens senators, a phenomenon which has been evident for some time now. From a Labor point of view, this is regrettable, but Greens senators are at least (broadly) ideologically onside and (1975 notwithstanding) senators don’t decide who governs.

In the 2007 federal election, there was one seat, Melbourne, where the ultimate contest (after preferences) was between Labor and the Greens. In another four seats, Labor polled less than 50 per cent of first preferences and the Greens polled over 10 per cent. In each case, the Liberal primary vote was under 40 per cent, but only in the seat of Sydney was it low enough for the Greens to almost finish second.

In the 2006 Victorian election, the two-party preferred contest was between Labor and the Greens in three lower house seats. Each could be viewed as vulnerable if there is sufficient disillusionment with a (now) long-term Labor government, especially with development issues potentially aiding the Greens’ cause. In two of the three cases, the margins were close, and one suspects that the sitting members (both ministers) may have taken more than a passing interest in the Fremantle outcome.

In 2007, there were two such seats in New South Wales, but, come the 2011 state election, losses to the Greens will probably be the least of Labor’s worries.

Ironically, Labor’s fate in this scenario is to a great extent in the hands of its Liberal opponents. Obviously, the absence of a Liberal candidate in Fremantle was by-election specific, and unlikely to be replicated at any general election. While high strategy might justify a non-contest, arguments about party morale and boosting the upper house vote usually prevail. Hence, the Liberals need candidates who are either pretty awful and/or run dead, thus finishing third and allowing their preferences to defeat Labor. That said, it remains the case that a proportion of Liberal voters will not follow a card which preferences the Greens over Labor, being more concerned about policy and ideology than with the strategic value of dividing the progressive side of politics.

In summary, local factors seem to have been decisive in the Fremantle result and the federal implications seem limited. But for a couple of ministers in Victoria the outcome may have served to remind them of their parlous hold on their Green-trending electorates. •

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