Katina Curtis: Questions to ponder about Labor’s future hold on WA

Here’s a 2024 forecast you can roll out if talk turns to politics over the Christmas table: we will spend much of the year talking about election dates and hung parliaments.

For a follow-up topic, try the redistributions that will see WA gain an extra seat and NSW and Victoria lose one apiece; everyone loves some electoral boundary chat with their festive feast.

All three elements will shape Federal politics in the year ahead.

And for WA, there’s one more key factor: the Federal and State elections are due at effectively the same time in early 2025.

Everyone you talk to, Liberal or Labor, knows the twin elections are going to pose massive problems for resourcing, time, enthusiasm and airspace.

The one question everyone wants answered as soon as possible is will the Federal election be before or after the State one?

WA’s polling date is fixed for March 8, 2025.

Anthony Albanese could take his Federal colleagues to the polls any time between August 3, 2024 and May 17, 2025.

One trusim in politics is that prime ministers always put themselves in the hands of voters at a time when they think they can win — otherwise they hang on as long as possible.

The Redbridge polling at the end of last week would have given Albanese plenty to think about.

Its WA numbers, which this masthead reported on Friday, were pretty positive at the Federal level.

The survey of 1203 WA voters in the second week of December showed a two-party preferred figure in line with the 2022 results and a bump to both Labor and Liberal primary votes.

Other polls have shown an overall slide in support for the Government across the country, as did the national Redbridge figures reported elsewhere.

That puts the prospect of a hung parliament into the picture. The existing large crossbench means Albanese has a slim majority but Peter Dutton’s Coalition has a large hurdle to taking power in its own right.

Redbridge’s State-level numbers were not as rosy, but that is comparing them to what almost everyone considers was a high-water mark — make that a super blue moon king tide — for Labor in 2021.

These figures are largely reflected in Labor’s internal polling, party sources say.

It comes with a warning that the party largely consists of children of summer, who have not witnessed seat losses for a decade.

But there is also some concern within WA Labor the party is not where it would like to be federally.

Another senior source felt the Federal Government was doing terribly in the State with voters starting to see several ministers as arrogant.

They feared some around Canberra’s Cabinet table had forgotten it was WA’s four extra seats that got them there.

Federal Labor sources dismiss this notion.

“I spend a lot of time in Cabinet and other meetings, reminding everyone — I don’t think they need reminding — but just making sure that they know exactly what Western Australia’s role in the economy is,” Resources Minister Madeleine King told The West.

But she still recognised there was no room for complacency.

Another Federal MP pointed to Albanese choosing Margaret River for his pre-Christmas as an indication of how large WA looms in his mind.

They said there might have been wobbles in the headlines, but there was still a lot of “good government” work going on under the surface and there had not been corresponding wobbles in caucus.

A similar point is made by others across factional lines.

Some wonder if people at the State level aren’t projecting their own problems onto the Albanese Government.

The handling of the Aboriginal cultural heritage laws proved the biggest self-inflicted wound of the year — not the referendum, not the fight with miners over paying workers more and not the immigration detention problems thrust on the Government by the High Court — and that was a State debacle.

A question on the minds of many is whether Labor can come through the next Federal election holding 10 WA seats — the nine with incumbents and the new one which is anticipated to be notionally theirs.

A tri-cornered fight in Moore, should Ian Goodenough lose Liberal preselection and run as an independent, could even put it in play.

One upside of Mark McGowan vacating the scene is it creates space for local MPs — and even east coast ministers — to make their individual presence felt rather than being subsumed into a WA Labor juggernaut.

You can be sure all these factors will feature in the talk around Labor tables (hopefully post-Christmas, for the sake of their families) as they look to reset and hit that eventual election date with good prospects of holding onto a parliamentary majority.