Peter Dutton desperately needs to regain seats in Western Australia, but Labor have made the state a fortress – and then there’s the NationalsPolls tracker; election guide; full federal election coverageAnywhere but Canberra; interactive electorates guideGet our afternoon election email, free app or daily news podcastElection 2025 live updates: Australia federal election campaignIn the heart of Kalamunda, a town nestled in bushland on Perth’s eastern outskirts, a turf war is under way.The Liberals and Nationals are on the same side in Canberra. But the two are fierce adversaries in Western Australia, a decades-old hostility now playing out in a scrap for the state’s newest political prize: the federal seat of Bullwinkel.Sign up for the Afternoon Update: Election 2025 email newsletter Continue reading…Peter Dutton desperately needs to regain seats in Western Australia, but Labor have made the state a fortress – and then there’s the NationalsPolls tracker; election guide; full federal election coverageAnywhere but Canberra; interactive electorates guideGet our afternoon election email, free app or daily news podcastElection 2025 live updates: Australia federal election campaignIn the heart of Kalamunda, a town nestled in bushland on Perth’s eastern outskirts, a turf war is under way.The Liberals and Nationals are on the same side in Canberra. But the two are fierce adversaries in Western Australia, a decades-old hostility now playing out in a scrap for the state’s newest political prize: the federal seat of Bullwinkel.Sign up for the Afternoon Update: Election 2025 email newsletter Continue reading…
In the heart of Kalamunda, a town nestled in bushland on Perth’s eastern outskirts, a turf war is under way.
The Liberals and Nationals are on the same side in Canberra. But the two are fierce adversaries in Western Australia, a decades-old hostility now playing out in a scrap for the state’s newest political prize: the federal seat of Bullwinkel.
Just 170 metres separates the campaign headquarters of the Liberal candidate, Matt Moran, and Mia Davies, the former state opposition leader now running for the Nationals.
“Good on ya sister,” a local shouts encouragingly at Davies, before offering an unsolicited opinion on the WA government’s new gun laws.
“Stick it up those Labor commies who want to take my guns!”
Had the man waited 30 minutes and walked across the road he might have bumped into Moran, having his morning coffee at a cafe that stares at Davies’ offices.
In this family feud of sorts, Liberal leader Peter Dutton is backing his candidate and Nationals leader David Littleproud backing his.
But neither wants a scenario in which Davies and Moran split the conservative vote, allowing Labor to skate through the middle.
That would be a disaster for the Coalition.
Because if Dutton wants to be prime minister, he needs to find a way to breach Labor’s newest political stronghold.
A very different state
Then premier Mark McGowan pulled up the drawbridge on the rest of the country during the Covid-19 pandemic, and since then WA has turned into a political fortress for Labor.
Labor followed up the party’s landslide 2021 state election with a historic federal result, riding double-digit swings to win four previously Liberal seats – Swan, Pearce, Tangney and Hasluck – and deliver Anthony Albanese majority government.
Teal independent Kate Chaney’s victory in Curtin – the Liberals’ crown jewel in WA – left the party with just one federal member in metropolitan Perth.
The unprecedented result was widely attributed to the popularity of McGowan and unpopularity of Scott Morrison after he briefly sided with Clive Palmer in a high court challenge to tear down’s WA hard border.
McGowan and Morrison are no longer in politics and Palmer is off trumpeting his new political mission.
The public’s support for incumbents during the pandemic has soured amid the cost-of-living crisis.
But not, it would appear, in WA.
Roger Cook’s thumping state election win on 8 March reaffirmed the strength of the Labor brand in the state.
WA Labor suffered a sizeable swing but still secured 46 of 59 seats in what was the second largest election win in the state’s history.
The Liberals won just seven, falling well short of even their modest expectations.
Kos Samaras, a director at the research firm Redbridge, cites two reasons for Labor’s “extremely strong” position in WA: the political events of the pandemic and the state’s demographics.
Samaras says a realignment is occurring in Australia and globally in which low-income, blue-collar workers are turning their backs on centre-left parties.
WA has comparatively fewer of those workers than the manufacturing heartland states NSW and Victoria, he says, meaning the trend is not biting as hard in the west.
The state is revelling in another mining boom, underpinning state budget surpluses that have funded generous cost-of-living relief, including multiple rounds of energy rebates.
The state has the nation’s lowest unemployment rate (3.5%) and highest average weekly earnings outside the ACT, cushioning households against the financial pain driving anti-government sentiment in other parts of Australia.
Until the state election, the view among Labor and Liberal insiders, independent pollsters and WA’s powerful business community was that three of WA’s 16 federal seats were in play.
Bullwinkel, which stretches from the Perth Hills to farming towns in the central Wheatbelt; Tangney, south of the Swan River; and Curtin, which covers the city’s affluent western suburbs.
The Liberals are confident of winning Bullwinkel (one source described it as “safely ours”), while Tangney and Curtin are tight races.
Gaining all three – Bullwinkel is notionally Labor – would represent a mini-resurgence for a party on its knees three years ago.
There is also renewed optimism about the Libs’ prospects in Pearce after big swings in overlapping state seats.
One senior WA Liberal says there is “no doubt a move to the Liberals” across Perth.
But others aren’t so sure.
“I don’t get a feeling that we have shifted the dial,” another Liberal says, observing that nobody is talking about a “thumping win” in Tangney, a seat the party held for decades before the former dolphin trainer Sam Lim won it for Labor in 2022.
Why?
“It takes time for wounds to heal,” they say.
Sheep shape the campaign
The winding road that leads to Kalamunda is dotted with telltale signs of a looming election.
Among the typical red, blue and green corflutes are smatterings of black posters with the words “FLOCK OFF” or “PUT LABOR LAST”.
The signs are the handiwork of “Keep the Sheep”, a campaign that mobilised last year to stop Labor closing down the live sheep export trade.
The now-legislated industry ban does not start until 2028 but campaign spokesperson Ben Sutherland says farming communities are already reeling.
The federal government’s $139m “transition” package has been dismissed as a metaphorical slap in the face to the industry.
“It’s resulting in the loss of work, especially for transporters at the moment, we’re up in arms about, where do we go? What do we do?” Sutherland, a truck driver, says.
Keep the Sheep will target Bullwinkel, Tangney, Curtin and Hasluck with corflutes, billboards and door-knocking before the 3 May poll.
But major party insiders are dubious about the influence the issue will have on the election, even in Bullwinkel.
The seat extends into small farming towns such as Northam, but the vast majority of voters live in the Perth Hills and foothills.
Davies, who reversed a decision to quit politics to contest Bullwinkel, warns Labor would be foolish not to expect a backlash to the live sheep ban.
“There’s a very strong message coming through from the electorate that they are disgusted by what the federal Labor party has done to the communities and all of the individuals that are impacted by that decision,” she says.
Labor’s Bullwinkel candidate, Trish Cook, says locals are pleased the trade is being shut down.
“With the transition package, the certainty of the four-year, phase-out period … that is a great way to support farmers and communities adapt,” she says.
“But when I’m talking to people on the doors, they don’t want to see live sheep export.
“People say to me, ‘well, we don’t do whaling any more’. You know, we can do better than that. We want to see the jobs here – that’s what people are telling me.”
Cook, a nurse and local councillor, says the issues top of mind for voters are the same in Bullwinkel as the rest of the country.
Cost of living, health and housing.
Friend or enemy?
On every trip across the Nullabor, Anthony Albanese boasts about the number of times he has visited WA as prime minister (it was 28 at last count).
These frequent trips and his repeated, ironclad commitments to honour WA’s GST deal are his way of assuring the nation’s most parochial state that he’s on their side.
The government has delivered substantial policies to back up the rhetoric, most notably $13.7bn worth of tax incentives for critical minerals refining and processing, and green hydrogen production.
But as the afterglow of 2022 has dimmed, the Liberals have sought to depict Albanese not as a friend but an enemy of WA.
They highlight the live sheep export ban, waves of industrial relations changes and Labor’s nature positive plan to rewrite environmental protection laws.
The prime minister intervened, twice, to shelve the EPA amid lobbying from the WA premier and mining bosses, heading off a potentially destructive mining tax-style campaign against Labor.
Labor has since recommited to resurrecting the nature watchdog after the election.
Liberal sources say feedback from voters suggests the damage has already been done and West Australians are turning on Albanese.
“People are very unhappy with Anthony Albanese,” Moran says.
“They think he’s a weak leader, and I genuinely believe there is an anti-Labor sentiment.”
Labor insiders accept Albanese’s popularity may not be what it was in 2022.
But they maintain the negativity pushed by the Liberals does not reflect the mood on the ground.
One senior WA Labor source says voters don’t have their “baseball bats” out for federal Labor in 2025, as they did in 2010 and 2013.
If anything is unpopular in WA, they say, it’s Dutton and his promise to scrap the production tax credits and build a nuclear reactor in Collie, south-west of Perth.
Dutton will hope the naysayers are wrong.
He needs them to be.