Election results WA

The Liberal Party loses Swan, Pearce, Tangney and Hasluck to Labor, with Curtin in doubt as a huge swing sees WA reject conservative party policies.

Labor has picked up the previously safe Liberal seat of Pearce, which used to be held by former Attorney-General Christian Porter and Swan, which was held by the retiring Liberal Steve Irons. "It's a clear and very strong rejection of the Liberal Party and a big swing to the Labor Party." Western Australia has turned its back on the Liberal party with a massive swing of around 10 per cent, and the loss of four seats to Labor.

Large swings in WA meant the Liberals lost Hasluck, Swan, Pearce and Tangney and will have just five seats – down from 10 – after the election.

Here, incumbent Celia Hammond was unseated by independent Kate Chaney with a 16.8% swing away from the Liberals. “It is perceived that they [the Morrison government] supported Clive Palmer in bringing down the borders, as having called us ‘cave men’ and as having gone to war with a very popular premier.” WA was the only state where this crossbench uprising was also accompanied by a significant swing to Labor. Chaney was one of the teal independents who, along with the Greens, enjoyed a memorable night in a range of urban electorates across the country. The “red wave” in the west was the biggest swing nationally and could deliver Labor a parliamentary majority. Perhaps the Liberals’ most embarrassing result in WA came in Julie Bishop’s former seat of Curtin, centred on the “golden triangle” of wealthy beachside suburbs in Perth’s west.

During the count, the rest of the country saw a slow but steady accumulation of Labor gains despite a fall in its primary vote. There was also a solid but ...

In addition, the WA Liberal Party’s failure to address internal organisational and factional issues left it open to a successful challenge in its Curtin heartland. First, WA Labor has been a serial underperformer in federal politics, so merely shifting towards the average national Labor vote share was always likely to deliver it at least one seat, possibly two. Labor in WA has gone from second-lowest to the highest 2PP share of any state. In the Liberals’ two most marginal seats, Pearce and Swan, the swings to Labor on a 2PP basis are 14.9% and 13.1% respectively. This could tip the balance of power in the Senate. Fourth, WA’s relatively benign experience of the pandemic, plus Palmer’s unpopularity, meant most disaffected Liberal voters switched directly to Labor rather than to other right-wing parties. This enabled it to make a second big step forward in its primary vote. Electoral boundaries for Pearce were redrawn after the last election, favouring Labor and reducing the total number of WA seats to 15. These seat gains to Labor come on the back of massive primary and 2PP vote swings. Labor won four seats from the Liberals: Swan, Pearce, Hasluck and Tangney. So it now holds nine of WA’s 15 seats in the House of Representatives – the first time it has held a majority of WA’s federal seats since 1990. The Liberals also look very likely to lose the prized seat of Curtin to a teal independent. In 2019, Labor won only 44.4% of the 2PP in WA, compared with 48.5% nationally.

The entire Perth metro region, aside from Canning MP Andrew Hastie's electorate, has turned red and for the first time since 1998 two Labor MP's received a ...

It was a claim he has vehemently denied. They said the enormous swing in Christian Porter’s seat of Pearce, currently sitting at 15 per cent to Labor, was an indication of some of the anger over the former attorney-general after he was accused of raping a former debating school colleague in the 1980s. The Labor strategist, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said swathes of the WA public had been trained in voting red following the 2021 state election when the party received a 17.7 per cent increase in its primary vote. They said the party expected this to carry over to the federal election and sought to take advantage of a stubbornly high approval rating for McGowan, which even in the face of vaccine mandates and continued COVID-19 restrictions, remained above 60 per cent. But it is the contest in Moore (held by the Liberal Ian Goodenough with an 11.6 per cent margin) and Public Services Minister Ben Morton’s seat of Tangney, previously held with a 9.5 per cent margin, that have shocked political pundits the most. The victory of teal independent Kate Chaney in Julie Bishop’s former seat of Curtin and an 11 per cent swing statewide to Labor has scalped two Coalition ministers and significantly shrunk the Liberals’ presence in the state to four with a fifth seat, Moore, still on a knife’s edge.

Perth has turned red as in a bloodbath for the Liberal party, delivering four blue-ribbon seats to Labor wi...

In Claremont, teal independent Kate Chaney was greeted with a rockstar reception as she celebrated a 16 per cent swing in the blue-ribbon seat of Curtin. "I don't think the government has been able to meet the expectations of the Australian voters in this election - those expectations are really high. "I just felt consistently that we were listening to them and they were respecting the fact we were listening and now we need to act and get that fixed," she said. "I think Mark McGowan was absolutely a factor in this election campaign," he said. "I fought breast cancer and this community was the ones that picked me up dried my tears and supported me on that journey and I will never forget that, when I was at my most vulnerable this community was there for me and I will give back," she said. Perth has turned red as in a bloodbath for the Liberal party, delivering four blue-ribbon seats to Labor with a fifth at risk.