After a grand tour of the Darling Range electorate on Tuesday, Opposition and Nationals WA leader Shane Love is scratching his head over why his party has never fielded a candidate here before now.
In March the party broke away from a long-standing tradition with the Liberals to take a tilt at key metro seats in the 2025 election.
Local councillor Morgan Byas will challenge Labor incumbent Hugh Jones, as the first Nationals WA candidate on a Darling Range ballot. Others will also run in South Perth, Bateman and Kalamunda.
“The more I get out and meet the community here, the more I wonder why we’ve never run a Nationals candidate in either Darling Range or Kalamunda before,” Mr Love said.
“There used to be an imaginary line between the metro and the regions, but from what I’ve seen today, people here have very similar concerns to the people I speak to in regional towns.
“The biggest issue is gaps in available services. And transport – there’s an absence of green buses here.
“Older areas of the city have a legacy of decades of development. It’s not fair for people in these newly developed areas to wait decades for the same services.”
Mr Byas accompanied Mr Love on a tour of the shire’s ageing sporting facilities, and spruiked the plans for Keirnan Park. They also breezed past the Mundijong Industrial Estate which is still scrambling to attract businesses in large part due to struggles in accessing trunk infrastructure services.
“Mundijong is expected to grow quite rapidly – there’s definitely an incentive for forward-leading development from government-owned infrastructure service providers,” Mr Love said.
“And a general lack of infrastructure provision is holding up new housing developments which could help alleviate the current crisis.”
The Examiner pointed out that it was the current Labor government which followed through on its promise to build a much-needed piece of infrastructure – the Byford Rail Extension – after years of stagnation from preceding governments.
“I’ve always supported the Byford rail project as a necessary extension of the Armadale line,” Mr Love said. “But I do question the management of these Metronet projects.”
Mr Love explained that apart from budget blowouts, the number of major transport infrastructure projects running concurrently was depleting the labour force for other things, like affordable housing.
“This is a government that’s focussed on vanity projects and securing photo opportunities before the March election, rather than good outcomes for local communities,” Mr Byas said.
“And local voices are being ignored, particularly in local planning decisions – our focus is on returning a voice to our communities.”
Mr Love added that the current planning process had become “almost autocratic”, with developers able to bypass local governments through an increasingly “centralised” system.
“We believe in there being as much local content in decision-making as possible,” he said. “That way unique places like Serpentine-Jarrahdale can retain their identity instead of being co-opted into an amorphous urban sprawl.”
In April the Nationals released a plan to even the playing field on WA’s Development Assessment Panels (DAPs), with local government members currently outnumbered by state appointed industry ‘experts’. They also intend to increase the threshold under which projects are automatically referred to these DAPs.
But how likely is it that the Nationals can make meaningful change in this space?
Despite currently outnumbering sitting Liberals, the Nationals will not be able to form government in their own right any time in the foreseeable future; they need the support of the Liberals to govern. And it was in fact a Liberal government that first introduced the DAP system to WA.
But Mr Love said his party has always had a “disproportionate influence on government” and that there would be a line in the sand drawn on certain issues.
“We have always taken a stand on things that are important to us, and the people we represent,” he said.
“And we’ve been very up front with our policies, so people can see what we stand for.
“People in Western Australia are sick of the duopoly of the two major parties. We like to compare ourselves to Aldi – an alternative that offers real choice and good value.”
The Nationals have recently gone out on a limb on issues stretching from gun ownership, to deregulating trading hours, abolishing stamp duty for first home buyers, and payroll tax reform.
“These are good, grass-roots, bread-and-butter policies that we think people are hungry for,” Morgan Byas said.
But a point of difference in policy might not be the silver bullet the Nationals are hoping for.
There’s a way to go for the opposition to claw back the seats it lost at the disastrous 2021 election. And a recent poll suggested most people simply don’t know who Shane Love is.
His tongue-in-cheek response was that maybe journalists should start writing about him more then.
“There’s also a large contingent of people who don’t really follow the daily goings-on of politics and still think Mark McGowan is premier – so I’m not too worried,” he smiled.
We asked Mr Love if it was wise to hope for a change of government next year instead of planning a two-term comeback strategy.
“I don’t want another four years in opposition,” he said.
“And WA can’t afford it,” Mr Byas added.
