Preview of the WA State Election

[b_auspol]

13 March - time for the WA State Election! (And time for the rest of the country to find out if WA are quietly holding a secession referendum simultaneously)

Let's be honest here, I mostly care about the Legislative Council, as I don't have any strong affinities for particular lower house seats and I think we can all guess that the margin McGowan will be sweeping back in with will be huge, bar any quarantine catastrophes in the next two months.

Also, my interest is heavily on minor parties, given that it's a good indication of the parties likely to throw their hats in the ring for the upcoming Australian Federal Election that must be held by 30 June 2022 and is presumably being announced as soon as Stage 2b vaccinations get underway.

So! Who is registered! Who is on the ballot? All ready to go?

Parties:

There are as of the time of writing 17 parties registered in WA plus two more attempting to get registered in time, plus whatever crop of independents run. We won’t have that until 12 February 2021 when nominations close.

• Animal Justice Party
• Australian Christians (WA)
• Australian Labor Party
• Daylight Saving Party
• Great Australian Party
• Health Australia Party
• LEGALISE CANNABIS WESTERN AUSTRALIA PARTY
• Liberal Democratic Party
• Liberal Party
• National Party of Australia
• NO MANDATORY VACCINATION PARTY
• Pauline Hanson's One Nation
• Shooters, Fishers and Farmers Party
• Socialist Alliance
• SUSTAINABLE AUSTRALIA PARTY - STOP OVERDEVELOPMENT / CORRUPTION
• The Flux Party / Liberals for Climate
• The Greens
• WAxit
• WESTERN AUSTRALIA PARTY

Great Australian Party and Legalise Cannabis are the parties attempting to register in time get on the ballot. I both want GAP to succeed (for my amusement) and do not want them to (because I rank them next to the Citizens Electoral Council in terms of how prone they are to conspiracy). Legalise Cannabis will likely manage to get registered quite easily.

Both the Daylight Saving Party and Flux are trying to register new ballot paper names, which I will get to if they succeed. I suspect they may not be successful, as both parties are hoping to pick up excess votes by using the word "Liberal" in their name. In any case, it's a super cynical ploy from both parties.

Let's get to it.

There are a couple of things I plan to do for the parties listed.

1. There was a test I came up with for the last federal election, to try and distinguish between far too many right wing parties so that I could figure out how to order them on my ballot. It's the "Is this party trying to kill me?" I'm going to extend this to the "Is this party trying to kill me? Is this party trying to harm me?" test for this election.

2. Back in March 2020 a few friends and I joked around about various minor party responses to COVID. I ended up putting a list together here. I'll be reviewing these predictions for the relevant parties to see how accurate we were.