WESTERN AUSTRALIA PARTY

[b_auspol]

WESTERN AUSTRALIA PARTY (WA Party)
https://westernaustraliaparty.org.au/

Oh this one is fun!

The Western Australian Party were founded in 2016 by Julie Matheson, who wanted a party to support her dignity in her habits of running for state and federal election as an independent (she is in fact a local councillor, so this isn’t quite as lost a cause as this can seem). She registered the Julie Matheson for Western Australia party. Now, I tend to regard any minor party that uses a candidate’s name in the party name is a flashing warning that the party is largely personality-driven by that individual and probably has very little cachet outside that individual. They are very very bad at re-electing anyone who doesn’t have that name, and quite often don’t even succeed at that. Probably for this reason, the party name was changed to the Western Australia Party, but also so they could claim to be a revival of John Forrest’s original Western Australian Party. This appears to be only slightly more factual than Clive Palmer claiming United Australia Party is a revival of the original holder of that party name.

They also are registered as WESTERN AUSTRALIAN PARTY as they want me to hate them on sight for using an all-caps name. They also really like using bold for word emphasis on their website which makes me hate them even more.

The WA Party currently has one member of the WA LC: Charles Smith, who was elected for One Nation, did as One Nation candidates tend to and became an independent, then decided to join WA Party rather than set up his own vanity party in May 2020. It’s a small blessing.

On this basis, we can probably assume the WA Party don’t have any real prospects this election despite having someone in the Legislative Council, unless they get really lucky with group voting ticket preference flows.

The WA Party claim to be a centrist party based on that most WA of issues: taxation reform as WA isn’t getting enough money from Canberra. Are you surprised? I’m not.

The policies on the website are grouped into 6 topics: your community; your family; your health; our state; your environment; your money. Someone in the party really believes in person-centring their concepts, clearly. Also fascinated by the choice of “Our State” but “Your Environment”. That sounds a lot like the personal-responsibility school of environmentalism rather than collective action, people.

Am I unduly suspicious? Let’s see!

Your community is about the suburbs and about community generally. In terms of suburbs, they want bigger lots (uhhhh welcome NIMBYs), rezoning to be paid for by developers and that money spent on the community (that’s an awfully specific and difficult sounding policy), and more community appeal processes for planning decisions. They are upset on losing money for infrastructure to other states, about rising utilities prices, and so the WA Party want more renewable power (good!). Also they want to divert water from ‘draining out to sea’ and use it for growers (I’m always slightly sceptical over this – generally Australia’s issue is not enough water flow for rivers, rather than too much, but I also understand how dry WA is).

They are also upset about the rising crime rate, which they plan to fix with mandatory sentencing, tougher sentencing for “heinous crimes” and more rehabilitation. “Youth Crime, gangs, drug use, robberies, anti-social behaviour and domestic violence are all increasing.” Also more money for police. I heavily disagree with mandatory sentencing as a blunt weapon that often does more harm than good and certainly ends up affecting minorities and vulnerable people more than the general community. It is a nice change to see rehabilitation called out for once here, but of course they want more money for cops. And I’m gently going to push back on the “rising crime rate” narrative: the WA Police crime stats show that assault and domestic and family violence have increased, but that property and drug offences are way, way down. Some of this might be a COVID confounder, but the property and drug offences were already down below the 5 year average three years ago, so they’ve been solidly trending down. Long term, crime numbers are going down, and the domestic assault figures going up is generally considered by those who study this to be an increase in reporting rates rather than an actual increase in violence (leaving aside lockdown-related increases).

Also they want to overhaul the entire local government system, because “Currently, local governments are full of political party hacks and are run by unelected bureaucrats who hold immense power.” Ahhhh, that’s the cry of someone who works on a local council if ever I heard one. (You have no power here Jackie Weaver...)

In Your Family, we are back with “increasing domestic violence”! As I said above, I’m slightly sceptical about this, though I would be interested to see a targeted campaign over how a year where people have spent more time trapped in their houses has brought more issues to surface. Also young people can’t get jobs (yes this is a problem at present, exacerbated by COVID, but also because our economy is going into a recession), “families are torn apart by the WA Family Court” (sigh. It’s going to be Men’s Rights issues isn’t it?) and suicide rates are apparently still high.

The WA Party want to tell us that they support “family values”, public education and the apprenticeship system. Oh I see that set of dogwhistles. Family values is defined as children needing both parents. They don’t like that “Many thousands of children are alienated from one parent, and the legal system does not respect that children need contact with both parents.” We have angry fathers here! And it is definitely Men’s Rights too, as “We support increasing counselling and mediation services in cases of family breakdown and revising restraining order legislation to prevent malice in such cases”. Look. When you start talking about restraining orders being used unfairly, I just KNOW someone writing the policy has a (male) family member who doesn’t have custody or has very restricted visitation of his kids for what are some solid domestic violence reasons.

The WA Party also want more trained tradespeople and thus support more apprenticeships. Which is fair. I suspect this also is anti-FIFO code, on a “stop importing tradies from other states to work at the mines” basis.

Your Health says “COVID-19 has highlighted flaws in our health system”. Yours and everyone else’s, WA. The specifics that they have called out are: increasing aged care prices; increasing obesity; mental health; drug and alcohol abuse; hospital waiting times and ramping. I’m nodding along with all of this: it’s a reasonable health policy that actually has some nuance on the drug and alcohol front. They call out education, policing and active and engaged work opportunities as lowering drug and alcohol abuse, which is certainly true for the first and the third, and the second we will have a bit of a disagreement on. In terms of COVID, the WA Party “supports a strong border and quarantining measures, to protect our people and to reduce the load on our public hospital system”, so they clearly are currently of the opinion that the WA healthcare system is currently under the pump, which seems to be a common opinion among many parties. And they like border closures.

Our State policies are about “Defending West Australian Jobs”. They want a 90% hiring quota for WA workers in “all major resource projects” (so we don’t like FIFO workers), eliminating payroll tax for small businesses (note my shock), and “Get Perth out of the Regional Migration Scheme”. If this is what I think it is, it’s the requirement for skilled workers to work in ‘regional’ areas for a period as part of their visa conditions. I know some doctors on visas who have to deal with this; I believe part of the idea is to help with regional staffing rates for skilled workers. I believe Perth or parts thereof are in fact considered ‘regional’ for the purposes of the policy. I’m sure the WA Party are unhappy about this for some other industry (probably mining related), and for kinda racist reasons, but it’s absolutely part of staffing for healthcare and after they’ve just complained that the healthcare system needs more support, I’m side-eyeing this.

There’s also a lot about how Canberra steals all our money, keeps moving federal agencies out of WA, mining companies not providing housing so there are more FIFO workers, etc. Also WA never gets defence contracts (I think they’re jealous of SA and its submarines). Also “balanced migration” – aka more ‘protect local jobs for local citizens’.

And there’s this: The Western Australia Party supports a strong border to prevent COVID-19 transmission, as long as it is medically justifiable, and not for economic isolation purposes. I love it. It’s such a vague statement. I can’t figure out if they think that the mid 2020 and/or current border closures were justifiable or not.

Your Environment is not encouraging to me, especially when I see this: The Western Australia Party believes there is a balance between mining, agriculture and the environment. In terms of policies: they are very worried about water security, and the pollution from desalination, so want more water conservation; they are interested in the transition to renewable energy (and industry jobs from it); they want more tree cover and tree planting to improve shade, rainfall and lower salinity; protection from invasive pests such as fruit fly and cane toads (cane toads are getting near WA??); and protection for Aboriginal heritage sites. You know what’s notably not here? Anything about climate change. It’s interesting that “renewable energy” is now generally accepted as a reasonable policy now it’s a cheaper fuel option, but we still daren’t talk about the climate.

Your Money is largely about tax rates being too high. They particularly don’t like stamp duty or payroll tax and want to simplify the tax system (I always have a kneejerk reaction to ‘simplify tax’ as it tends to correlate to flattening the taxation). There’s a fleeting mention of the gender pay gap but nothing about what, if anything, they want to do about it. Also ban political donations from property developers, which are apparently still legal in WA. They do want to maintain employee wages and entitlements to stop a “race to the bottom”, though I suspect this is a policy better pursued federally.

Any Predictions?

Actually no. I originally assigned secession to the WA Party when I did the spreadsheet, but we didn’t mention them by name at the time and since we have an Actual Secession Party on the ballot, I’ll let the Western Australia Party be.


Is this party trying to kill me?

No.


Is this party trying to harm me?

There are no gun policies among their policies, and I didn’t see anything problematic about vaccination, at least. They do appear to be harbouring a family court/men’s rights problem, but I can’t quite tell if it’s at the whinging about not seeing the kids end of things or the full on Men’s Rights end of the spectrum. That’s still enough to put them into the ‘harm’ category for me, though I wish I had a better read on the level of toxicity.


Conclusion

The WA Party are essentially at the mid end of the Liberal Party, in terms of where on the compass they are, while still being annoyed about the Major Parties. Feels very much like the sort of Common Sense Independent ("Why don't politicians do this? It's only Common Sense!" blah blah mid right wing opinion blah).

I’m not particularly keen on their love of policing, their crime policies, their lack of interest in climate change, everything they said about the family court and their desire to strip away taxation. But for most of that they couched things in terms where there was a desire to each sides things, rather than being hardcore fringe.

I’d rank them around the Liberals on the ballot. Probably below, since they set off my Men’s Rights radar.