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.

( Policy Analysis )

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.