Collie in play as Murray steps away

Mick Murray may never have got into politics were it not for some workplace inequity and a greasy sandwich.

Working underground in a coalmine for the better part of 25 years, Mr Murray understood both the physical demands of 12-hour shifts and the inherent dangers of the job.

What he didn’t understand, however, was why workers at the coalface were supplied healthy amounts of degreaser at lunchtime, while underground workers were required to wrap their lunch in newspaper to avoid contamination.

Although not particularly union-oriented to that point, Mr Murray’s frustration with the absurdity grew until, one day, he called a stop-work meeting specifically to organise and bargain for the right for coalminers to wash their hands.

“We had got the oil and the grease that goes on the chains that we were trying to wash off with ordinary soap that we brought down ourselves,” Mr Murray told Business News.

“I said to the guys, ‘Stuff this! Look at those bastards over there; they’ve got their hands clean for lunch’.”

The gambit paid off; within days the underground crew was supplied with buckets of degreaser.

“It went from where we couldn’t get it to stupidity,” he said.

Some industrial disputes were easier than others, though, and while Mr Murray can laugh now about a job that gave him lifelong friendships and the joy of a weekly paycheque, he clearly resents the antagonistic attitude his opponents and, on occasion, colleagues have taken towards the industry.

Nowadays, representing Collie-Preston in state parliament and serving as a minister, Mr Murray can more effectively than ever prosecute arguments on behalf of the workers, leveraging years of political survival and capital to ensure Western Australia’s lone coalmining town is visible in policy debates.

When Mr Murray arrived in state parliament in 2001, a product of the local council and the Australian Manufacturing Workers’ Union, he faced a prevailing view among opponents and colleagues that coalminers were underworked and overpaid.

“I challenge anyone to come underground and do a day of shift work on the borer or a shovel or on a machine where you’re breathing fumes all day,” he said.

“It was tough; a lot of people before me didn’t last very long once they came out of the mines.

“They brought the age of retirement down to 58 [because of] poor air, nitrates … the lifespan wasn’t very long.”

To understand Mr Murray’s frustration, one must first understand the transformation of his home town and electorate namesake of Collie, located about 45 minutes east of Bunbury and with a population of about 7,000.

Collie’s two mines – owned separately by Griffin Coal and Premier Coal – produce just 9 million tonnes of coal per annum.

By comparison, Queensland’s controversial Carmichael coalmine, owned by Adani Mining, will produce 10mtpa once operational next year.

Unlike eastern states, WA doesn’t have much of an export market for coal; most of it is used domestically, with Collie’s local coal-fired power plant, Muja, likely to have just one unit operational by 2024.

Two other nearby plants, owned separately by Synergy and Bluewaters Power, collectively employ about 700 workers, and their future is presumably as precarious as Muja’s position over the coming decade.

And while coalmining in WA is small relative to the rest of Australia, its contribution to Collie’s economy is enormous, employing about 14 per cent of the town’s residents per latest census data.

Mr Murray has long championed a transformation for Collie to become a tourism destination, owing to the widely accepted view that coal is more expensive for power generation than gas or renewables.

The town’s demographics appear stacked against it, however, with a population that is on average older, poorer, and less educated than the rest of WA.

Difficulties notably boiled over in February last year, when the state’s energy minister, Bill Johnston, reportedly told the town’s residents at a union-organised meeting the transition away from coal was outside of the state government’s control.

The state government isn’t insensitive to these struggles, however, with hundreds of millions of dollars having flowed into the town since 2017, courtesy of investment in tourism and vital infrastructure such as roads and hospitals.

For his part, Mr Murray is particularly proud of the investment and jobs he has secured for the town in the past four years, such as its array of bike trails, public sector jobs, and $13 million emergency services centre.

Culturally, Collie remains wedded to its blue-collar roots, and being sympathetic to those values while ushering in a cultural rethink among the business and working class has been a struggle.

“Convincing people that there are jobs in that has been very difficult,” Mr Murray said.

“It’s difficult to be able to … understand there’s a job in that service industry.”

Mick Murray (left) with Roger Cook and Mark Irwin ahead of announcing a series of sport and recreation facility grants in May. Photo: Gabriel Oliveira

One could reasonably argue that Mr Murray, a titan of South West politics, can be viewed as the foremost authority on Collie, a town that has anchored successive redistributions of his electorate and helped secure him nail-biting wins over the course of his political career.

Persistence has also played a part, with Mr Murray having spent most of the 1990s running against then incumbent, Hilda Turnbull. 

While his background as a councillor, union-affiliated mineworker and local sporting hero put him within five points of winning the seat in 1993, he was well beaten in a rerun four years later, earning just 41 per cent of the vote and facing diminishing returns on the campaign trail.

Come 2001, however, and he was convinced to take a third run at the seat by upper house member and Labor veteran John Cowdell, who reasoned Mr Murray was the only candidate who had built enough of a profile to win.

After three weeks of counting, Mr Murray finally got the call he had waited eight years for: he’d won the seat of Collie by 34 votes.

“You’re not expecting to win, then you’re nearly there, and then you think you’re going to lose by five or 10 votes,” he said.

“I was that cranky [during counting] that my daughter moved next door to live with her brother-in-law.

“I was living off of the computer, watching postal votes being opened. Ten would be counted, seven for them, three for me, ugh.

“That’s how it was; it was a very stressful, emotional moment when I got across the line.”

It wouldn’t be the last time Mr Murray would pull off a close victory, with unkind redistributions in 2008 shifting him into a race against then-rising star for the Liberal Party, Steve Thomas.

The new seat, which took in most of Mr Thomas’s former electorate of Capel, made Mr Murray an underdog for re-election, as the state was set to boot Labor from office after two terms.

But Mr Murray denied the electoral trend, pulling off a surprise 421-vote victory.

A far closer scare came in 2013, when a well-funded campaign by former Troy Buswell adviser Jaimee Motion appeared likely to dislodge the incumbent on election night.

So convinced of the win were both parties that Mr Murray was already organising his finances for a post-parliamentary life. However, a recount of the postal votes in the days thereafter handed him a 54-vote victory.

“I felt sorry for her [Ms Motion] personally, but not for the [Liberal] party,” Mr Murray said.

“They were running around the place singing [Kylie Minogue’s Locomotion] to the tune of ‘do the Jaimee Motion’ … but I can tell you, on Tuesday, they were packing up, and on Wednesday I was back in a job.”

Spirited wins and an ability to keep the seat stubbornly in Labor’s column were reportedly part of the reason Mr Murray was elevated to the ministry in 2017, with the former country football luminary having held the sports and recreation portfolio since.

By that stage, Mr Murray’s margin had swelled on the back of a Labor wave and a strong personal vote, to a point where he now holds the seat on an almost 15 per cent margin.

That result may mask a tough reality for Labor in March when Mr Murray, who will be 71 by the next state election, will retire.

There are factors that will play into Labor’s hands, not least of which is its double-digit polling lead that appears to presage an uptick in support for the state government.

But while Mr Murray has retained the seat at the past four elections, his slim margin may disguise a strong personal vote that may not flow to other Labor-nominated candidates in what is traditionally a conservative, resources-dependent electorate.

All three major parties are primed for the March contest, with the Labor Party having preselected former councillor Jodie Hann to replace Mr Murray.

While unlikely to draw on the same personal support as the incumbent, Ms Hann has built a reputation in the local business, education, and coalmining communities in her professional career. 

She is likely to face a stiff challenge from The Nationals WA, which has drawn a strong recruit in Wayne Sanford, a former councillor and shire president of 13 years with a professional background on development boards in the South West.

Mr Sanford’s candidacy is especially compelling given he ran for the federal seat of Forrest in 2019 as the candidate for Labor, strongly opposing tax loopholes and promoting the party’s campaign slogan of being ready to govern.

He lost that election by a double-digit margin, but not before heaping praise on the state government for addressing road issues, mobile black spots, and regional hospital struggles in the region.

Mr Sanford likewise lauded Mr Murray after announcing his candidacy, arguing the electorate deserved someone as strong and robust as the incumbent, in what can probably be viewed as an appeal to Collie’s rusted-on Labor voters.

Labor’s fortunes in towns like Collie are already the subject of great attention federally, where antipathy towards the Labor Party in resources-dependent electorates in Queensland, where a swing of 4.3 per cent that delivered 23 seats to the coalition at the last poll was widely seen as the lynchpin in the coalition’s shock victory.

Mr Murray is accustomed to being a thorn in Labor’s side. He happily admits that some viewed him as a gadfly under Geoff Gallop and Alan Carpenter, and is aware some on the party’s progressive flank were unhappy to see his promotion to the ministry.

And while Mr Murray has supported the state government’s work in Collie, privately he was reported by Business News to have threatened to retire if the party took a 50 per cent renewable energy target to the 2017 state election.

They didn’t, and Mr Murray stayed.

But his imminent departure and the increasing likelihood of a win next March gives leeway for the state government to reintroduce the target should it feel it has a free enough hand on the issue.

If that was to eventuate, Labor may find itself running the risk of becoming a city-centric party.

Although it’s mathematically possible to win a majority of seats in state parliament without winning any in regional WA, to do so would require winning 30 seats in Perth (for context, 34 seats of Labor’s 40-seat governing majority are based in the state’s capital).

For his part, Mr Murray doesn’t view the outsized focus on city-dwelling and suburban voters as a problem unique to Labor. 

Nevertheless, he is concerned that shifting the party’s base explicitly away from the regions could have a corrosive impact on the state more broadly.

“The divide between country and city is getting wider, not closer, especially politically,” Mr Murray said.

“The natural drift away from country towns makes it difficult for political parties to continue to put facilities in there that will be used by small numbers of people.

“The country towns themselves need to be reinvented, and that’s something that’s a problem for both sides.

“We need to look at not just closing one door but opening a new one … otherwise we won’t have those country towns.”

Mr Murray is clearly troubled by the trends, but he’s hardly one to get bogged down by the naysayers. When it comes to those who have derided his hometown over the years, he’s more than happy to see the back of them in retirement.

“I’m going to go back to Collie,” he said.

“That’s where I’m going to retire and that’s where I’m going to stay.”

Jordan Murray is not related to Mick Murray