Liberals seek clean bill with Mettam

Labor's grip on power in Western Australia will likely prove insurmountable come 2025.

Regardless, the Liberal Party WA is betting a change in leader will help bridge the gap, even as its role in an undermanned alliance opposition continues to throw up roadblocks ahead of the next election.

Libby Mettam, who successfully challenged David Honey for his role late last month, has come into the job with a mandate to repair the party’s hobbled image.

Already, she’s reached out to private sector figures and held press conferences far outside the beltway of West Perth, taking the parliamentary press team into Perth’s northern suburban corridor.

It’s a real change of pace for the party, which under Dr Honey had languished with polling numbers barely any better than the 21 per cent primary vote it managed in 2021.

Few observers were surprised to see Ms Mettam challenge for the job.

It’s understood she had the numbers long before she showed her hand on Australia Day weekend, with Dr Honey’s preservation in part likely owing to tumult outside of his control.

That included last year’s disastrous federal election result, in which the party copped a double-digit swing and lost five of its nine seats in WA.

The resignation of party president Rick Wilson in November didn’t help, either.

Pressure, then, had been building for some time, as Dr Honey’s persistently poor poll figures could attest.

Ms Mettam accepted as much on the day she became leader, conceding the party had failed to gain ground on the government while explicitly avoiding pointing the finger at her predecessor for the party’s failings.

“The reality is the team has not been effective as it should’ve been,” she said.

Ms Mettam didn’t shy away from this sentiment when she sat down to speak with Business News earlier this month.

Still, she was guarded.

Her manner of speaking, prone to deliberative pauses that verge on halting prose, disguised what appeared to be some discomfort with questions about her leadership tilt. It took Ms Mettam several attempts to explain her thinking before she eventually settled on answer with which she felt comfortable.

“I felt the party did need a reset,” she said.

“We did need to see a line in the sand in relation to some of the internal issues of the party that had held us back and a clear focus on the issues that matter to Western Australians.

“That is my focus. It’s also my team’s focus going forward.”

Efforts to weed out factionalism in the Liberal Party have proved fraught in the past two years.

The party’s highly publicised post-mortem, which criticised factions for acting out of “self-interest” and recommended reforms to branch and membership eligibility, became the object of a legal dispute when upper house member Nick Goiran threatened to take the party’s state director to court over its contents.

Mr Goiran wasn’t named in that report but his role in ‘The Clan’ – a group of party powerbrokers thought to have been led by the likes of fellow MLC Peter Collier and former senator Matthias Cormann – has been highly publicised.

He’s denied the group exists in any meaningful sense but has nevertheless incurred scrutiny for his role in preselections and a strong personal following in party branches in Perth’s southern suburbs.

That’s despite Mr Goiran’s involvement in an eponymous group chat, the contents of which were published by Seven West Media’s The West Australian in the months after the 2021 poll.

Dr Honey largely dodged the issue while he was leader.

Ms Mettam has gone in the other direction, having stripped Mr Goiran of his plum party secretary role and shifting him to the backbench within days of taking on the job.

She’s circumspect when discussing the issue further.

That includes refusing to explain why Mr Goiran had borne the brunt of her ire rather than Mr Collier, who was retained in his posts after publishing a brief written apology for remarks he made as part of the text message dossier.

“I don’t want to go into the internal matters,” Ms Mettam said.

“There’s already been much said about this. I had given Nick an opportunity to apologise. I’ll leave my comments there.”

Some measure of stability does seem to have returned to the state Liberals since Ms Mettam became leader four weeks ago.

Mr Wilson’s replacement has since been named, with solicitor-turned-Sky News commentator Caroline Di Russo leading the party apparatus along with Ms Mettam and Senator Michaelia Cash.

Preselection reform, started while Dr Honey was leader, continues, with almost every party member given a vote in selecting general election candidates.

Taken alongside Mr Goiran’s expulsion, Ms Mettam cited the move to plebiscites in preselection as instrumental to the party’s reset. She was reticent to discuss internal political matters any further than that, though.

“I think that the public are sick of us talking about ourselves as a party,” she said.

True to her word, Ms Mettam has spent her first month as leader with a view to the next state election.

That’s been evident in her press conferences, which have included trips to Kingsley, Joondalup and Wanneroo: winnable swing seats in north metropolitan Perth the Liberals held under the Barnett government.

Appearances alongside Foodbank boss Kate O’Hara and Accordwest chief Evan Nunn have also helped lend credibility to an opposition that has for two years seemed dead on arrival when it came to engaging with the private sector.

Other shifts – such as handing greater responsibilities to MLC Tjorn Sibma and elevating Steve Thomas into a more visible leadership position – have also proved timely.

Mr Sibma is the subject of significant speculation when it comes to his future in Parliament, with some privately touting him as a strong candidate to run for a lower house seat in Perth’s northern suburbs.

No doubt having him as the opposition’s chief attack dog on Metronet, and butting heads with John Quigley, and will help elevate his stature.

Dr Thomas, meanwhile, is generally considered one of the party’s more astute members in the upper house and has shown a willingness to get into the weeds on spending and energy policy.

He’s going to carry a big load, though, given he is now leader of the alliance opposition in the Legislative Council as well as the opposition’s treasury and energy spokesperson.

That, of course, is just one hurdle among many as the party heads into the 2025 state election.

Ms Mettam is in no doubt how difficult that task will prove.

“It’s a massive task,” she said.

“The most popular premier in the state or country’s history. Enormous power in the chamber. Revenue windfalls from the iron ore industry.

“And yet, we have so many issues in WA.”

Ms Mettam has thus far nominated three areas she believes will resonate most with voters in the years ahead: cost of living, health and crime.

Focusing on price increases is a sensible political play.

Inflation ran at 8.3 per cent in Perth last year, the second highest rate of any capital city in Australia, boosted largely by an unmatched 3.6 per cent surge in the three months to December.

Meanwhile, a federal Labor government is presiding over an economy in which the cash rate has risen at a faster rate than at any time since the 1990s, with Business News last month revealing the number of WA households behind on repayments was almost 50 per cent higher than the national average.

Renters haven’t had a much better time of it, with latest CoreLogic data showing the median rate increasing at the fastest rate in the country in December, capping off an overall increase of 11.2 per cent in 2022.

Crime is a slightly more complicated topic, with Ms Mettam having repeatedly insisted in recent weeks that violent crime in WA is ‘out of control’.

While it’s certainly trended upwards across the state in 2020 and 2021, offences were still relatively low last year, with WA Police tracking fewer offences in 2022 than in the five years prior to the pandemic.

Violent offences are on the up across the entire state but much of that is being felt in regional communities, where the rate has more than doubled in the past eight years.

When pushed on these figures, Ms Mettam countered that the general decrease in crime was largely attributable to a fall in drug offences, which are lower now than at any time since 2014.

Still, the point remains that a law-and-order platform may prove less than compelling, particularly when the state government is running a similarly hard line on youth detention.

Health policy, meanwhile, presents as comfortable terrain for Ms Mettam, who has chosen to retain her role as spokesperson for that portfolio.

She is, like many opposition leaders across Australia in recent years, fond of touting ambulance ramping figures, which in metropolitan Perth were up 26 per cent in January on 12 months prior.

It’s important to note those figures came as case volumes also reached an eight-year high.

However, recently released Productivity Commission research shows St John WA managed the second-best response times for any ambulance operator in Australia in FY22.

Data like that does help Ms Mettam bolster her case it’s the government that needs to pick up the slack.

Unsurprisingly, it’s a subject Ms Mettam seemed comfortable addressing.

She recited in great detail how the Barnett government had put more beds in public hospitals and been responsible for the four-hour rule in emergency departments.

The further the interview progressed, the sharper Ms Mettam’s responses became; concise slogans and phrases that, if repeated often enough, could give a moribund opposition a pulse headed into 2025.

“I have so many people say to me, ‘How on earth is that we’re in a state as prosperous as ours that we have a health system that’s on its knees?’” she asked.

“That’ll be a priority of ours as a team going forward in the lead up to the next election.”