Love bites on the Voice and issues with representation

Shane Love is a rather unassuming figure to take on the mantle of opposition leader.

For one, his past contains few hints to suggest he climbed party ladders in search of political office, having spent most of his life as a farmer before being elected to state parliament in 2013.

He even readily admits that, had former Nationals leader Mia Davies not pushed him to run as her deputy in 2017, he might not have bothered with a tilt at that role.

“I didn’t see the party really wanting me to go further,” Mr Love told Business News.

If his colleagues didn’t want to see Mr Love promoted beyond deputy, though, they did a good job of hiding it earlier this year when he was unanimously elected to lead the Nationals following Ms Davies’ shock resignation from the top job.

Becoming party leader would traditionally have been the ceiling for the former Dandaragan shire councillor.

However, with the Liberal Party a diminished force in the Legislative Assembly, it means he’s now effectively the state’s alternative premier. It’s a momentous situation about which Mr Love appeared unphased when speaking to Business News last month.

Plainspoken as he is, Mr Love admits he had no great designs on the job of opposition leader when he was first elected to parliament about a decade ago.

That’s to say nothing of his own approach to policy.

He confessed to having come to politics with some hopes of one day becoming a minister and, when asked about the appropriateness of a Nationals MP leading a state opposition, was adamant there were no contradictions in bringing a regional focus to a job representing the entire state.

“We may have a regional lens with which we view things, but we understand there’s a whole state,” Mr Love said.

“You can have a view that is for the good of the whole state, but we approach it from the point of view, first and foremost, that there’s an issue here for the regions that may not be reflected in the discussion.”

Time will tell if voters are receptive to Mr Love’s entreaties. Though he’s only been in the job for a few weeks, already he’s benefited from a rebalancing of the political landscape.

Public polling notably has begun to show cooling in the state government’s stratospheric favourability ratings, and the scandal now engulfing Gold Corporation – an issue Mr Love had followed closely in recent years as the opposition’s mines and petroleum spokesperson – will likely offer more political openings in the short term.

On the other side of the aisle, the Liberal Party’s own turmoil appears to have receded some since Libby Mettam replaced David Honey as leader.

While Ms Mettam’s elevation was premised in part on her view of the opposition’s ineffectiveness since the 2021 election, Mr Love believes many problems in that time boil down to visibility issues, insofar as MPs weren’t communicating their achievements and many journalists were focussed on other issues.

“In the everyday application of the parliament, I think we’ve actually done very, very well,” Mr Love said.

If the conniptions of state politics don’t much trouble Mr Love, then the political challenge imposed on him by his federal colleagues, who have become the most prominent opponents of the upcoming referendum on a Voice to Parliament, may emerge as a more potent challenge in the months ahead.

Their views are in contrast to that of the party in Western Australia, which has formally backed the Uluru Statement for the Heart and it’s demand for a constitutionally enshrined advisory body.

The party can ill afford the conflict with its federal counterpart.

Just one Nationals candidate, Tony Crook, has been successful at a federal level in recent election cycles. Even then, that success was largely due to a confluence of factors, which included the presence of a deeply controversial Liberal incumbent who had held office for three decades.

For what it’s worth, Mr Crook served just one term in parliament before losing his seat, with 2010 to 2013 proving in retrospect to be the party’s electoral nadir in WA.

Ms Davies had been respectful but firm when quizzed on the issue since November last year, insisting it was possible to pursue both constitutional recognition and the practical measures sought by her federal colleagues.

Mr Love, however, appears to be walking a finer line on the subject, having signalled in-principle support for the Voice while also allowing for debates on the issue.

That said, he denied his support was tepid when pressed on the issue by Business News.

“I’m asking people to consider it,” he said.

“At the moment, unless something happens dramatically in the interim to upset the whole process, and we know this can happen in referendums, I think it will be supported and I’ll be supporting it.”

These matters are probably ancillary to Mr Love, who would have more pressing concerns about the 2025 election.

That poll presents serious issues for the party, with structural reform to Legislative Council elections having effectively diluted the Nationals’ ability to secure seats throughout the regions.

Rather than having six upper house members elected each across six regions, including three outside of metropolitan Perth, voters at the next state poll will cast their ballot for a single, state-wide slate of candidates.

These rules will likely prove difficult for the Nationals to overcome in 2025.

If the 2021 election was held under the new one-vote, one-value laws, the party would have elected outright just one upper house member. That’s compared to the three who did win, with two needing preferences to get over the line.

Mr Love won’t be directing campaigns ahead of the next poll, given that’s largely the job of the party machine.

Still, it’s not as if he’s divorced of the concerns of metropolitan Perth, with residents in his electorate likely to become part of the city’s commuter belt with the extension of the Joondalup railway line.

Mr Love seems to see a credible path for a regional platform carrying appeal in the city.

“My message to people in Perth will be, if you have a family member or friend who lives or works in regional areas, think of their needs at the next election as well,” he said.

“If you’ve got a husband, daughter or sibling working in mining, flying out to the regions every day, they may need to access local medical facilities or travel on regional roads to get to site.

“Think about them and consider where they’re working and where they’re bringing their wealth home from.”

It’s a different story in the Legislative Assembly.

There are at least a dozen seats where the Nationals may prove competitive, with Warren-Blackwood, previously held by party leader Terry Redman, ripe for the taking after Labor narrowly snatched it amid the party’s landslide win in 2021.

Kalgoorlie was held by the Nationals as recently as 2017, while Pilbara – where (then) Nationals leader Brendon Grylls famously won amid a concerted effort to expand the party’s appeal into the state’s mining and pastoral region – is perhaps as good an option as is available, despite Labor incumbent Kevin Michel now holding the seat by a double-digit margin.

Other options might simply be too hard to crack in one electoral cycle, with Collie and Albany, natural territory for the party, firmly in Labor’s camp. Both seemed gettable in 2021 but, as was the case in most seats, were comfortably retained by the government.

No matter what can be achieved in 2025, the harsh reality for Mr Love is that bar another stunningly poor result for the Liberals (which can’t be completely ruled out as a possibility), now will likely be the most prominent platform he or the Nationals will ever have outside of being in government to press their case to voters in WA.

It invites of him a question that befalls any state opposition leader facing grim electoral prospects: does he actually believe he can become premier?

“It depends on how many metropolitan seats we run for, doesn’t it?” Mr Love joked.

“I think that’s unlikely, given the fact we are a regional party, and, in my view, we do our best work in the regions.

“What has happened, though, is that the definition of ‘regional’ has changed. It’s no longer a line on the map around Perth, and you could make an argument that people in Gidgegannup, which is in the City of Swan, are as regional as people in Morangup, which is a residential area just to the east of it which is actually in my electorate.

“Around the edges of Perth there certainly are now areas where we can claim we wouldn’t be losing our regional focus if we were representing those folk.”