Basil Zempilas has published his report card. One year as WA Opposition Leader. One year of travelling the state. And the conclusion? West Australians want housing they can afford, a health system that works, and relief from the cost of living. If this required twelve months of travel, one wonders what the previous twelve years of polling data were for.
“Good and effective Opposition,” Zempilas writes, “starts with understanding people’s lives, their frustrations and their hopes for the future.” Five paragraphs. No policy position. No specific failure of the Cook Government named. Nothing committed to except continued listening. The WA Liberals do not have a listening deficit. They have a credibility deficit. And there is no path to good and effective opposition, let alone government, with a credibility deficit.
There is a substantial literature on what effective opposition actually requires in a Westminster system. David Clune and Scott Prasser’s The Art of Opposition is a good place to start. They say the opposite of Zempilas. The purpose of opposing, as Philip Norton puts it in the foreword, is to win the argument — not to conduct an indefinite survey of public sentiment. Prasser is unequivocal: oppositions need to be more than critics of governments; to be seen as a government in waiting, they need real policy options ready to implement. John Howard, who spent nearly five years as Opposition Leader before winning government, was blunter still: an effective opposition must constantly maintain a policy agenda fit for the circumstances. One wonders whether any of this has reached the Leader of the WA Opposition’s desk.
Edmund Burke observed that political loyalty begins in the particular — in what he called the “little platoons” of society. Family, church, neighbourhood, association. People do not develop loyalty to an abstraction. They develop it through attachment to something concrete and local, and from there it scales outward to country and commonwealth. Burke’s observation is a permanent insight about how political movements hold together: from the bottom up, through people who are committed enough to show up.
A political party is one of Burke’s platoons. Not the parliament. The party — the branches, the volunteers, the candidates, the people who doorknock in an election and argue your case at barbecues and stand for ten hours next to someone unpleasant handing out how-to-vote cards in seats they know they cannot win. These people are the infantry of any political movement. They are not motivated by listening tours. They are motivated by conviction — theirs, and their leader’s.
The WA Liberal Party won seven seats out of fifty-nine at the 2025 election. Its leader, the star recruit of the party, won his own seat of Churchlands with 50.7 per cent of the two-party preferred vote — in a seat that returned 63.3 per cent to the Liberals eight years earlier. The party does not have the luxury of extended listening therapy sessions. It needs to give its people a reason to fight, and quickly, before they conclude the fight is not worth having.
When a political organisation substitutes process for conviction, the people who leave first are never the passengers. They are the platoon leaders — the ones with energy and ability and options. They leave not because they disagree with a policy, but because they conclude that the organisation is not serious. And because they are the people who do the actual work of political organisation, their departure is both silent and catastrophic. What remains is a party of people who are comfortable with permanent opposition — which is to say, a party that has already lost.
Donald Rumsfeld said that weakness is provocative. Yes. I say it is also contagious. And it spreads downward.
Ask a punter in my part of the world which state Liberal they’d trust, and the names you hear are telling. Nick Goiran — described by one admirer as the GOAT of the WA Liberals. Michelle Hoffman — because she stands up for women and babies, and stands against single men being able to legally procure a baby on desire. Phil Twiss — because he defends firearms owners and the prosperity that fossil fuel has built. They are known because they have convictions and are willing to state them. The party needs more of that, not less.
Now consider what happens when the leadership does not share it. As a candidate during the 2025 state election, when asked about the existing WA abortion legislation, I said that babies born alive after an abortion should not be left to die. The then Liberal leader and health spokesperson was silent. No defence of the position. No engagement with the argument. Just silence and distance. It fell to Maryka Groenewald of the Australian Christians to introduce the Born Equal Care and Protection Bill and prosecute the case in parliament. In March this year, the Cook Government conceded in Hansard that babies who survive an abortion should receive medical or palliative care. Groenewald won because she had the argument and was willing to make it. In a fight for providing care to a dying baby, the parliamentary Liberal leadership wore yellow instead of blue. No one votes for cowardice.
The contagion filters all the way down. A leader who will not state a position teaches his parliamentary colleagues that positions are dangerous. The parliamentary team teaches the branches. The branches teach the volunteers. The volunteers who want to fight for a position notice that there is nothing to fight for. They’ll find something else to do with their Saturdays, or another organisation to support. And then you are left with the kind of party that publishes five paragraphs about listening and calls it leadership.
So what would it look like if the WA Liberals had something to say? The party has taken a position on stamp duty concessions for first home buyers and opposition to the Belmont Race Track. This is not a platform.
On health: decentralise. Queensland runs sixteen independent Hospital and Health Services, each with its own board, budget, and authority to hire. WA runs its entire regional system through a single centralised entity with decisions made in Perth for communities spread across 2.5 million square kilometres. The results are 23-page guidelines for inserting a cannula and four separate forms to administer medication for a heart attack. Commit to independent regional health boards with real authority and real accountability.
On housing: the bottleneck is not raw land. It is the cost and delay of turning land into serviced, buildable lots — headworks, approvals, zoning. Fund headworks directly so greenfield developments can proceed. Permit more homes where roads, water, and sewerage already exist, rather than forcing development ever outward. Phase out stamp duty for the inefficient tax that it is.
The party faithful do not need a manifesto. They want to know what they are selling on the doorstep. Right now, they have nothing to sell except the promise that their leader has been listening.
The WA Liberals are not going to win back Western Australia by being a less competent version of Labor. They are not going to win by discovering, after yet another regional tour, that people want cheaper houses and shorter emergency department waits. Everyone knows this. The question is what you propose to do about it, and why your answer is different from the government’s, and whether you have the courage to say so plainly.
One year in, the listening tour has delivered its finding: people are unhappy. Everyone knew that already.
Noted. Now lead.