There is every chance Wanneroo will remain a bellwether seat in this month's tight West Australian election, says election analyst William Bowe.
Largely made up of blue collar, outer-metropolitan suburbs on the northern fringes of Perth the seat, held by the Liberals with an 11 per cent margin, has been impacted by the sharp downturn in the West Australian economy.
It is an area where jobs and infrastructure are tipped to be key issues and where Pauline Hanson's One Nation is expected to find strong support.
"It has gone the way of the government in every election since it was created and I think that is likely going to be true again this time," Bowe says.
"It is a classic marginal seat out in the mortgage belt, it swings big when a swing is on … mainly because you have got young families who aren't passionately committed to one side of politics or the other."
And this time around, not only are many voters disengaged but there are just as many that are disillusioned. Small business owner Carla Weir is one.
Anti-politics
"I am a little anti-politics because I find both parties [Liberal and Labor] to have good and bad policies and in the end you just pick the one that is the least bad," she says.
"I am opinionated about a lot of issues and I just don't feel, to be honest, that voting for one person and not another is really going to change any of those things."
Weir owns and runs Gaia's Organic Gardens, which sets up and maintains organic vegetable gardens around Perth.
She lives in Wanneroo with her three-year-old son and her partner, who is retraining as an electrician after working fly-in, fly-out as a rigger.
Weir says she remains undecided about how she will vote on March 11 but is leaning towards minor parties.
"Each one of them [the parties] has some good things that I would like to see happen and some bad things, and so it is like 'which one do I vote for at the end of the day'," she says.
"I will probably just give my vote to either One Nation or Greens to support those smaller parties."
She is angry about the Liberal government's plans to build the Roe 8 highway through sensitive wetlands on the other side of the city, opposes the sale of the state's poles and wires and says she shares a lot of One Nation's concerns about the Muslim community.
Desire for change
One Nation Wanneroo candidate Joe Darcy says the mood he is picking up in the electorate is that "people are definitely look for a change".
"I think people are looking for an alternative," he says.
"Hopefully One Nation people can hold the balance of power and by doing that we can make either of the major parties, whichever one gets in, accountable and make sure they don't have the credit card to spend."
The WA Liberals struck a preference deal with One Nation in February, which will see the Liberals preference One Nation ahead of its alliance partner the WA Nationals in the upper house. In return One Nation will preference the Liberals ahead of Labor in the lower house.
Bowe says the preference deal makes the result in Wanneroo hard to call, with each party's success to be determined by whether protest voters like Weir follow how to vote cards.
"These deals are only as good as your capacity to get how to vote cards into people's hands and for your voters to actually do what the how to vote card says," Bowe says.
