WA Premier Mark McGowan speaking at Labor’s campaign launch at RAC Arena. Credit:Peter de Kruijff
In late January last year Mark McGowan was tucking into pies with his children at a bakery in Dawesville, a coastal suburb 75 kilometres south of Perth, when his phone lit up.
“We were sitting at a table eating and my daughter was demanding more tomato sauce and the Prime Minister rang me,” he said.
Covered in mud after a successful crabbing expedition with his kids, the WA Premier grabbed some sauce and took Scott Morrison’s call.
“He said, ‘I’m going to have to shut down flights from China’.”
A year later, McGowan has emerged from the crucible of COVID-19 a political superhero in the west, soaring high on the popularity of his hard border policy. His polling for the upcoming March 13 election threatens a wipeout of his Liberal opposition, which could cause headaches for Morrison at next year’s federal election.
Australia’s state leaders have all enjoyed a surge of popularity during the pandemic but the rock star status of McGowan, a 53-year-old from the Perth mortgage-belt suburb of Rockingham, has turned political orthodoxies on their heads.
It’s a world where Labor is at war with unions over automation in ports and has become the darling of business in its relentless pursuit of jobs growth. Meanwhile, the state’s Liberals are adopting policies from the Greens’ playbook, including the astonishing pledge to shut down coal-fired power plants.
McGowan’s ‘middle of the road’ approach has created an upside-down political landscape in WA offering lessons to federal branches, says veteran WA political journalist Peter Kennedy.
“[He’s] forced the Liberals out, they’ve had to go more to the right, but then my view is that the Liberals were so far to the right they had nowhere to go, so they leapt back over the centre and went to the left with that energy policy,” says Kennedy.
Mark McGowan was a Navy lawyer based in WA before joining politics.
“One of the criticisms of federal Labor was that it went too left on things like tax policy and too influenced by the Greens on climate change. If they want to imitate McGowan then they need to push back into the middle and try and push Morrison to the right.”
The cult of McGowan
McGowan’s hardline policies during the pandemic, controversial elsewhere in Australia, have resulted in celebrity-like fandom in WA. Children as young as five know his name, he has featured in numerous viral videos, and one fan even tattooed McGowan’s face onto his leg.
Polls back the anecdotes up, predicting a Labor tidal wave come March 13. His personal approval rating cracked 91 per cent in September and has hovered around the high 80s ever since. A recent Newspoll found Labor was primed for 59 per cent of the primary vote, which would leave just two Liberal seats out of 59 in the lower house.
Morrison has avoided the state and opposition leader Zak Kirkup is at risk of losing his seat, taking the extraordinary step last week of conceding his party would lose the election and pleading for votes because “democracy is at risk” if Labor gains total control of the parliament.
A hard-border approach to the pandemic has proved popular across the nation, but no one went as hard as McGowan, who halts free travel between the states after just one case of community transmission in another state.
Despite the recent hotel quarantine bungle that sent the state into a five-day lockdown, McGowan’s willingness to restrict free travel into the state and his tit-for-tats with “naysayers and doomsayers” such as the NSW government and Clive Palmer have swelled the ranks of his supporters.
The unrestricted COVID-free life WA has been living for most of the past 10 months has its citizens proclaiming him a “life saver”. Even lifelong Liberal voters publicly profess their intent to vote for him at the election.
Perhaps the most astounding aspect of McGowan’s rise is that despite not being born in Western Australia, he has captured the hearts and minds of a fiercely parochial public often cynical of the benefits of the federation.
Who is Mark?
While his popularity is new, McGowan’s ambitions go back a long way.
Born in Newcastle in NSW in 1967, he headed west in 1989 to start a career as a navy lawyer at the Garden Island naval base. After meeting Sarah, a teacher who became his wife, they settled in the southern coastal Perth suburb of Rockingham where they remain to this day, raising their young daughter Amelia and two teenage sons Samuel and Alexander.
McGowan’s father Dennis, a squash centre owner, sparked McGowan’s interest in the ALP and by 1996 he was elected as the local MP in what is a safe Labor seat. A political junkie, one of his most cherished political memories is sharing a beer with his idol Bob Hawke at the eponymous Bob’s Bar in Perth ahead of the 2017 WA election.
One Labor insider, who was not authorised to speak on behalf of the party, said during his early years McGowan demonstrated himself as a hard worker and bright but struggled to get traction because of his east coast heritage.
Mark McGowan with his parents Dennis and Mary in the mid-90s.
He persevered, working his way into the inner circles of former federal opposition leader Kim Beazley and former premier Geoff Gallop.
For a time, his colleagues nicknamed him ‘Sneakers’; someone who ‘brown-nosed’ his bosses so vigorously that all you could see was his shoes. His most notable political feature was how completely unremarkable he was, knowing when to keep his head down.
After a stint in the Gallop cabinet and then in opposition he was elected as Labor leader unopposed in 2012, surviving a bruising defeat in the election the next year. By 2017, WA voters loathed Liberal Party leader Colin Barnett and McGowan and his re-energised team led by his chief of staff Guy Houston, Chevron’s former corporate relations adviser, romped home to victory with a record 9 per cent swing in the primary vote.
Gallop, now an Emeritus Professor at the University of Sydney, says McGowan always showed leadership potential.
“If you want to deliver something in the rough old world of politics you have to be capable of setting priorities, capable of winning support and capable of negotiating,” he said.
“He is a person very committed to the political process and making sure he is effective in it.”
WA Premier Mark McGowan speaking at his campaign launch.Credit:Peter de Kruijff
McGowan’s formula and the upside-down election
McGowan’s obsession with budget surpluses, prioritising resources jobs over climate action and a populist promise to keep the state “safe and strong” means even the staunchest Liberal voters face a tough choice this election.
That choice is made even harder when the WA Liberal Party’s signature election policy—labelled a lemon by their own federal colleague Andrew Hastie—is to shut down government coal power stations and bring carbon emissions from state-owned assets to zero from 2030.
WA Labor has also demonstrated far more politically impressive outcomes with the federal Liberal party than the former state Liberals could muster, achieving a 70 cents in the dollar GST floor. Plans to introduce a floor were announced by former Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull alongside Barnett before McGowan’s election but they weren’t actioned until after Labor’s win. Barnett rejects the idea that he did not have a good relationship with his federal colleagues but concedes it was a “pretty cynical exercise” to introduce the floor after he had lost.
The business community also naturally gravitated toward McGowan’s government. One of his biggest cheerleaders is multimillionaire developer and card-carrying Liberal Party member Nigel Satterley, who has benefited greatly from the state’s COVID-19 housing stimulus package.
“I know a lot of leading Liberal supporters around Perth think he’s doing an outstanding job. He’s tough, he’s fair and he’s respectful,” Satterley told Perth radio station 6PR.
Too close for comfort
But these policies and the closeness to business have come at a price. Old union allies have turned against Labor and the party has opened itself to comparisons to the dark days of the 1980s when taxpayers were left hundreds of millions of dollars out of pocket as a result of then-premier Brian Burke’s questionable dealings with Perth’s biggest businessmen.
A rare moment of controversy during the pandemic came courtesy of the government’s relationship with media mogul Kerry Stokes, who was granted exemptions to hard-border policies. Freedom of Information documents revealed McGowan’s office was directly involved in Stokes’ application to enter WA from Colorado in April.
In August, Stokes’ oil and gas venture Beach Energy and its Waitsia onshore gas project in the state’s midwest were granted an exemption to WA’s onshore domestic gas reservation policy.
McGowan says his office forwarded lots of border exemption requests and becomes exasperated when asked about his relationship with business leaders such as Stokes.
“When I try and get on with business I’m attacked for that, if I do something on behalf of working people or a union, I’m attacked for that,” he says.
His biggest ruction has been with the Maritime Union of Australia, which accused McGowan of leading a “Liberals Lite” government that will put wharf jobs on the chopping block as he pushes forward with plans to build a heavily automated outer harbour container port.
McGowan says he is proud of his government’s economic and jobs record but emphatically rejects the suggestion he has somehow switched political sides.
“We did obviously have a pretty serious breakdown in relations over the [hard] border when the Commonwealth backed Clive Palmer, so the idea that somehow we were aligned with them, I think, is a misplaced thing,” he says.
West Australian Premier Mark McGowan entering the Dumas House media room ahead of a press conference during the state’s recent lockdown.Credit:Peter de Kruijff
“Like all the premiers, you try and work with the [federal] government and get good outcomes. I’m outcomes-focused.
“But where it’s necessary to stand up for the state, I will stand up for the state.”
In any normal election year, these criticisms may have caused headaches for a first-term government seeking re-election, but this is the new normal and politics is no exception.
“I think [the pandemic] showed people that we’re human and me and the other Premiers and the Prime Minister, we’re all human and we try and do the best we can in the circumstances,” he said.
“If it lifted the stature of people in elected office, well, then that’s a good thing.”
Hamish Hastie is WAtoday's political reporter.