WA’s resource riches fuel a politics of greed and grievance

Despite its vast resource wealth, WA’s politics remains fuelled by corporate power, parochial resentment and populist grievance, writes Dr Mark Beeson.

WESTERN AUSTRALIA is famously a long way from anywhere.

Unsurprisingly, local politics can be a bit self-absorbed and insular. Denigrating outsiders, even if they’re fellow Australians, is de rigueur, even if using pretentious foreign phrases isn’t. Even so, Premier Roger Cook talking about “east coast clowns” took the state’s favourite pastime to a new level.

And yet given the amount of money the rest of Australia lavishes on resource-rich WA thanks to the indefensible GST carve-up, you might think Cook would know better. But no one ever lost votes in WA by dumping on the out-of-touch, elitist Eastern states who undeservedly and unappreciatively benefit from “our” resource wealth. All of which makes One Nation’s by-election victory even more noteworthy.

True, it doesn’t really matter given Labor’s thumping majority in the WA Parliament, but it does suggest that the locals are still grumpy, despite the latest state budget including policies designed to ease cost of living pressures. People in WA’s far-flung regions were not impressed.

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It’s not as if the Cook Government doesn’t have plenty of money to throw around. Eastern staters will have noticed that WA’s a big place and there’s lots of valuable stuff to dig up, all of which helps to explain eight budget surpluses in a row. Deciding quite what to do with all the loot is a good problem to have, but the $100 fuel support payment didn’t go down well in the bush.

Still, some people are doing very nicely out of the resource boom. Gina Rinehart, Australia’s richest person and Senator Pauline Hanson’s principal supporter, is estimated to be worth around $40 billion, so she can afford a few bob to help out a pal and a plucky battler. After all, Gina did it tough, too, apparently. Good to see a couple of Aussie gals making a go of it.

Speaking of which, Woodside’s CEO is another local woman. Anyone still labouring under the illusion that women can’t make tough decisions ought to check out Liz Westcott’s record. Overseeing the development of a monstrous contribution to Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions on the Burrup Peninsula – obligingly waved through by the Cook Government – takes a special sort of grit.

Still, it’s the bottom line that counts, and Woodside’s windfall profits from the Iran war should help allay any doubts about the future everyone’s children will inherit. Despite Woodside’s net zero commitments being described as ‘greenwashing’, deliberately misleading and ‘contradicted by the company’s actions’, it is unlikely to get any pushback from the Cook Government.

On the contrary, Labor’s candidate in the Secret Harbour by-election was Georgia Tree, a former Woodside employee and intermediary between it and the government in which she was a former staffer. The revolving door between politics and business continues to spin in WA, leading some malcontents to fret about conflicts of interest and even state capture.

Under cloud of secrecy, U.S. weaponises Western Australia

The United States has continued to prepare key areas of Western Australia as bases to fight its wars while the public is left in the dark.

It’s doubtful if many votes in the by-election were decided by misgivings about the cosy nature of state-business relations, though, despite the legacy of “WA Inc”. But you might have thought being only 20 kilometres from a prospective nuclear target might have weighed on voters’ minds. Secret Harbour may be secret, but the soon-to-be American naval base at Garden Island isn’t.

Not only will the locals have to put up with inflated real estate prices when the Yanks arrive, but they’ll be vaporised in the event our American cousins get into a fight with China. Still, it’s bringing in lots of investment in the meantime and that’s what matters.

Kids may be able to get jobs in the defence sector, too, not least because local universities are getting on board with the great AUKUS nation-building project. Lots of work for lobbyists with experience in government, as well, not that the WA Government needs any persuading about the merits of the defence sector.

Perhaps being a long way from global trouble spots lulls people into a false sense of security. Many West Australians seem to live in blissful ignorance of the world around them. Their remarkable, startlingly atypical good fortune seems natural and incurs no reciprocal moral obligations to other Australians, much less the world’s undeserving poor. Yes, they’re “doing it tough”, but not as tough as most of the world’s population.

Indeed, if the politics, economic activities and lifestyles of Perth’s elite were replicated around the world, we’d all be doomed even more quickly than seems likely. Not that there’s much chance of many people in the global south following in our developmental footsteps, of course. There’s even less chance of any of them joining us if the support for One Nation and Labor’s response is anything to go by.

Perhaps we really do get the leaders we deserve.

Dr Mark Beeson is an adjunct professor at the University of Technology Sydney and Griffith University. He was previously Professor of International Politics at the University of Western Australia.