There was a notable piece of symmetry to Labor’s newest MP, Magenta Marshall, celebrating her Rockingham by-election win by standing on the side of a local road, holding up a sign that thanked the electorate.
Her by-election campaign had earlier been rocked by another occasion that saw her standing on the side of the road – after being busted by a booze bus, with a blood alcohol content of 0.08, back in 2021.
Now the major parties will embark on a post-mortem of Saturday’s result.
For Labor, it’s about to figuring out why there was a 33 per cent swing against it on primaries, and whether there is a danger this could be replicated at the State Election in 2025.
The post-poll analysis for the WA Liberals is very similar, only they have a very different motivation for identifying the chinks in Labor’s previously impenetrable armour.
The Libs, who we must remember still lost the race rather convincingly, are, with good reason, finally seeing light at the end of a tunnel that once looked a lot darker, and a lot longer.
So, what do we take from the Rocko result?
There are some obvious conclusions we can tick off.
For starters, it’s very hard to replace the State’s most popular Premier in living memory with an unknown candidate, who is outed for drunk driving just weeks from the poll.
Even a genetically engineered super-clone, combining the DNA of Justin Langer and Sam Kerr, two of our most beloved West Aussies, would still have failed to maintain Mark McGowan’s obscene primary vote in Rocko.
A result that was driven by COVID and will prove to be a total outlier of a State Election.
Magenta didn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of doing it.
Beyond the boundaries of the electorate, McGowan’s replacement in the top job, Roger Cook, is also a relative unknown compared to his predecessor.
To paraphrase the great Bette Midler, it must have been cold there in State Daddy’s shadow, and Cook is still dealing with the lingering effects of frostbite.
Since emerging from said shadow, the major source of light on Cook’s face has been the harshest of spotlights relating to the calamitous rollout of the Indigenous cultural heritage act.
Add all this up and it’s not hard to explain any elector disquiet.
It’s a little harder to explain why the Libs, despite enjoying every advantage listed above, could only earn a meagre primary swing of 8 per cent in their direction.
There was an even bigger swing – 13 per cent! – to not voting at all, so let’s pump the brakes on a Liberal return to power.
If Cook’s mob had pre-selected the excellent independent candidate, Hayley Edwards, the deputy mayor of Rockingham, who attracted 16 per cent of the primary vote without major party backing, one suspects the narrative around this by-election result would be very different.