Now that voters in former premier Mark McGowan’s seat have had their say, the major parties have started in earnest trying to “control the narrative” as they dissemble the weekend by-election result to suit their particular perspective.
But they cannot stretch and bend the laws of arithmetic.
The indisputable fact — the known known, as Donald Rumsfeld would have categorised it — is that Labor has lost thousands of supporters since McGowan won an astonishing 82.8 per cent of the primary vote in his southern Perth stronghold in the COVID election of 2021.
The ALP suffered a massive swing against it of 22.5 percentage points.
And for the first time since McGowan first won the seat in 1996, the ALP needed to rely on preferences for its candidate, Magenta Marshall, to get over the line.
This was notwithstanding the fact the party splashed out plenty of money on its campaign, in which McGowan and his not inconsiderable star power was put to good and frequent use during several walkabouts and media events with Marshall through the electorate.
And that Marshall was up against a Liberal opponent, Peter Hudson, who was barely old enough to vote.
And was next to invisible in the electorate.
Yes, a win is a win.
But this result shows that the bizarre era of McGowan-mania is well and truly over.
And that politics in this State is returning to the traditional arm wrestle between Labor and the Liberals.
Particularly fascinating is the analysis in today’s newspaper in which the Rockingham result is extrapolated Statewide to examine how many seats Labor would have lost had the two-party preferred swing been replicated in a general election.
The answer is 23.
Those include each and every of the shock wins from the 2021 poll — Warren-Blackwood, Nedlands, Churchlands, Carine, Bateman, South Perth, Riverton, Scarborough, Kalgoorlie, Dawesville and Hillarys.
Others at risk would be those won from the Liberals in 2017 including Kalamunda, Kingsley and Mount Lawley.
Which would have left Labor clinging to government with a wafer-thin one-seat majority in the 59-seat Legislative
For the Liberals, this means they are back in the game. They need to make sure they have got high-quality candidates ready to hit the ground running next year.
For Premier Roger Cook — who for years has been in McGowan’s shadow — he needs quickly to establish his own identity and his own priorities. He is truly a decent bloke but unless he can demonstrate more, the electorate may feel they have little to lose by ditching him.
He is not being helped by the chaos he inherited around the Aboriginal Cultural Heritage Act.
If Cook is truly open to making changes, he should be making them sooner rather than later.
The hard work must start today for Labor.
It’s all very well for Cook to say the Liberals “didn’t have a great night” but a potentially fatal double-digit swing against the ALP cannot be dismissed so glibly.