A WA Liberal MP has launched a scathing attack on his own party's performance, saying it failed to be a "credible opposition" over the past four years and calling its central election energy proposal "the stupidest policy" ever released by the party.
Upper House Member for the South West, Steven Thomas, who is on track to secure his seat for another term, unleashed a barrage of criticism against his party on ABC Radio Perth.
"When COVID came along Mark McGowan did a pretty good job with it and he's been rewarded for that," Mr Thomas told the ABC's Nadia Mitsopoulos.
"But at the other end of the argument, from a Liberal perspective, we lost our credibility.
"We didn't campaign hard enough for four years, we lost our connections to the community.
The politics, the policies and the people. We've collected all our coverage on the election campaign here.
"I think a lot of our people somehow thought that everybody made a mistake in 2017 and it was going to come flooding back to the Liberal Party, but what we needed to maintain all through the last four years, and particularly the last four months, was our credibility that we could be a credible opposition.
"And we failed to do that."
The WA Liberals suffered a thumping defeat at Saturday's election, with WA Labor on track to claim a majority in both houses of WA's Parliament.
Mr Thomas rejected the suggestion the former Liberal leader Zak Kirkup, who lost his seat of Dawesville on Saturday, had been "thrown to the wolves".
Mr Thomas claimed there was a group of around six people who were "supposed" to make decisions about the campaign, policies and costings.
"But in the end it was a very small, select group around Zak (Kirkup) who made those decisions and I think he stands by his decisions," Mr Thomas said.
"He was the maker of his own demise in my view, because that little leadership team were the people who decided to put out that energy policy, who decided to admit defeat weeks out.
"Those decisions damaged everybody. While I wish him the best I think he is as responsible as everybody else."
ABC News: Andrew O'Connor
The WA Liberals yesterday said it would take steps to begin "a comprehensive review of the election, from 2017 through to and including the formal campaign period."
"The circumstances of this election and the events leading up to it made for the most difficult campaign in our party's history," a party statement said.
"History and timing were not on our side."
Mr Thomas said he had contributed to previous party reviews but they had "contained things that the leadership and the people in control of the Liberal Party didn't like, so none of it ever saw the light of day."
"If you are going to have another review, it actually has to result in change," Mr Thomas said.
"It has to look at going back to empowering those local branches, and not allowing them to be dominated by any one particular group.
"And it's not just the conservative Christian Lobby who seem to have an excessive amount of power in Perth, there are other groups as well that form around factions.
"It is time for the Liberal Party to take the power back from those groups."
Mr Thomas said the party needed to change "the selection process, the control process for the Liberal Party", suggesting plebiscite preselection to give the entire party a chance to contribute.
Mr Thomas said he had heard frequently from within his party over the past four years that "it would never get worse than 2017".
"The reality is it got significantly worse," Mr Thomas said.
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"For the two and a half years, I don't think any policy was developed. Nobody heard from the Liberal Party about issues.
"All of those things meant that people thought the Liberal Party wasn't present and wasn't in the debate."
Mr Thomas then drilled down on the election campaign, saying while some strong Liberal policies, including payroll tax reform, had been developed, they were largely undersold.
Instead, Mr Thomas said the party focused on a "couple of policies and decisions" he labelled "terrible" and made the Liberal "situation far worse", zooming in on its central renewable energy proposal.
"That energy policy was the stupidest policy I have ever seen the Liberal Party release," Mr Thomas said.
"It makes the Alexander Downer, 'The Things That Batter' domestic violence policy, look sensible by comparison."
Mr Thomas was referring to Mr Downer's comments as the leader of the federal opposition in 1996, when introducing a set of policies dubbed "The things that matter", he segued into the party's domestic violence policies by saying, "from the things that matter to the things that batter".
Mr Thomas said the politics of the Liberals' energy policy and what it aimed to achieved made it "foolish".
Read the ABC's election expert Antony Green's analysis of the WA election.
"The expectations that thousands of Greens supporters would suddenly jump onto the Liberal Party bus because of this greener-than-green policy was foolish politics," Mr Thomas said.
"But it also shredded our already damaged credibility because it was utterly undeliverable.
"You could not do it even if you wanted to."
Mr Thomas called himself the "greenest" member of the Liberal Party but said he thought the policy was "undeliverable".
"You couldn't have shut down the Collie Power Station by 2025 even if you wanted to, you couldn't deliver renewable energy down that pathway and get it to Albany safely without droppage," Mr Thomas said.
"If you decided to do it, it would cost billions.
"That energy policy, in my view, is the reason why our costings were such a debacle, because you could not afford to have that policy costed."
Outgoing Liberal MP Alyssa Hayden, who lost her seat of Darling Range, took aim at the party's former leader Liza Harvey and the role her leadership played in the party's thumping defeat.
Ms Harvey, who lost her seat of Scarborough at the weekend's poll, led the Liberal Party during the COVID-19 pandemic and came under intense scrutiny over her original call for interstate borders to open.
She stood aside months out from the election to effectively give the party a clean slate, and Zak Kirkup took over the reigns.
"If we'd swapped over to Zak a year out from the election, I think we would have been in a better position," Ms Hayden said.
"I don't think Liza did us any favours, certainly got us no runs on the board and we went backwards."
ABC News: Jacob Kagi
Ms Hayden said Ms Harvey's border comments hurt the party "immensely" and that there had been "no consultation in the party room" over the position.
She claimed under Ms Harvey's leadership, she and other Liberal MPs, "were frozen out".
"Silly things, like we were gagged in Question Time, we were not allowed to interject it just killed our morale and we were no longer a team," she said.
Ms Hayden said comparatively, former leader Mike Nahan and Mr Kirkup were both very inclusive.
Ms Hayden said in hindsight neither the Liberal's green energy policy, nor Mr Kirkup's decision to concede defeat weeks out from the poll, were the right moves but that Mr Kirkup had "done an amazing job".
"I had people stopping me congratulating me on changing leader.
"Zak ran an amazing Opposition line, he did an extremely good job in a very short timeframe with no resources."
One of what could be only two re-elected Lower House Liberal MPs, Libby Mettam, who is the acting party leader, said her colleague had made some valid points.
ABC News: Gian De Poloni
"The WA Liberal Party do need to take responsibility, not just for the fifteen weeks of the election campaign, which obviously could have been better," Ms Mettam said.
"But also the last four years where we had that time to really build and be in a better, more resilient position through this pandemic election."
Ms Mettam said being an effective Opposition would be "an enormous challenge" but it was not an insurmountable task.
"We do need to reconnect with our base, and do that very quickly, we do need to re-energise the party," Ms Mettam said.
"There is a public interest in ensuring that we have an effective working Opposition and we quite clearly need to do more to ensure that we meet that objective, numbers aside."
Ms Mettam laughed off a suggestion that "you could flip a coin" to determine the next Liberal Party leader, but said it would be determined with her party colleagues at a later time.
Excerpt from:
Liberal MP Steven Thomas lets fly at own party in wake of WA election catastrophe - ABC News