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The West Australian Liberal Party lies in ruins.

For so long the dominant political force in this state, the Liberals have been sent a message by the electorate that is beyond brutal in its force.

The politics, the policies and the people. We've collected all our coverage on the election campaign here.

Their leader is gone, blue-ribbon territory all over Perth has fallen into Labor hands and the Liberals' Lower House ranks are now so minuscule that they could fit on a tandem bike, outnumbered by the Nationals.

And their stint in the political wilderness could last much longer than the four miserable years that now certainly await the Liberals, after an unmitigated disaster of an election night.

"This is ground zero for the Liberal party," Churchlands MP Sean L'Estrange told party supporters at a function that, somehow, could have been his political wake, with his seat now on a knife-edge.

"The nuclear bomb has gone off."

ABC News: Jessica Warriner

March 13 was never going to be about toppling Mark McGowan for the Liberals, once the Premier began enjoying rockstar popularity in the COVID era.

But as recently as when Zak Kirkup took on the leadership in late November, the hope in the Liberal partyroom was that they could save the furniture.

The WA election has been called for Labor.

Holding onto their 13 seats, maybe even gaining one or two more, was seen as the bar for Mr Kirkup.

Instead, the party has now fallen off a cliff and seems to have lost both its official party status and its role as the opposition.

"Very few people walk away from this catastrophe undamaged," was the stinging verdict from one MP.

Mr Kirkup losing his own seat is one of the telling signs he is the first WA opposition leader to do so, and the first major party leader in WA to suffer that fate in nearly 90 years.

ABC News: Eliza Laschon

But the fact it was one of the least-surprising things to happen on election night shows beyond doubt how badly the campaign went for the blue team.

The Liberal post-mortem will be stinging, with the finger pointing having begun long before polls closed.

One of the greatest causes of ire among Liberals both those who remain and the ones who will spend today cleaning out a career's worth of work in their offices was the party's green energy policy.

ABC News: Hugh Sando

Many Liberals were mystified by it when it was unveiled, believing it further alienated the party's base and torpedoed their hopes in Collie for years to come, while having no significant subset of voters that it could realistically win.

It scared voters on the right and while some on the left may have liked it, they still voted Labor or Green or so the thinking goes.

But beyond the policy arena, the actual campaign itself was a source of immense frustration for some Liberals.

Some MPs felt Mr Kirkup's conceding defeat with 16 days to go consigned the Liberals to irrelevance and turned off voters, who perceived they had given up.

It has many Liberals questioning whether the move to a first-term opposition leader so close to an election was a mistake.

"The energy policy was a debacle," a shellshocked former Liberal leader Mike Nahan said on the ABC's election night panel.

"And I think in the end you will see his statement that 'we have lost', that we had no chance of winning, just was not right."

Furthermore, the party was so cash-strapped that it was outspent dramatically by Labor. Attack ads targeting Mr Kirkup appeared relentlessly with little response.

ABC News: Tabarak Al Jrood

And Labor used 'dirt files' to great success, forcing the Liberals to defend questionable views espoused by numerous candidates while the Opposition made no in-roads in that space.

But, as much as the now-former MPs who will today start dusting off their resumes if they hadn't already were immensely frustrated by the way the party handled the past five weeks, the problems run much deeper than that.

And they started long before Mr Kirkup was even a parliamentarian.

ABC News: Hugh Sando

Many Liberals believe the current dearth of political talent in their ranks can be attributed in part to the failure to attract and nurture those with ability during the years of the Barnett government.

The question of who the next Liberal premier would be has been a source of fear for conservatives since Christian Porter and Troy Buswell left state politics, not a newfound phenomenon.

The politics, the policies and the people. We've collected all our coverage on the election campaign here.

Then there is the issue of preselection.

The Liberals battled candidate controversies on multiple fronts from one claiming the allegations against Mr Porter were part of some conspiracy related to the state election, to another suggesting a link between 5G and COVID-19.

And those were just the tip of the iceberg.

A significant number of Liberals believe potential quality candidates are choosing not to seek state preselection because there is no realistic chance of success unless they attach themselves to a key party powerbroker.

ABC News: Andrew O'Connor

Winning Liberal preselection in the metropolitan area, without tying yourself to either Nick Goiran or Peter Collier, is pretty unrealistic these days.

Expect to see old Liberal hands demanding urgent party reform in the aftermath of this annihilation, with calls for plebiscite-style preselections and other changes to curtail the influence of powerbrokers.

Most immediately, though, the Liberals need to work out how such a paltry team can hold a politically-dominant Labor government to account while seemingly not even being the official opposition.

Simple tasks like allocating policy portfolios and filling committees will be made extraordinarily difficult by there being so few MPs.

Some MPs believe the Liberals will have no choice but to have coalition discussions with the Nationals, with their only chance of properly holding Labor to account being to work together.

At this stage, it might be David Honey and Libby Mettam flipping a coin to decide who becomes leader although for now, the Liberals have a glimmer of hope that Mr L'Estrange or maybe Bill Marmion could hold on.

ABC News: Gian De Poloni

Whoever gets the job will face the challenge of a lifetime, with the Liberals needing to climb Mount Everest and then some just to make the 2025 election even close to competitive.

As for the departing leader, he will cop plenty of blame from some Liberals for a campaign more than one labelled a "shit show".

But most Liberals admit that the problems run much deeper and will not be easily fixed.

Picking up the pieces from an election night calamity will be a long process as the tiny number of Liberals to survive this bloodbath try to work out how to rebuild a shattered party.

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The WA election has left the Liberals decimated and in the wilderness, facing a long road back - ABC News