This WA election, let’s just dynamite the Ningaloo reef and be done with it

No-one knows who Libby Mettam is. Stroll up to the average Western Australian punter, say, an ol’ bloke having a midday tipple at The Buffalo Club, and ask, “Sir, what are your thoughts on Libby Mettam?” He’ll understandably respond, “Ay? Wot? Shout me another Swanny-D, would ya?”, and it’d be amiss of you not to.

Truth is, I’ve had to google her six times while writing that paragraph alone. It turns out she is the leader of the WA Liberals — the state’s opposition party, a fringe political group of yesteryear that the late King McGowan banished to the outskirts of politics after his great victory over the once-golden “Golden Triangle” elites. The party holds two seats in the WA lower house, and no two hemorrhoid cushions on earth have ever felt as alone and abandoned. 

Libby and co are merely placeholders anyway, keeping said cushions warm until Kerry Stokes can spit a fully formed Basil Zempilas from his slime chute, tanned, ready and rested, like a private school Uruk-hai. WA’s Coalition is in it for the long haul, with its heir apparent confident the state’s sole newspaper (which Zempilas happens to be an employee of) won’t do too much digging on his infamously iffy past, let alone his tenure as Perth’s lord mayor.

So it goes. Labor Premier Roger Cook is running all but unopposed in the upcoming March 8 state election, coasting along on the afterglow of McGowan’s unprecedented triumphalism, shaded by the still radioactive legacy of Colin Barnett and his crew of cronies. Cook doesn’t have to do much else other than meek policy rollouts, tough-on-crime performativity, and the odd blood sacrifice to the true rulers of Western Australia: Rio Tinto, BhP, Twiggy and Gina. 

For Western Australia is, at its black heart, a petrostate. There’s no two ways about it. We are run by gargantuan robber barons who have spent the better part of the past decades cracking our bones and sucking the marrow. The mining corpos are the only kingmakers that matter, and every premier who has clung to power for even a heartbeat knows and respects this. 

Roger Cook is now something between toady and lobbyist, deferring to the cadre of megacorps that call the shots before rolling out their desired policies with barely a whiff of friction. Whether it’s fighting the rollout of a federal Environmental Protection Agency or cracking down on environmental protesters like they’re Hamas, Cook is little more than an extension of the mining industry’s unfillable, unrepentant Moloch — a sort of mercenary-enforcer arm, used to keep things in line and little else. 

All of Western Australia’s major problems — its cooked rental market, housing shortages, obscene ambulance ramp times, “soaring youth crime”, head-splitting traffic congestions — can be traced back to the boom; its unprecedented mining wealth and the state’s failure to capitalise on it, to prevent it from being vampirically hoovered from its veins by the mining megacorps and an industry of remora. Successive governments have ensured the flow of money runs one way, and that our reward for this hijacking is a series of miscalculated, miserable and miserly infrastructure projects, each too little too late. 

Premier Cook is essentially a willing Eli Sunday to a series of unstoppable, milkshake-slurping Daniel Plainviews: nothing but the afterbirth, a false prophet. Really, why does Western Australia bother holding elections at all? With both major parties captured by mining interests, why vote on which one will eventually pass along the money sack? It’s a waste of taxpayers’ money, which is really Woodside’s money, and living here has taught me there’s nothing more sinful than that.

Instead of a parliament, we should just have a cabal of resource industry CEOs sitting around a Mustafar-style boardroom, replete with lava pits and all. Why vote for which sorry jig the premier must dance when you could just put the jug band directly in control? 

I’m sick of premiers consigning the Ningaloo Reef to a protracted death. I want one who’s willing to fly their personal dirigible over it to drop dynamite down a whale shark’s gob. Why have a premier to tell us that BhP isn’t that sorry for detonating another sacred Indigenous site, when instead I could have a billionaire premiergarch in a hardhat out there pushing the blasting plunger himself? Why have a premier that’s flesh and blood when we could just have the ghost of Lang Hancock ruling us via Ouija board?

Barnett, McGowan, Cook, errr [frantic googling] Libby Mettam, stop making me witness these people’s hideous pink and sweaty heads, with their constant look of consternation from a life spent kowtowing. Just crane in a 30-tonne iron ore boulder, drop it in the speaker’s chair and let things play out. What’s the worst that could happen, another children’s hospital filled with lead?

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