Yahoo Finance WA election: Zak Kirkup hopes to save at least one piece of the Libs' furniture – his seat
Sixteen days before the state election, Western Australia’s opposition leader, Zak Kirkup, conceded defeat. As the doors opened to early voting booths last week, he said what had been obvious for months: the Liberal party was not going to win and needed to work hard just to save the furniture.
At a leadership debate on Thursday night, he urged people to vote Liberal anyway to ensure Labor did not gain “total control”.
“I know what happened in the past when Labor had too much power and a popular premier – it resulted in WA Inc,” Kirkup said. “It is dignified to talk about the future of our state and talk about what it means for democracy if Labor gets too much control.”
Related: A state apart: Mark McGowan's pandemic performance taps into WA's separatist past
WA Inc, the corruption scandals in the 1980s involving businessman Alan Bond that resulted in the then Labor premier Brian Burke going to jail, is a case study in what happens when big people in a small town have too much power. Applying it to the McGowan government is such a reach that Kirkup likely strained something – but he has precious few cards to play.
Premier Mark McGowan’s personal approval rating is 88%; Kirkup, at 34 the youngest member of state parliament, sits on 29%.
Newspoll last week showed Labor ahead 68-32 in two-party-preferred terms, a 12% swing to Labor after its thumping victory in 2017. It is shaping up to be an “absolute landslide”, Kirkup told the West Australian.
The campaign would shift to seat-level fights to try to keep the numbers on opposition benches in at least double digits.
“Because without that, another four years of Labor with an opposition that is reduced to single-digit seats, that’s a massive, massive issue for the future of our democracy,” Kirkup said. “I’m conscious that this is my body on the barbed wire here. I need to get as many over the fence as possible now.”
WA Liberal campaign material literally just assuming they’ll be in opposition pic.twitter.com/Bi43c40DEt
— Tom Rabe (@Rabe9) February 27, 2021
The pre-election concession tactic has been done before, by Labor’s Geoff Gallop. He ran up the white flag in 1996, just before the Liberal party won majority government for the first time in the state’s history. Gallop went on to win in 2001. McGowan was trampled in 2013 and won in a landslide in 2017.
That time when Labor conceded before polling day (and it worked out alright for the then Opposition leader) pic.twitter.com/Tzm2lRbyEo
— Anthony De Ceglie (@AnthDeCeglie) February 26, 2021
It’s a two-election strategy that Kirkup will be hoping to emulate. But there is a catch: both Gallop and McGowan had safe Labor seats. Kirkup holds Dawesville, in the satellite city of Mandurah, on a margin of just over 300 votes. Never mind saving the furniture – with less than two weeks until the election he is fighting to save his seat.
Kirkup came to politics at an early age. In 2004, aged 16, he presented the then prime minister, John Howard, with a business card that read “future prime minister”. He says the cards were “a piss-take by my parents” who were slightly baffled to have produced a politics-obsessed child. It speaks to Kirkup’s earnestness that rather than shredding the gift out of embarrassment, as most teens would, he decided to take the networking opportunity.
This is the “future PM” business card Zak Kirkup handed to John Howard when he was still in high school. @Gary_Adshead kept it in his archive for years. Its appears @zrfk will take the leadership of the @LiberalsWA in the next few hours. @9NewsPerth pic.twitter.com/WaosVt4BdK
— Adam Haynes (@9haynesy) November 24, 2020
He sounds just as earnest now, speaking to Guardian Australia earlier this month about the responsibility of being made opposition leader just 15 weeks out from the election.
“My mum rang me when she heard that I’d become the new leader of the Liberal party, and she was like, ‘Congratulations. This is such a big thing. You must be so happy,’ ” he says. “My immediate response was: ‘Actually, no, it’s so serious. There’s so much work to do in such a short period of time.’
“My family, we’ve come from a very tough background, and it speaks to the power of WA and WA democracy that someone like me could be in a position of being leader and the alternative premier. I’m very honoured by that.”
Kirkup grew up in the working-class suburb of Midland in Perth’s east. His grandfather was a Yamatji man from the midwest, the same traditional country as the retiring state treasurer, Ben Wyatt, and the federal Indigenous Australians minister, Ken Wyatt.
Kirkup proudly acknowledges his heritage but does not identify as an Aboriginal person. It’s a complex issue: Indigenous identity is born not just of genetics but of lived experience and connection to community. Kirkup does not feel comfortable with just one out of three.
“My father and I speak about this … I talk about it as being from a family with Aboriginal heritage,” he says. “My dad has not been comfortable talking about his heritage as much, and he’s always very clear about us being Australian first. And that’s the most important thing to him.”
Related: Gospel according to Mark: can anything stop Western Australia’s Covid saviour's re-election?
Kirkup has held the shadow portfolio of Aboriginal affairs and says he wants to continue working with Aboriginal communities, even if he loses his seat.
“When I go to the midwest, I make sure I go to those suburbs like Spalding that are traditionally where the Aboriginal reserves have been,” he says. “I try and understand as much as I can the experiences that people are going through. I have not lived those, and I get a bit of a sense of there but for the grace of God go I. I’m very lucky. I consider myself very lucky, together with my family. But I want to make sure we help as many people as possible.”
Kirkup dropped out of university to volunteer at the office of the then WA opposition leader Matt Birney and joined the party’s head office in 2007, becoming deputy state director. Two years later, aged 22, he went to work for then premier Colin Barnett. His career to date includes a brief stint outside politics as a consultant at construction firm BGC, which included four months working as a labourer. He told PerthNow in 2017, after he was elected to parliament, that the experience was instructive: “I probably didn’t anticipate just how hard people worked and just how little government they want in their life.”
Labor has seized on Kirkup’s real-world inexperience during this campaign, running attack ads highlighting his youth and background as a political hack. It was unnecessary – both are obvious.
Kirkup looks and sounds exactly like a man in his 30s who has spent most of his career working in politics. Cut open any political office of any party in Australia and a dozen will spill out: keen young men who, no matter what shoes they may actually be wearing, always give the impression of wearing RM Williams boots.
He does not shy from his employment background. Rather than being inexperienced, he says, it meant he came to parliament with knowledge of how to draft policy.
He appears stumped by the suggestion that the party may have decided to appoint a rookie while undergoing a rebuilding phase.
“Oh, I don’t know,” he says. “I think I got the job because the party believed that I was the best possible person to take them to the election … That’s all I really thought about.”
He has been too busy to ponder it: in three months his party rolled out 55 policies. Now they are a showcase to the remaining Liberal voters: keep us in the building and we will push this further in 2025.
The political commentator Dr Martin Drum describes Kirkup as “very much a moderate, small ‘l’ liberal in the Turnbull mould”.
Turnbull was deeply unpopular in WA. If Kirkup manages to retain his seat, he will be on the chopping block for the same issue that brought Turnbull undone the first time around. Conservative Liberal party members who oppose taking a strong line on climate change will blame him for having lost an election that was always unwinnable.
Related: Perth's homelessness crisis: the WA election issue Mark McGowan can't shake off
“Part of that might be deflecting from other people’s failings,” says Drum. He names the former opposition leader Liza Harvey’s decision to push for state borders to reopen in July, as Melbourne was struggling to contain the second wave, as the moment at which defeat was secured.
The party’s emissions reduction policy was described as “laughable” and thin on detail by McGowan, but the strong headline targets drew praise from the Conservation Council of WA and other green groups.
Kirkup, in defending the policy, compares it to the moon landing, saying: “This is what happens with bold and visionary policy.
“Labor can laugh at it all they want, but in 10 years’ time, gosh, in five years’ time – mate, like this is where we’re going to need to be.
“And I reject entirely that this isn’t a Liberal party policy … If there are any detractors, they’ll say what they want. But I’m sure they said the same thing of Sir Charles Court and David Brand, when we talked about the North West Shelf or state agreements. I’m sure they said the same when Kennedy said they wanted to go to the moon.”
He will have to hold true to that position if the two-election strategy is to play out, says Curtin University’s Prof John Phillimore.
“If he manages to hold on to his seat, then you’d expect him to stay the leader,” Phillimore says. “In that case, for his own credibility, he has to at least keep some sort of ambition on the emissions front.”
