EDITORIAL: One year out from the election; Cook must step up for WA

With election day less than a year away, it’s time for Roger Cook to get serious. Not about the State election in March. Though Mr Cook hasn’t enjoyed the same stratospheric popularity as his predecessor, Mark McGowan, it would still take a pretty catastrophic collapse for Labor to lose power in WA. It’s the looming Federal poll the Premier needs to focus his energies on. Both Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Peter Dutton, the man who wants his job, know they need WA on their side to form a government. That means Mr Cook has a unique opportunity to figure out what his State needs from the Commonwealth to secure its economic prosperity for decades to come and extract those promises from Canberra. Last election, strong support in WA helped Federal Labor clinch its thin majority in the Upper House. While the party’s primary vote fell elsewhere in the country, in WA, it surged enough to see four seats and the keys to the Lodge change hands. Labor knows it must keep those seats if it wants a second term. Even if it does, the prospect of a hung parliament, the probable outcome of which would be a power-sharing arrangement with either the radical Greens or the slightly less so teals, is looking increasingly likely. That makes Mr Cook’s challenge even more urgent. He needs to extract iron-clad commitments from Canberra on issues that matter to his State. Commitments that aren’t open to negotiation in the event of a hung parliament. That means trying to claw back some of the $300 million in Federal money that was withdrawn from WA’s major projects in last year’s review of the nation’s infrastructure pipeline. It means locking down commitments to streamline approval processes and cutting unnecessary green tape to unlock job growth and address stagnating productivity. It means sorting out the tensions that exist between the Federal Government’s production tax credits for critical minerals and its safeguard mechanism. Industry says the two schemes will work to cancel each other out. On the one hand, they will provide incentives for investing in hydrogen and mineral production and processing necessary for our renewable revolution, while on the other hand, they will punish those companies for the short — to medium-term emissions that will be an inevitable consequence of that increased production. Meanwhile, Mr Albanese and Mr Dutton have been busy fighting a pseudo-election on far-off climate targets. Not only is that bickering a distraction from the economic issues that are having a very real impact on our country and State in the here and now, but it’s also serving to undermine investor confidence in Australia as a place to do business. Mr Cook has an opportunity to step in and redirect their attention back to the issues that really matter.