A state apart: Mark McGowan's pandemic performance taps into WA's separatist past

Western Australia is on a high. In the past 12 months it has closed its borders to the eastern states, creating a Covid-free bubble and thumbing its nose at Canberra in one fell swoop. It is also on track to record a $3.1bn budget surplus, thanks to high iron ore prices, at a time when the pandemic has cleaned out government coffers worldwide.

It is proof for a view long-held by many West Australians: the state does not need the commonwealth nearly as much as the commonwealth needs the state, and WA voters will richly reward a leader seen to be standing firm on states’ rights.

Premier Mark McGowan is on track to sweep the state election next month on a wave of state pride, a current so strong that the opposition leader, Zak Kirkup, has already admitted he cannot win.

The pandemic has seen the rise of a “very peculiar West Australian sentiment”, says Dr Martin Drum, a political commentator from Notre Dame University. In good times and bad, the state falls back on century-old isolationist tendencies. The federation is unfair, exceptions should be made.

Related: Clive Palmer v Western Australia: border ban justified by risks of Covid-19, high court reveals

Two parties at the state election are running on isolationist policies: the Western Australia party, which advocates that jobs in WA should go to West Australians; and the Waxit party, which calls for WA to become an independent nation, freed from “the shackles of the federation”.

WAP, which may be regretting its acronym following the release of a chart-topping song of the same name, is tipped to retain its one member of parliament, former One Nation member Charles Smith, in the upper house seat of East Metro. It is a collection of independents and former members of rightwing parties that describes itself as a centrist party based on the politics of WA’s first premier, Sir John Forrest. Forrest was made premier in 1890, around the same time that the discovery of gold in the east of the state sparked the sudden growth of the state’s population from 47,000 to 179,000.

Forrest supported federation and led the Yes campaign when WA finally agreed to hold a referendum on joining the federation in 1900. He was briefly affiliated with a party called the Western Australia party before helping to stick a slew of anti-labour parties together into the Commonwealth Liberal party in 1909.

Waxit, which describes WA as the Cinderella state “taken advantage of by the three ugly sisters and the wicked stepmother of the eastern seaboard [NSW, Victoria, Queensland and the federal government]”, is not expected to pick up any seats.

‘Mendicants living off someone else’s hard work’

Both parties name the distribution of the GST as among their central tenets, a debate which reached its peak in 2015 when WA’s GST share was just 30c in the dollar and the iron ore price crashed, wiping $3bn off the state’s bottom line.

Related: Perth's homelessness crisis: the WA election issue Mark McGowan can't shake off

The GST dispute sparked another wave of secessionist feeling: the then WA treasurer, Mike Nahan, accused the eastern states, who received some of the GST collected in WA, of being “mendicants living off someone else’s hard work”. The east, Nahan said, was “profoundly jealous” of the west for its mineral wealth. Victoria hit back, claiming that WA had “the mentality of an unreconstructed mendicant” for balking at sharing the profits.

Both the Labor and Liberal parties in WA beat the GST drum, prompting the federal government in 2018 to change the GST model to ensure no state received less than 70c in the dollar back of GST paid. It’s now another argument in McGowan’s arsenal: he held the commonwealth to the line on GST, too.

McGowan walks the line on state independence, reminding voters that he stood up to the commonwealth on borders during the pandemic, while saying the cooperative relationship between his government and that of Scott Morrison is closer than ever.

“There are obviously people who are secessionists, but that’s not a majority view and that’s not my view,” he says. “But I think people just recognise that it’s a lot of what we’ve done, and that it has kept our people safe.

“The reality is, economically, the state has done better than anywhere else in the world. We kept our export industries open basically because we put borders in. We got the [fly-in fly-out] industry largely to move from the east to Western Australia, so Fifo workers have moved here en masse to live. And we have had a strong domestic economy because people are not spending their money in Bali or Thailand or London, they are spending their money here.”

On the issue that is most likely to put WA in direct conflict with other states, rising carbon emissions from the liquid natural gas industry, the state and commonwealth are in lockstep. Both are intent upon promoting the gas industry as a cornerstone of Australia’s energy policy, and leave the problems of reducing emissions to another day.

Kirkup says WA’s physical isolation from the eastern states, and the way it is largely ignored by media companies based in the eastern states, fuels the separatist sentiment.

It’s a sentiment that is exacerbated at every federal election, when the time difference means a televised election special filmed in Sydney could call the result before the polls have closed in Perth. There is a view among West Australians that their votes don’t count in Canberra, and so Canberra will not matter to Perth.

“Various premiers have talked about how in many respects we look north, not east, because of our reliance on resources,” Prof John Phillimore says.

Distrust of the eastern states is “very, very deep-rooted”, says the Grattan Institute’s Tony Wood. “It comes through sometimes slightly jokingly, but it happens often enough to suggest there’s more to it than that.”

He recalls being criticised in business circles for appointing a non-West Australian to lead the WA branch of a company.

“I had customers who rang me up and said, ‘you can’t do this! He’s an easterner! You are going to lose all credibility in WA if you haven’t got a WA person running the business over here!’”

‘Self interest tends to prevail’

WA voted to secede in 1933, and then didn’t. It was, in some respects, more successful than other separatist movements driven by a disgruntled populace whose call for independence was based more on frustration than an actual desire to sever the union.

By the time a delegation sent to the British parliament to petition for succession returned, having been politely informed that Britain couldn’t split Australia without the federal government’s consent, the air had gone out of the campaign. The driving force was to voice discontentment, and the vote had achieved that aim. A complaint had been registered. No need to take it further.

It was what many who voted for Brexit later revealed they wanted: to tell the government they were deeply unhappy by issuing an ultimatum that would never be acted upon.

“Most of the time people realise that it might sound romantic, but actually it’s a pretty dumb idea,” Wood says. “Self interest tends to prevail.”

Wood compares WA’s separatist urges to the Scottish or Catalan independence movements, without the centuries of deep cultural differences. WA was a recognised colony for all of 10 years before federation in 1901 and felt it unfair it was being asked to give it up so quickly. It also did not want to lose intercolonial customs duties which made up a substantial part of its income and would be abolished under federation.

Those two themes, of generalised unfairness and specific concerns around loss of income, have fuelled the separatist movement ever since.

“A lot of it is actually just bravado and annoyance,” says Wood. “I don’t think any of it goes as deep as it would have to go for there to be real motivation for change”.