The strongest man in the west

For a time, Queensland billionaire Clive Palmer embodied the unwelcome force from beyond the border who Mr McGowan was battling.

Mr Palmer was going tit-for-tat with the WA government for most of last year before taking a break over Christmas and ultimately deciding not to run in the election or spend any money on advertising or donations.

[Mr Palmer] picked the fight with Western Australia, he picked the fight with our state

Mark McGowan

Mr McGowan has been aided in furthering his protectionist lines leading into the election by NSW Deputy Premier John Barilaro.

Mr Barilaro has been a willing combatant with Mr McGowan over COVID-19 lockdown strategies, going as far on Tuesday to say the WA Premier stands for mental health-related deaths due to his hard border policies.

“We’ve had COVID deaths in this nation, but we’re going to have more deaths from mental health from people locked away in isolation,” Mr Barilaro told radio station 2GB. “Mark McGowan, that’s actually what he stands for.”

Mr McGowan took aim against the management of COVID-19 by other states with some tough talk on the same day.

“My view is [if the virus is] in the community, you kill it, we get rid of it, we don’t have it and that’s the best outcome for WA and the entire country,” he said.

“NSW seems to think it’s okay to have the virus ticking along in the community and you just deal with it in individual suburbs and individual venues. I’d rather just get rid of the virus, we’ve done that now for nine months in WA.”

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Mr McGowan has created more anti-east material this week by reigniting concerns states like NSW were trying to steal WA’s GST share.

Mr McGowan was featured in an Australian Financial Review front-page story on Tuesday where he said NSW and other governments would try to undo the GST deal to give more money back to WA that was made two years ago.

“Just so it is understood what the GST deal does, is it gives us 70c in the dollar,” he said.

“NSW still gets over 90c in the dollar, so I don’t understand what they are talking about. They just always seem to be looking at ways to undermine the finances of our state.”

Mr McGowan’s comments came two months after the NSW Treasury claimed WA was being shielded from the economic impacts of COVID-19 because of iron ore royalties and the GST carve-up.

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Treasurer Ben Wyatt told 6PR on Tuesday, however, that his federal counterpart Josh Frydenberg and Prime Minister Scott Morrison had indicated there would be no change to the current GST arrangement.

Mr Wyatt defended the Premier sparking up on GST, despite the federal guarantee, as Mr McGowan was “quite rightly asserting we’re not going to cop any change”.

“It may get the odd, I guess, dust-up from a state, from one time to the next because they are used to getting more of Western Australia’s money,” he said.

“The biggest subsidy by a country mile per capita comes from WA into the Commonwealth and certainly not from NSW. Josh Frydenberg has made it clear we have an agreement.”

Mr McGowan’s willingness to talk up the use of his border policies and the popularity of those measures in WA has made it nearly impossible for the opposition to cut through.

Liza Harvey had been an easy target for Mr McGowan as opposition leader with border policies that were never in step with the fears and expectations of the broad populace.

Her stepping down and Zak Kirkup’s ascent have seen the Liberal party refrain from getting too close to criticism of WA’s COVID-19 management, fearful of being burned by a Labor behemoth all too happy to liken them to traitors of the state.

Mr Kirkup was trying his best on Tuesday to shift the conversation from state squabbles to domestic policy issues.

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“Whatever the Premier gets up to with respect to other states and territories, I think all West Australians would expect we focus very much on the long-term plan for WA,” he said.

“Ultimately we wouldn’t expect anything more than both the Liberal and Labor parties to be talking about our plans for the future and what it means over the next term of government.”

Unfortunately for Mr Kirkup, West Australians will remain fixated on the state’s COVID-19 response to the east as long as there are community outbreaks that threaten to bring up WA’s iron wall again and again.