CHECK AGAINST DELIVERY
Good morning and welcome to this the Official Launch of the WA Liberal Party’s 2025 Election campaign.
It’s so good to see you all here today and I want to thank you on behalf of the Parliamentary team and all our candidates for the great support we’re receiving from you all as we enter the final stretch of this campaign.
Don’t our candidates look great! And I want to thank each and every one of you for your commitment and hard work to the Liberal party.
By now you’ve all seen the Labor Party’s advertisement featuring Premier Cook claiming that WA has the best economy in the Nation, and of course he’s right.
Through no doing of their own, Labor in two terms of Government has received $114 billion in GST grants and royalties compared with $57 billion the Barnett Government received in its last two terms.
Now everyone in this room knows that the question is not who receives the most money, it comes and goes with the iron ore price and the GST grants and has absolutely nothing to do with the Government of the day. It is an entirely empty boast.
What matters is how Governments manage the money at their disposal to benefit the people of Western Australia and on every metric the two Labor Governments have failed miserably in this regard over the past 8 years.
Our research shows food, utilities and health services are the biggest contributors to the cost-of-living crisis families face every day.
We will ease cost of living pressures by scrapping Labor’s electricity tax, stop wasteful spending and lower fees and charges for families.
The Labor campaign bangs on about their experience but the experience for West Australians is that they are now worse off after 8 years of Labor mismanagement and I don’t think they want that experience to continue.
Can anyone here tell me what WA’s good fortune on iron ore and GST revenues has done for our Health system over the past 8 years?
Between 2017 to 2024, the Labor Government invested just $3 billion in health infrastructure, little more than half of the $5.7 billion the former Barnett Liberal Government invested over two terms of government.
We have record ambulance ramping, dangerous staff shortages and plummeting morale, more than 30,000 people waiting for planned surgery, and 10,000 children waiting up to a year to see a paediatrician.
Our health system is on its knees and the Premier with all the experience, says everyone else - the Productivity Commission, the AMA, the Nurses, Parent Groups – they’re all wrong!
Fixing the Health system will be the major priority of my government. We will hold a Royal Commission to get to the bottom of what has happened and act on its recommendations.
We will invest in our frontline medical work force and hospital infrastructure, cut hospital wait times and ambulance ramping, and ensure people get the care they need.
We will begin the rebuild of our state’s major trauma centre and city hospital Royal Perth Hospital as part of our long-term vision for the state. We know the best location for the new Women and Babies Hospital is at QEII. These two hospitals will set Western Australia up as a leader in healthcare for the next 100 years.
One thing we haven’t seen on this campaign and aren’t likely to see is the debt monster that bounced around in the 2017 campaign. One reason is because the person inside the furry blue costume is now a Labor candidate who probably doesn’t want to talk about how the State’s debt is now higher than it was back then.
Amazingly there’s nothing to show for this extra debt except about 30,000 more public servants, higher household fees and charges and massive blow-outs on the few infrastructure projects that they’ve attempted.
Which of course, brings me to Metronet, originally costed by Labor at around $3billion – that’s the figure they took to the 2017 election – and now projected to cost over $13.5billion. Metronet, the pet project of our Treasurer, Rita Saffioti.
You could get five new Fiona Stanley-style public hospitals for that $10billion – but only if we build them of course. With Rita in charge, they’d cost $50 billion.
Across all areas of Government, WA is now worse off than it was 8 years ago and that is despite record revenues.
It’s astonishing that with complete domination of both Houses of State Parliament, and record revenues, the latest Report on Government Services showed that WA now has
fewer social housing dwellings than when Labor came to government in 2017. A seemingly impossible outcome for the wealthiest State in the nation.
Labor has been disastrous for both the public, private and government housing sectors in Western Australia.
And while our social housing stock has been dwindling, thousands of once financially secure families have crashed into mortgage stress, more than 30,000 people are on a waitlist for up to four years for social housing and a record number of Western Australians are homeless.
We will unlock land, streamline approvals, cut stamp duty for first homebuyers and downsizers and add 100,000 more homes to improve affordability.
The Cook Labor government has comprehensively failed in the area of crime. Recent crime statistics show family assaults, drug offences, threatening behaviour and breaches of violence restraining offences are all on the increase.
We will put 800 more police on the beat, toughen bail laws and ensure repeat offenders face real consequences.
And of course, a month ago 12,000 WA households dropped off the grid in the middle of a heat wave.
Cook blamed “extreme weather” but then, as a throwaway line, said blackouts would be “part and parcel” of the State’s transition to green energy.
He basically said: Get used to it!
Only the WA Liberal Party is committed to a responsible and achievable energy transition that’s not skewed by ideology, union interests and an alliance with the WA Greens.
My government will continue building 4,400MW of battery storage, and 810MW of wind power but we will also build 300MW of new gas generation capacity.
We will unlock approximately $318billion of business investment which the Chamber of Commerce and Industry says is being held back by green tape by streamlining the approvals process and amending the Environmental Protection Act.
We will enable parallel approvals to reduce unnecessary delays and remove unnecessary appeals processes and clearly define who can appeal.
We will also stop funding the Environmental Defenders Office in our first 100 days. Taxpayers’ money should not be spent propping up activists. It’s ludicrous.
We will also on Day 1 of government lift Labor’s ban on Uranium Mining.
We will in the first 100 days draft legislation to restore representation in the regions. The mining and pastoral, agricultural and the southwest regions are the backbone of the West Australian economy where the wealth of the state is generated. We believe under the new boundaries these regions have been disenfranchised by the Cook Labor government and the Liberal Party will restore regional representation.
Labor don’t care about regional Western Australia.
20% of the state’s population have lost representation because of Labor’s grab for power. We will fix that and not add to the city-country divide at a time when regional Western Australia needs support.
We will also protect small businesses from this red tape gone mad Cook Labor Government. Fishing families will be better off under a future Liberal government. We will provide them with greater certainties and protections. Fishing licenses currently have to be renewed annually – we will change this to 5+5-year fishing licences, in line with normal commercial arrangements so they can go to banks knowing they have no security issues and we will establish an electronic register of unit entitlements that financial institutions can rely on to assist with sovereign risk issues.
Western Australian small businesses will also save up to $32,000 through a payroll tax rebate that will provide tax relief to WA’s small businesses struggling with Labor’s cost of living crisis.
We will allow metropolitan shops to trade from 9am on Sundays, an extra two hours on the current 11am opening time. This will give West Australians the choice to shop earlier on a Sunday morning.
In Government, we will commit to a 6-month review of the current Aboriginal Heritage Act. We will engage with Farmers, Landowners, Aboriginal people and the community as a whole with the intention of amending the Act and regulations to create: more certainty and precise definitions on a range of concepts and terms, as well as sensible caps on fees that offer genuine protection to proponents. We will apply common-sense solutions to common-sense problems.
This issue is about private property rights. Farmers and landowners should be able to undertake minor works on their properties without suffering the indignity of a prosecution.
We will also commence a comprehensive review to assess the impact of sex change treatments on children and teenagers.
We will ban puberty blockers, cross-sex hormone treatments, and surgical interventions for new patients under 16 undergoing gender transition, following concerns about long-term harm.
And we will immediately restore common sense by introducing legislation to repeal Labor’s reckless changes to birth certificates, ensuring that sex cannot be arbitrarily altered, particularly for children.
Fellow Liberals Western Australia is my home – It’s a place of opportunity. I want to see families thrive, businesses succeed, and communities feel safe, and I know we can do much better with the right leadership.
Sadly, Western Australia is becoming less affordable, our hospitals are in crisis and crime is rising while Labor fails to deliver on the basics.
A government I lead will create conditions for stronger economic growth, by cutting red tape, supporting small business and ensuring Western Australia remains a place for investment and opportunity.
West Australians deserve better --- We can’t afford four more years of the same failures. If Labor wins, nothing changes.
We will build a better future with the right priorities for all West Australians.
Thank you.
