Essential services are the minimum but most essential function of any government.

If a government cannot provide power, water, health care and housing or maintain law and order it is failing.

The power outages of the past week are a fundamental failing of the Cook Government that cannot be fixed with election sweeteners. They are the cumulative result of a Government that failed to prioritise, failed to plan, failed to listen and failed its voters. They are a sure sign our State is headed in the wrong direction.

Only the WA Liberals are going to the March State election with a long-term plan for a better future for WA and with commonsense policies to achieve that plan.

Power is not the only failure of the Cook Labor Government and there are no fixes on the horizon. Labor is expecting WA voters will, like it has, ignore these failings.

The full effects of a degraded and neglected power network came to reality for tens of thousands of WA households this week, as power outages ripped across the State — some for up to 48 hours — during a record heatwave.

The Premier swiped the outages away as “part and parcel” of running a network. It is not and his Government has been repeatedly told so.

Many will remember the Christmas of 2021 when WA’s power network was unable to meet demand over the ferociously hot Christmas period leading to outages that affected more than 100,000 people.

In the wake of those outages, then hapless energy Minister Bill Johnston commissioned Australian Energy Market Commissioner Michelle Shepherd to conduct an independent review into what went wrong.

In Ms Shepherd’s own word: “The review concluded the main cause for the outages was parts of the distribution network did not have the technical capacity to deliver electricity to meet the unprecedented demand experienced at the time.

“In addition, many of the outages were significantly extended due to the fire weather conditions, restricting Western Power’s ability to safely restore power until conditions eased.

“While the extreme heatwave which led to the outages is historically rare, the Bureau of Meteorology advised similar conditions are likely to occur more frequently in the future due to the impacts of climate change.”

What did the Labor Government do with this expert advice? Nothing. Which goes a long way to explaining Premier Roger Cook’s dismissive approach to the current power outages. He knew it was going to happen.

It is extreme hubris, not to mention a risky campaign strategy, to tell voters to accept as normal an intermittent power supply and failing network.

The WA Liberals have a plan to end Labor’s secret electricity tax and produce 300 additional megawatts of power. Our plan will mean West Australian families can keep the lights on at a price they can afford.

Similarly, Premier Cook has been happy not to just signal his satisfaction with the current state of WA’s health system but to express his pride in it.

As shadow minister for health in 2017, Cook said monthly ambulance ramping hours of 1100 was a “massive failure” and a “crisis”. But now with monthly ramping hours regularly over 4000 hours, exhausted and overworked healthcare professionals, unprecedented elective surgery and specialist wait lists and unacceptable patient deaths, Cook says he’s “proud” of our health system.

It must be that pride that is propelling Cook to March 8 with little more to offer electors than a plan to go against decades of expert and clinical advice and relocate the women and babies hospital to Murdoch rather than the recommended QEII site.

The WA Liberals are promising an elective surgery guarantee which will ensure all patients in WA get their elective surgery within the medically recommended time frame and to listen to the experts and build the women and babies hospital at QEII, saving up to 200 tiny lives every year.

Roger Cook has also turned a blind eye to one of the biggest increases in crime our State has ever seen. Criminal offences increased 20 per cent between 2020 and 2023, domestic violence incidents have spiked by 44 per cent on the five-year average and failed recruitment initiatives have left WA with fewer officers per capita after eight years of Labor Government.

Cook recently offered up, as election treats, a “crackdown on hoons and antisocial behaviour” and to make it illegal to “post and boast” about criminal activity. Initiatives that should have been in place for years.

The WA Liberals have a plan to immediately put the equivalent of an additional 300 frontline officers on the beat with an overtime initiative, have committed $134.4 million to recruit 500 more officers and $110 million in superannuation bonuses to incentivise officers to stay long-term in the force.

The Cook Government, the wealthiest WA Government ever, has abrogated its responsibility to the fundamental functions of government.

I’d like to say it has behaved like parents disguising their children’s school uniform as a Christmas present but then I’m aware that in the current cost-of-living crisis, resourceful parents may have found themselves, through no mismanagement of their own, having to do exactly that.