‘Is this the result I hoped for? Of course not. Is this what we have been working for? Absolutely not. What we will take from tonight is lessons on how we can do better.’ That was the message from Liberal Leader Libby Mettam in her concession speech.

Or put more simply, the election was a failure.

The disintegration of the Liberal vote in Western Australia is more like a four-movement symphony than a single arrow to the heel.

Let’s start with their existential problem… Young people.

For a party that’s desperately seeking to win the influential and growing younger vote, their social media campaign was next to zero. A handful of posts per month leading up to an election is the equivalent of leaving leaflets on a park bench.

I understand there is hostility to social media, driven, no less, by the Federal Liberals who keep coming up with ways to censor it, but it’s 2025 and they have to accept that reality has changed. People under 40 rarely watch TV, read newspapers, or turn the radio on. If they do, it’s an accident while plugging their phone into the car to listen to a Joe Rogan podcast.

Conservatism is being rejected because it’s an alien concept. Kids don’t interact with conservatives in school, university, or through their entertainment. Why would they trust someone with a fake smile shoving a how-to-vote card in their hand at the 11th hour?

Donald Trump proved that the underlying ideology is popular, but he won the youth vote because he conquered social media.

Young voters weren’t just consuming their content, they were creating it for them because it was entertaining. They saw themselves as fighting an ideological battle, one meme at a time. That might not make sense to the majority of readers, but it was an approach that filled stadiums with people under 30 who had learned to love conservatism as the saviour of their country.

What has Peter Dutton put up lately on his social media accounts? A post about the ADF crash. A post about International Women’s Day. A post condemning those who threatened the mosque. A handful of posts about the cyclone. A post for the Youth Development Foundation Limited. A post for the Young Socceroos. And a post proposing Defence funding. That’s it for March so far. Trump averages a dozen posts a day, all of them about what his government is doing to make everyone’s lives better and reaffirming a clear policy direction. And he attacks. Ruthlessly.

Setting aside the Great Digital Silence problem, Mettam’s Liberals are difficult to trust because of their sluggishness and back-flipping on critical cultural issues.

In 2023, the infamous Aboriginal Heritage Laws entered the political arena to almost universal outrage in the heartland of Liberal and National voters. It should have been the ultimate own-goal for Labor, but it was mishandled.

The Opposition Leader said her party was committed to scrapping the laws if they won the 2025 election, but also that they were committed to fixing the laws with sensible changes. Scrapping or fixing?

‘We have always supported the intent of these proposed laws which promised to prevent a repeat of Jukaan Gorge,’ she said.

Such statements make it impossible for Mettam to get enough distance from the policy to gain election millage. Rural voters don’t want to hear a conservative say they support the intent of a law that nearly destroyed their property rights.

Mettam also supported the ‘Yes’ side of the Voice to Parliament, with the Western Australia Liberal Party in open defiance against the Federal Party for months.

‘I support recognition of our First Nations people in the Constitution.’

Then her position changed.

‘I’m unclear about what my position is now.’

She flipped entirely as the referendum drew closer, but maintained a personal desire to see eventual recognition. So in the end it was a no but a yes, kind of, which is a political what the f-.

This is a sequence of events that makes heart-and-soul conservative voters groan. For them, the Voice was a moral test of conservative leaders, not a policy negotiation. A conservative leader who does not instinctively know why writing racial privilege into the Constitution is wrong, is not, in their eyes, a true leader.

While all of this is bad for the Liberals, I asked conservative voters on the ground in Western Australia what angered them most about the current party.

The three recurring topics are: Aboriginal Land Rights infringing on farmland, the live animal trade, and new gun laws.

All three have spawned from a desire to sacrifice the needs of rural voters to keep the city happy.

The gun law reform should have been an easy one after Labor decided to make it infuriatingly difficult for farmers to attain gun licences. It was the perfect opportunity for conservatives to secure the regional vote. The Nationals opposed the laws while the Liberals did their signature, well… we’re thinking about doing a few back-flips trick.

Instead of discussing what was best for the people who live and work with guns in the vast expanses of Western Australia, the whole thing devolved into a damaging political tug-of-war playing out in the press.

They made it about party politics, instead of the farmers.

To understand where the election went wrong, we have to return to 2021.

The Western Australian Liberals experienced one of the worst political losses in Australian history. Their party was reduced to a rounding error in government and their leader, Zak Kirkup, became the first major party leader in 88 years to lose his seat.

This wasn’t a wipe-out, it was a slaughter.

Instead of setting his sights on winning, Kirkup went on the record saying he did not expect his party to win and instead wanted to focus on creating a credible Opposition. That’s a great plan if your name is Nigel Farage and you are leading a revolution. It’s not great if you are the head of a major establishment party staring down oblivion.

The ABC seemed to love Kirkup, running headlines like: Meet the young Liberal leader who wants more action on climate change.

Through their defeat, the Liberals demonstrated why it’s a terrible idea to seek the approval of the left-wing press at the expense of the party’s base.

Kirkup built his campaign around Climate Change and Net Zero in the mining capital of the country, and he had a particular fondness for hitching his wagon to green hydrogen.

‘…cheaper and more efficient, and it’s greener … this is the way of the future.’

Kirkup out-greened the then-Premier Mark McGowan who all-but scoffed, saying: ‘Everyone should be very fearful about what they have just put forward.’

In the end, the left-leaning voters Kirkup was hoping to steal off Labor didn’t believe his plans were serious and the conservatives who would ordinarily vote for him didn’t want a bar of it.

After the devastation of 2021, the party went home to lick its wounds but largely remained under the same ideological delusion. Their energy policy is still harping on about carbon neutrality and clean energy targets. The truth is they look a bit Teal from a distance … if you ordered them from Temu and asked ChatGPT to write their press releases.

At the time of writing, there were 10 seats left in doubt but odds are the Liberal 5-seat score (Nationals at 4) is the final word.

If you want to talk up the result, you could say they have doubled their representation but that’s a bit like a retail company saying their sales are up since their store was locked down during Covid. It’s accurate, but disingenuous. They are a very long way from their 31-seat high.

Lots of things went wrong in Western Australia, but the core failure is the same for the Liberals in every state and in Canberra. They are not selling a message. There is no vision. This is not a life raft to save them from the current hell of Labor. They look weak when people want strength.