Someone, please invade Perth

The WA state budget delivered a $3.2 billion surplus last week, pushing the overall total under WA Labor to more than $23 billion in six consecutive surplus years.

Those numbers might be the envy of other states running big deficits, as WA Treasurer Rita Saffioti claimed last week, but there’s bugger all to show for it anywhere apart from on the spreadsheet.

It’s not that things are that much worse in WA, although they are, with more Aboriginal people in prisons, in state care, and dying on the streets than in other states. It’s that WA is the one state in the country actually in a position to fix it.

On account of the glut of resources dug out of the ground beneath WA communities, the resources in the state coffers are also looking pretty plentiful, but not only is there no pay-off or mitigation for the global impacts of this runaway resource extraction, it’s not even trickling its way back to the communities that need it most.

Youth crime and social collapse in WA towns are at all-time highs and Aboriginal kids are dying in a prison system that cannot cope. Meanwhile, most of the nation’s focus remains on Alice Springs, since Dutton has decided that’s the place that does the most damage to the federal government. 

There was nothing in the WA Budget to replace a youth prison currently at the centre of a damning coronial inquest, and child protection workers received nothing in spite of a system so overwhelmed that a 10-year-old boy took his own life last month in state care.

While kids are dying, the government counts its coins.

There was a smattering of cash for housing and homelessness in recognition that the housing crisis is likely to dominate the coming election campaign. But the headline spend failed to acknowledge that additional money was poured into a social housing fund widened to encompass affordable rentals too, with the result that funds committed in previous years are now less likely to house those who need it most.

I was up at WA Parliament as the Treasurer gave her Budget speech. NGO CEOs jockeyed in front of the cameras outside to thank the government, while giving the game away sotto voce with reminders that there were a few things left off the list that really might have helped.

The response from the journalists there was instructive and insane. They had no questions for the Greens MP or environment groups declaring this a dark day for climate and nature. They had plenty of questions for the Chamber of Industry and Commerce about investment in minerals extraction and ensuring ‘green tape’ was cut to ribbons to open new gas infrastructure.

WA is in halcyon holiday mode while we’re frying the rest of the country without anyone realising.

Federal Resources Minister Madeleine King, arguably the most dangerous woman in Australia, is also from WA. The same day as the Budget, while the PM was in Perth for a prescription visit, she delivered Labor’s Future Gas Strategy, which locks in fossil fuel expansion and opens up new gas fields out past 2050, basically annihilating the government’s net zero promise.

Western Australia is the only state in the country with rising CO2 emissions, up 12% last year. 

As I write this today, in Perth, it’s 28 degrees. It’ll be 28 degrees every day this week. It’s the middle of May.

It has rained 22 mm in Perth in four and a half months so far this year. Halfway through May, we’ve had 3.6 mm in a month where the historical average is more than 100 mm.

Across the south west our forests are dying. I was camping on the Collie River two hours south of Perth last weekend, and half the canopy was fried to a dried brown like dead ferns. There is so little rain that 100 turtles died last week at a wetlands in Perth.

The WA government last week responded to this nature collapse by pledging to reduce environmental protections in a bid to fast-track gas industry project approvals.

The politics on this is simple. The West Australian newspaper runs WA Labor, which runs federal Labor, which runs the country. 

So bring in the tanks and park them on the lawn at Council House. Get Basil Zempilas out with his hands in cable ties. Pull down the statues to Kerry Stokes and Gina Rinehart and melt them down to make the new transmission wires.

WA needs an urgent intervention, and the rest of the country needs to wake up to what the West is cooking up before the smell of searing flesh makes its way to a town near you.