This Year in the West

Happy 2025 to all our valued OG Last Place on Earth subscribers.

If you’re receiving this email, it means you signed up in the halcyon days of 2024, when global goodwill prevailed and health and harmony abounded. But 2025 is a different kettle of fish.

We don’t know much about what that’s going to look like – if you listened to our last podcast of 2024, you’ll know that all bets are off, and even Perth’s most notorious futurists couldn’t forecast what the next spin round the sun will bring – but we‘ve spent all summer (or at least a few hours yesterday) working out how we’re going to work with the uncertainty.

The Last Place on Earth has thus far been a moonlighting side-hustle experiment in DIY self-publishing in a new media environment – but in 2025 that all changes. We’re going mainstream. We’re wearing suits with pocket squares. We’re figuring out how to podcast with three microphones.

With both state and federal elections approaching, we think we’re uniquely placed to cover the role of Western Australia as the ultimate political influencer – and the most vapid. 

WA Labor remains one of the worst – and richest – governments in the country, if not the world, still riding high on what’s left of the dominance granted to them by pandemic-era McGowan-mania. While Labor looks set to hold the lower house in March’s state election, the balance of power in the upper house could be up for grabs. We’ll keep an eye on the Greens and their hopes of taking more Legislative Council seats, as well as the Teal resistance bubbling away in Fremantle and Perth’s Western Suburbs. Meanwhile, Basil Zempilas’s destiny continues to await him. We’ll cover his likely ascendency to the top of the Liberal party, and to whatever other lofty heights he'll eventually reach. After all, Kerry Stokes and his ilk know it’ll be even easier to get what they want out of a man of their own.

We’ll also track how the WA election will set the agenda and tone for the federal poll that will take place just weeks later. The dynamic is clear by now: the resources industry tells WA Labor what to do, and WA Labor passes the message on to Albo and co. But Federal Labor appears to be in trouble, as the global dissatisfaction with established institutions and political elites increasingly makes itself known on our shores. The election campaign will bring forth a flush of freaks, weirdos, and cookers. We’ll suss out what makes them tick and what it says about, like, society.

All of this will be coloured by the second presidency of Donald J. Trump, set to begin in just over a fortnight. Just as politics is downstream of culture, events in the Last Place on Earth are downstream of whatever’s going on in the Land of the Free. 

On top of all this, in weeks to come expect to see us covering issues like the death of mainstream media, the rise of Gen Z as a political force as potent as their cultural influences, controversies surrounding psychedelics and their return to the mainstream, and ongoing social collapse as manifest in the various local crises in housing, health and education - and global climate?

The source material may stay familiar, but the product is getting a big upgrade. We’ll aim to publish at least five pieces a fortnight going forward – a weekly podcast (sometimes with guests) and a slantendicular weekly round-up of politics, culture and general decline of the West. Thrown in will be more features and cultural commentary, the odd opinion piece, and a few long-form audio investigations into issues you’ll have heard about before – but never from this angle. As WA assumes its natural place as the judge, jury and executioner of the shape of Australia for years to come, the stories are only getting started – and so are we.

We’re also getting even more online and diving deeper into the boring, banal brain rot of Tiktok to read the tea – or at least try to get some viral engagement for our more ponderous thinkpieces and political listicles. We’ll be shitposting more than ever, so you don’t have to. If you’re on Instagram, throw us a follow there. If you’re on TikTok, you can train the algorithm to give you something marginally less stupefying by following the official Last Place on Earth account, Jesse’s account, and Gerard’s Big State experiment. Meanwhile, you can follow Gerard on Bluesky – where he’s joined the drips and furries in their migration from Twitter.

Thanks for your support. As ever, get in touch if you’ve got feedback, ideas, or corrections for us. We love to hear your thoughts on the issues and stories we’re covering.

We’re particularly grateful to our paid subscribers, who’ve helped us get this thing off the ground. We need more money to keep operating our palatial studio spread in South Freo. For that reason, we’ll be putting up the paywall. Around half our posts going forward will be exclusively available to our premium subscribers. We’ll save our most unhinged takes and juiciest predictions for our beloved patrons. There’s never been a better time to take out a paid subscription, if you haven’t already.

Our priority is to build our email subscriber list – that way, we’ll be able to reach our audience directly and build something that lasts. So we’d love it if you could tell your friends about our burgeoning media empire. Could you forward them this email and tell them to subscribe? That way, they won’t miss out on an inside look at how what happens in WA matters for the country and the world.

Speak soon xx