After a few years of soul-searching in the political wilderness, the WA Liberal Party has outlined its plan for redemption ahead of the looming double-header elections.

In 2022, the party was still picking up the pieces after being obliterated in the state election and then stunned by the loss of what were once blue-ribbon federal seats.

With state and federal elections now looming again, the party has laid out its plan for winning back the west.

At the Liberal Party’s annual state conference on the weekend, both state and federal leaders made their pitch to WA voters and set the stage for what’s to come in the course of the campaign.

Here’s how the party plans to try and win back your vote.

WA the ‘battleground state’

A federal election must be held before mid-May and will almost certainly be sometime next year.

West Australians are practically guaranteed a state election on March 8 – unless a federal election is called for the same day.

And you can expect to see both leaders doing plenty of gallivanting around WA between now and then. In fact, they already are.

That’s why Liberal leader Peter Dutton chose Perth to launch his party’s major housing policy on the weekend.

And it’s the same reason why, on the same day, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese made a flying visit to WA’s Midwest to spruik the revival of the lobster trade with China.

Both leaders have taken to declaring what number visit they are up to whenever they’re in town – ‘great to be back in the West for the 26th time’.

This is all because, as Mr Dutton told fellow Liberals on Saturday: “Western Australia is a key battleground state.”

That’s something both men can agree on.

“Of course, [the] WA economy is the driving force behind our national economy, and that’s why this is so important to be here today,” Mr Albanese said on Saturday.

After a prickly visit to the coal mining town of Collie on Friday, which saw him heckled by a small group of people opposed to nuclear power, Mr Dutton was given a much warmer welcome by WA Liberals at the annual state conference.

Cheered on stage by Senator Michaelia Cash as the “future prime minister”, Mr Dutton went on to outline his plan for winning back the west.

He promised to keep the live sheep trade and the state’s GST deal, “turbocharge” the mining industry, and scrap federal Labor’s offshore wind plans in the state’s south-west.

“The [GST] deal is set in stone,” Mr Dutton said.

If the current pace of visits is anything to go by, West Australians can expect plenty more – with accompanying promises – over the months ahead to curry favour in an election where every seat will count.

State issues

At a state level, the details of the campaign are starting to be fleshed out too, thanks to the Liberals’ state conference over the weekend.

Leader Libby Mettam used her speech on Sunday morning to announce the party’s “Priorities for Western Australia”, which were unsurprising to say the least.

“Our priorities are to fix the health system, restore law and order, provide meaningful cost of living measures and deliver more housing,” she told the crowd, which was missing a few of her own MPs.

At a press conference afterwards, she added another priority: “Restoring our regions.”

Given Ms Mettam has spent much of the past three years hounding the government on issues in the health system, it’s hardly surprising her big policy announcement was an “elective surgery guarantee”.

If the Liberals do the impossible and win the next WA election, the plan would see the government pay for public patients to have their surgery performed in a private hospital if they’ve been left waiting longer than the recommended time for their operation.

It’s not an entirely new idea, and according to the government is already happening for some patients, based on their doctor’s assessment of clinical need.

The idea of an expansion of the scheme was welcomed by Australian Medical Association WA president Michael Page.

“The focus on health, the focus on improving access to care, is very welcome,” he said.

It’s a reminder that even if the Liberals don’t win this time around, they have the ability to throw their weight behind issues, put them on the agenda and potentially push Labor to make promises in that space.

‘Best chapters’ still to come

The state and federal campaigns will be very different affairs, given the federal team is far stronger than the state Liberals, who are still limping along with just a handful of MPs.

But that doesn’t mean the fight will be any less fierce locally, at least according to Ms Mettam’s outlook.

“I believe we can and will win government,” she declared to the party faithful on Sunday.

The question is whether she’ll help make her party one of the winners from the polls, or if they’ll be left waiting another four years for their redemption chapter to be written.

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