Western Australia was the focus of Dr Ian Cook's co-authored analysis of the upcoming Federal election in The Conversation.

The leaders’ debate may have returned Western Australia to the political spotlight, but less attention was being paid to what important players in WA’s 2017 state election were saying about a Liberal preference deal with Clive Palmer’s United Australia Party.

In 2017, a desperate Liberal Party did a preference deal with Pauline Hanson’s One Nation to try to save the election. The results were not what the Liberals had hoped for. It might have helped them to hold Geraldton, but the general damage to the party was considerable.

Both important players in WA’s 2017 state election worried about the Chinese government’s reaction to a preference deal with Palmer’s UAP. Former Premier, Colin Barnett, and current Premier, Mark McGowan, called attention to Palmer’s ongoing spat with Chinese officials and warned that any deal with Palmer would upset Australia’s most important trading partner. Palmer responded by accusing WA Labor of sucking up to the Chinese.

More importantly, at least when it comes to the current election result,

Barnett should know. That’s what happened to him when party officials made the deal with One Nation. It didn’t help that soon after the deal, Hanson said that voters hated Barnett, and One Nation candidates said they weren’t going to preference the Liberals. But the general effect of some Liberal voters rejecting the deal and the party was real.

Fake news and pre-selection politics

This brings us to the blue-riband seat of Curtin, which the Liberals hold by a 20% margin. While it’s an ultra-safe seat, like Wentworth, it contains the kind of progressive Liberal voters who helped to elect independent Kerryn Phelps.

Curtin’s gotten a little curious, though. The former Member for Curtin and Liberal star Julie Bishop’s first choice to replace her lost in the preselection process. This was yet another moment of rejection by a party that Bishop had served with great distinction for two decades. It also meant that a conservative was preselected to a seat where there are likely to be plenty of progressive Liberal voters.

Then former Fremantle MP and Minister for International Development in the Rudd government, Melissa Parkes, nominated for the seat and soon resigned as Labor candidate after comments she made that were critical of Israel returned to haunt her.

Finally, and even more bizarrely, the independent candidate who might have done a Phelps and snatched a blue-riband seat from the Liberals passed “results” from what turned out to be a fake opinion poll to the West Australian, which led the paper to publish a headline story about the Liberals losing the seat. So, we even had fake news!

This article was first published in The Conversation.