Josh Zimmerman: In the end, it wasn’t age that caught up to John Quigley, It was Labor’s factions

In the end, it wasn’t age that caught up to John Quigley. It was Labor’s factions. The pending retirement of the 75-year-old Attorney General is the clearest sign yet that the era of captain’s picks in Cabinet is over. Mark McGowan wielded unprecedented control over Parliament, and his crushing 2021 election victory meant his iron fist extended to the inner workings of his party. Roger Cook inherited McGowan’s supersized majority on the Government benches. But he enjoys nowhere near the same authority over the lay party. There are two reasons for that. First, Cook has not won an election in his own right — let alone delivered the best result in the history of the party. Second, a major plank of Cook’s pitch to Labor MPs during last year’s leadership contest — in which the now Premier broke rank with his own factional backers — was a return to traditional party processes. Those processes dictate the unions that form Labor’s powerbase choose who they send to Cabinet, just like they chose who they made Premier. And those factions — in this case, Labor’s right — no longer want Quigley occupying one of their seats at the table. Much has already been written about Quigley’s immense contribution as Attorney General. The prolific lawmaker has enacted the harshest bikie crackdown in the country, overhauled the State’s electoral system and erased Clive Palmer’s $30 billion legal claim against West Australian taxpayers. He is closer to 100 than he is to 50, and he has only become more eccentric with age. But his eccentricity is more than matched by his effectiveness. Before Monday’s announcement, Quigley had repeatedly stated his desire to re-contest the 2025 election. If it were up to Cook, Quigley would have had his wish. It wasn’t, and he won’t. McGowan populated his Cabinet with some of his closest allies, leveraging his personal standing to overcome their lack of factional alignment. Those people included Quigley, Ben Wyatt, Rita Saffioti, Reece Whitby and Paul Papalia. Wyatt left politics on his own terms, and Saffioti is so securely entrenched at the highest level of government that she remains elevated above factional warfare. But McGowan’s exit meant Quigley was always on borrowed time. Papalia and Whitby will be looking nervously over their shoulders, too. Ironically, it was another of McGowan’s closest allies that accelerated Quigley’s demise. Daniel Pastorelli’s decision to enter frontline politics started a game of musical chairs that left Quigley without a seat. Pastorelli, chief of staff to both McGowan and Cook, plans to seek preselection in his home electorate of Landsdale, where long-serving MP Margaret Quirk is expected to retire in 2025. Landsdale had long been promised to Quirk’s right faction colleague Lorna Clarke, a lawyer who is also WA Labor president. Pastorelli has joined Labor’s right faction, clearing one major hurdle. The other is that he is a bloke. Labor’s strict gender quotas mean replacing a woman with a man is close to impossible. To accommodate the switch, Clarke needed to be found a seat elsewhere. The seat settled on was Butler — currently held by Quigley. The solution to that particular quandary is far neater than what faces Labor over McGowan’s remaining legacy picks in Cabinet. Ten of the 17-person ministry — including Cook — have clear ties to Labor’s ascendant left faction, which will not give up those spots lightly. Just three hail from the right: potential attorney general in waiting Tony Buti and rookie ministers David Michael and Hannah Beazley. None of that trio is going anywhere anytime soon. That leaves four who are unaligned: Quigley, Papalia, Whitby and Saffioti. Papalia and Whitby have been promoted under Cook, who clearly rates them. They occupy senior portfolios dealing with law and order and energy, respectively. That provides a level of protection. Both are aged around 60, making it harder to mount the same kind of renewal argument used to dump Quigley. Still, with a bloated and ambitious backbench and a clear factional imbalance in Cabinet, the question is not if the emboldened right will make another move. It’s when.