Ever.

This was an election where all of the ALP’s problems over the last 6-8 years came home to roost.

There was no central theme. The campaign material was ugly, late out, badly written, and largely unrelated to anything voters actually cared about.

The central campaign was a shambles, courtesy of a complete disconnect between the Parliamentary Labor party, party office, and the lay ALP membership.

Local campaigns were worse – added to little or no leadership from Stirling St was the placement of inexperienced and incompetent teams in a large number of individual local campaigns. People who had either no campaigning experience, no recent campaigning experience, or who were completely subservient to the sitting members for whom they worked.

Add to this lazy and complacent sitting members, who assumed Buswell would take the Liberal party to the election, did no work as a consequence and are now looking about for someone else to blame.

Add to this a poll-based campaign which had its agenda set from data collected by a polling company that, it would now appear, knew fuck all about anything.

Add to this a lack of political operatives with a marginal seat campaigning background in ministerial offices – a key way of making sure that community concerns about sensitive issues are recognised and dealt with, and the best way of ensuring that ministers and the premier are aware what the actual issues are.

Add to this the complete inability of the Carpenter government to capitalise on its record of being a generally competent government – or even mention it during the campaign. Despite the usual media angst, there are no real problems in health and lauranorder in WA, and the looming infrastructure issues are largely in hand.

Add to this the fact that a two term government appears to have been outspent by a Liberal party that was broke and widely regarded as unelectable as recently as a month ago. How, a month before the election, was Stirling St not up to the armpits in cash?

Make no mistake, the ALP lost the campaign – Barnett didn’t win it. And they’ve lost, whether they’re able to form a minority government or not. While a Barnett government will be unstable, a returned Carpenter government will be worse – the presence of Michelle Roberts in the caucus room, at the very least, will ensure that.

They got beat because it was the worst run political campaign in recent history.

Sure, there was a generally hostile media environment (with Paul Armstrong at the West, in particular, intent on playing kingmaker at the state government level), a number of running (CCC, for example) issues, a Premier with little direct experience of formal campaigning and questionable political instincts, a botched preselection process which saw a number of sitting members dumped, and general voter fatigue with the government.

But those people in the WA ALP now looking for someone to blame – every MP who failed to get returned, every staffer newly out of a job, every political wannabe currently staring at the wreckage of their ambition – wants to pay close attention to the top part of that list, because the reasons they were weeping into their Crown lagers last night were the product of eight years of inattention and lack of political forethought, not one man’s decision to call an election six months early.

On a day when speculation ran rife that WA had lost the nation’s biggest resource development project, the Inpex Liquefied Natural Gas project in the Kimberley valued at $25 billion, Alan Carpenter announced yesterday he would be closing the bars at Parliament House.

That announcement, aimed at wedging Colin Barnett over his predecessor Troy Buswell, was pretty typical of how this election has gone in the first two weeks and might explain why at the halfway mark of the campaign Labor finds itself in a tight contest against a crisis-ridden Opposition that only settled on a leader the day before the election was called.

Barnett may be obsessed with Brian Burke, but the Labor campaign is a little too fond of the Buswell jokes they had prepared to let them go this quickly. There are many valid points to be made about Buswell’s continued political success, in particular the effect it’s had, and will continue to have, on women in the Liberal Party, which translates to the women whom they seek to govern. But stunts like this impress nobody, and they belittle the real issues that Buswell’s behaviour brings to light. The problem with Buswell, and the boys’ clubs on both sides, is not that there are bars in parliament house.

There’s an even bigger problem with this kind of stunt, though, which is that it helps paint Carps as arrogant, but arrogant in the service of very little except his ego. “No-one else would have dared to try this,” he would have thought to himself, though it probably wouldn’t have occurred to him to wonder why that was. As Barnett pointed out, it’s the Speaker’s job to make these kinds of decisions. Quite aside from the issue of whether a Premier should be involving himself in such trivial matters, it doesn’t help his standing within his party to be attempting to take on yet another power that isn’t his.

Outside of legal restrictions and standing orders, the only standards for MPs are those that their constituents set for them. The issue isn’t whether they share a bottle of wine during a meeting, it’s whether they make the right decision. It’s not about drinking during work hours, as if they’re operating heavy machinery; work hours for an MP are a fluid thing. Is networking a work requirement or a social opportunity? It’s both.

The problems this is supposed to be a fix for are serious. The treatment of women, the seriousness with which political decisions are made, the amount of work done by our politicians, a lack of transparency and democracy in decision-making… State politics is certainly in need of a lot of work. But this is just a way to hide some of the symptoms. It will do nothing to make MPs take their responsibilities more seriously. It won’t prevent a single meeting with a lobbyist. It won’t stop women being excluded from the exercise of real power(if anything, it could reduce the ability for women to be included, if it forces people to meet and network elsewhere), and it won’t stop them being objectified and harassed .

Election campaigns are mostly for those who haven’t paid attention for the rest of the term. Stunts can be useful; they’re certainly understandable. But it’s best to consider the long-term implications before pulling them out.

I’d be watching any gender breakdown in the polls in WA very carefully.

Elsewhere: More from William Bowe aka The Poll Bludger for subscribers in Crikey.

Nevertheless, there’s no doubt that politicians think this way, and often seek to learn from campaigns and tactics that appear to have worked elsewhere in the past. There’s a whole mini-industry now, for instance, of importing Australian political consultants to work on and direct British campaigns. One thing I’m surprised no one (to my knowledge anyway) has mentioned is the fact that Alan Carpenter is obviously taking a leaf or two from Peter Beattie’s campaign book.

In 2001, Peter Beattie – enmeshed in a scandal where MPs and candidates were under the microscope of a CMC inquiry for allegations of electoral fraud – a scandal which took the scalp of the Deputy Premier Jim Elder and also of prominent MP Mike Kaiser – dashed to the polls with a promise to cleanse the Augean stables of his own party. He handpicked candidates for now vacant seats, and won a landslide victory of massive proportions. In 2006, despite voters’ tiring of his “look it’s broken! I’m sorry! I’ll fix it!” schtick, he once again dashed to the Governor’s residence a week after the Liberals had dumped Bob Quinn for the hapless Bruce Flegg, and won against the odds with the Springborg led opposition imploding on cue on the first day of the campaign.

Alan Carpenter appears to be playing a similar game – distancing himself from his own party’s factional morass, and making much of his selection of candidates who are supposed to be clean, untied to the Burke scandals, and represent renewal. He’s also rushed to call the election just after the Liberals changed their leadership, dumping Troy Buswell for Colin Barnett. Whether or not any of this will produce a Beattie sized result, or even a win, I can’t say. But it’s obvious that Carpenter has been keeping a close eye on Queensland political dynamics.

Resurrected Liberal leader Colin “Don’t mention the canal” Barnett is promising that he’s not Troy Buswell. And doesn’t at all look like the kind of bloke who could be caught sniffing chairs.

The first night is all about predictability – Barnett is claiming that the snap election has been called because Labor is running scared (of him, presumably). Carpenter is denying that the snap election has been called to take advantage of the leadership turmoil in the Liberal ranks.

Despite some rustlings of dissent from the local commentariat – local political commentators are largely calling the move a political mistake – a call based largely, I suspect, on the idea that if Barnett isn’t as thoroughly unpopular as Buswell was, the Libs should therefore cruise to an easy win.

There may be something to that view – certainly Buswell was regarded in WA with the kind of amused contempt that makes it difficult to get any political traction, and it is entirely possible that WA electors have forgotten exactly why it is they didn’t vote for Barnett last time. And there is no doubt at all that Carpenter isn’t held in the same regard as Geoff Gallop, and certainly doesn’t have the same campaigning experience as his predecessor.

But when you consider the raw mechanics of Carpenter’s decision, it starts to look like a potentially very good decision indeed.

Consider this:

Item: Barnett has been in the job for a day. He probably hasn’t even appointed a chief of staff, let alone a strong trusted team around him.

Item: Barnett and WA Liberal President Barry Court hate each other. Court has been leading the public charge defending Buswell’s leadership in recent weeks, and has clearly been caught out badly by the sudden change in heart in the parliamentary party. This is something that could probably have been talked out, given time – but they don’t have time.

Item: A change in leadership means the Libs have no campaign material prepared – no photos of the leader, no photos of the leader with candidates, no pre-prepared ads for television, their style guide is suddenly is out of date – they have close to nothing, unless party office is a lot more organised than they’ve seemed to be over the last six months.

Item: A change of leadership always means a change of policy (don’t mention the canal, dammit!). While the Libs to date have been pretty thin on publicly stated policy, they presumably have some stashed away for the election. Not only will the leader’s new office have to go through this, the risk they run is that a shadow minister will get caught on the hop, and be promptly contradicted by the new leader. Now, as Rudd’s run amply demonstrates, you can get away with this a couple of times in a campaign, but maybe not so much when your opponent’s narrative is all about portraying you as clueless and disorganised.

Item: Barnett is not popular with the lay Liberal Party. Again, you can get over this, but not in the two days Barnett has had. This will hurt on the ground, in a way it shouldn’t.

Item: The WA Libs have very little money – corporate and wealthy individual donors haven’t been kicking in to a campaign they have presumed doomed by Buswell’s chair sniffing antics. There now isn’t much time to fix this – individual candidates may have cash but party office does not. And while WA Labor’s fundraising efforts have been pitiful compared to the rampant corruption corporate schmoozing seen in other states, they have enough of a war chest to make a proper run at it.

Item: A snap election means that government departments won’t have time to get properly non-partisan in time for the election. The WA government has a bunch of health, apprenticeship and Laura Norder ads running at the moment, and it will probably take a week or so for those that are still pre-booked to get withdrawn. Free advertising for the incumbent doesn’t always win an election, but it certainly doesn’t hurt, particularly when you have a ready made excuse…

Item: The Olympics will suck all of the oxygen out of everything for the next month. Getting traction is going to be very difficult, which also won’t hurt the incumbent.

Figure: Labor is ready for this campaign, the Libs are not. Confusion in the ranks will cost them at least a week of a very short campaign while they fix their material and get it out onto the ground. This will hurt, when there’s not much oxygen to be had late in the campaign.

Figure: The confusion will cost Barnett more time and energy putting out spot fires, minor f*ck-ups and policy blunders than it will Carpenter – and that will play into the Labor narrative. Snap campaigns take discipline to survive, and Labor will have that in spades.

Figure: Both Barnett and Carpenter get a bit… how can we put it… tetchy… under pressure. But Barnett’s under more pressure now, and everyone knows it – especially him.

Figure: The internecine internal Liberal warfare will spill over into public. It’s been going on too long not to. At the very least, Matt Birney will spit the dummy at some stage.

Money where mouth is: despite its many flaws, this Labor government has one more term in it. Labor by eight seats.