Introduction

A New Common Sense for Western Australia

Nearly a century ago, Western Australians petitioned for freedom from an overbearing federation – a cry ignored in the halls of power. Today, the Commonwealth of Australia looms over Western Australia like a distant monarch, ruling not by hereditary right but through a two-party dynasty. In Thomas Paine’s day, the English king and Parliament conspired against the American colonies; in our time the Commonwealth and its heirs – the Labor and Liberal parties and their collaborators that have their roots in the Eastern states’ urban elite – have captured Parliament, shutting out the people of Western Australia from real democratic control. This opening polemic, in the spirit of Paine’s Common Sense, lays bare the present crisis. Western Australia finds itself as America once did: governed by a distant power that treats it as a vassal province, exploits its wealth, and calls this plunder unity. We ask in earnest: must the people of Western Australia forever remain supplicants to a federated Crown that devours our substance?

Yet our call for self-determination arises not from any rejection of Australia or its people. Western Australians are proud participants in the national story - we have celebrated the ANZAC legacy of courage and sacrifice, marveled at the ancient majesty of Uluru, cheered alongside our mates at the MCG, and watched with millions of families as the boats set off for Hobart on Boxing Day. Our push for independence does not reject this shared heritage, our ‘Australianness’, but rather seeks to fully embrace its best aspects by casting off the shackles that Canberra has imposed on us and replacing them with local, accountable governance. Indeed, we believe the true spirit of Australianness - our egalitarian ethos, our belief in a “fair go” for all, and our world-renowned mateship - can be upheld only by a government that is close to its people and answerable to them. It is out of loyalty to these Australian ideals that we can no longer abide a system that so routinely betrays them.

The Commonwealth as King and Parties as Heirs

Government, Paine wrote, is at best a necessary evil and at worst an intolerable yoke. We contend that the Commonwealth of Australia has become an intolerable yoke upon Western Australia. It presides imperiously from Canberra – a “de facto” monarch in all but name – with the major parties alternating as its heirs apparent. These two factions share the throne like feuding princelings, more alike than different in their entitlement. Through caucus discipline, closed-party preselection, and the maturation of a cradle-to-grave grooming system that produces cohort upon cohort of career politicians representing nothing but their party’s interests, the major parties have usurped the sovereignty of the people, leaving Western Australians effectively voiceless. The Commonwealth’s ministries act as a court clique.  In stark contrast to the vision of Australia’s founders, federalism as practiced today is a mere pretense: Perth’s voice can scarcely be heard over the din of party politics and Eastern states’ demands, and states’ own local spans of control have shrunk as Canberra’s has grown into a monstrosity. Parliamentary committees that should reform this broken system are dominated entirely by the major parties, which naturally resist any change that would dilute their duopoly. Thus, the democratic safeguards we assumed inviolable – such as representation, accountability, and federal balance – have been artfully circumvented. Like colonists of old, Western Australians pay their taxes and bow to laws made thousands of kilometers away by politicians and bureaucrats who see Western Australia not as an equal partner but as a serf, a quarry, and a cash cow.

Fiscal Bloat and Mounting Debt

Under this captive arrangement, the Commonwealth has swollen to grotesque proportions, unsustainable in its appetites. In the 1960s and ’70s, Canberra lived within its means: federal budgets were counted in only the single-digit billions and public debt hovered around 20% of GDP. The national public service numbered under 100,000 souls in 1966, serving a population of 11½ million. Today, by contrast, the Commonwealth spends over $730 billion a year – roughly 27% of the entire economy – equivalent to more than $28,000 per Australian (versus about $600 per Australian spent by the Commonwealth government annually in 1970). The federal bureaucracy has ballooned to 170,000+ officials and untold numbers of contractors, with hundreds of agencies proliferating just as advisors and servants proliferated in royal courts of old. Gross national debt has exploded to nearly $1 trillion, projected to soon exceed $1.1 trillion - three times higher than just ten years ago. Interest payments on this debt are surging, yet the Commonwealth blithely continues to borrow and spend as if the public treasury were bottomless. Surpluses that were once common have vanished; perpetual deficit is now the rule, shackling future generations with debts to repay. All this fiscal profligacy enriches a bloated Canberra bureaucracy and bankrolls grand schemes abroad, while returning precious little to the ordinary Western Australian who foots the bill with the rest of their countrymen and women.

Oil and Gas – Sovereignty Surrendered

Nowhere is the Commonwealth’s misrule more evident than in the plunder of Western Australia’s natural bounty. Our state’s offshore oil and gas fields – from the North West Shelf to Gorgon and Browse – rank among the greatest hydrocarbon reserves on Earth. Western Australia’s LNG exports now rival Qatar’s for volume, and in iron ore we are a global colossus. Yet what benefit from this lucky treasure have our people seen? Australia’s federal Petroleum Resource Rent Tax (PRRT), ostensibly meant to give Australians a fair share of resource profits, has instead been a gas company accountant’s paradise. For decades, energy giants have paid next to nothing on these massive exports: clever provisions let them deduct (and even double-deduct) expenses to delay taxes indefinitely, so that companies like Chevron and Shell managed for years to pay zero PRRT despite reaping billions in income. Even today, the PRRT yields under $1 billion in most years – about the same paltry revenue it produced twenty years ago when we were exporting almost no gas at all. Meanwhile, other resource-rich nations have seized their chance to enrich their people: Qatar, matching Australia as an LNG exporter, saw its budget surpluses skyrocket on the back of proper resource taxation, and Norway taxed North Sea oil at nearly 78%, banking tens of billions of dollars in a single year, and every year – enough to endow every Norwegian with wealth for generations. Australia, by tragic contrast, has no sovereign wealth fund of note; our much-touted Future Fund is a pitiful fraction of what it might have been and should be, languishing far behind the funds of Norway, Qatar or even tiny petro-states.

The design of Canberra’s resource regime – low royalties and generous loopholes – ensures that the wealth under our seas flows mostly into foreign hands (and Eastern coffers) while Western Australians get scarcely a trickle. On over half of all Australian LNG exports in recent years,  no royalties at all were levied under Commonwealth-negotiated terms, effectively giving away our gas to corporate giants. In one recent year, gas companies made about $56 billion in income yet paid a mere $454 million in Commonwealth company tax – a rate of under 1%. This was not a misstep; it was tax avoidance by political design. The political heirs of Canberra – Liberal and Labor alike – have kept it that way for decades, plying the public with empty rhetoric about “investment attraction” while international companies reap super-profits and ordinary Australians are denied financial security despite the riches of their own heritage.

Energy and Housing – WA Pays the Price

Western Australians now endure some of the nation’s highest living costs even as our region’s resources enrich everyone but us. Electricity and gas drawn from our own lands have only grown more expensive for locals. The promise of an “abundant supply of cheap gas” to spur industry has turned to ash: since 2019, our domestic gas price has more than doubled, and once the state government allowed gas that was reserved for local use to be shipped offshore, Western Australia’s wholesale electricity prices tripled. Households have been kept afloat only by emergency rebates and subsidies – which are themselves funded by our taxes. In effect, we subsidise our own sky-high power bills. We pay twice – once at the meter and again through the treasury – while gas producers revel in windfall profits.

So too has the housing market slipped beyond local control. The minerals boom centered in WA helped inflame a nationwide property frenzy, yet it left affordable homes scarce on our western shores. Perth’s median house price has surged past $850,000, far outpacing incomes, and rents have exploded to some of the highest levels in the nation. Nearly a quarter of WA households now find their housing costs unaffordable – roughly double the figure of just a few years ago. This social crisis is not for lack of land or lack of money (Western Australia generates enormous wealth), but for lack of power. Canberra’s mismanagement of the macro-economy – its obsession with hoarding our revenues for its own bloated budget, then frittering them away on vote-buying sprees and eastern megaprojects – and its failure to ensure resource riches lead to local benefits have combined to make life far harder here than it ought to be. Energy sovereignty was surrendered for corporate profit; housing stability was sacrificed to federal complacency. The result is a cruel irony: Western Australia, rich in land and energy, now suffers under punishing energy costs and a housing affordability nightmare.

Collateral Harms of Canberra’s COVID-19 Response

Compounding these challenges are the collateral harms from Canberra’s response to COVID-19. Whatever one’s view of the health threat posed by covid, it is plain that Western Australia’s greatest long-run threat came not from the virus but from the overreaching, panic-driven policies imposed in its name. In 2020–21, under the banner of a so-called “national emergency” and a National Cabinet never contemplated in our Constitution, governments rolled out draconian measures – prolonged lockdowns, school closures, vaccine mandates, internal border controls, and endless emergency decrees – with scant regard for proportionality or regional realities. Western Australians endured some of the harshest internal travel restrictions in the world, often enforced at the behest of Canberra’s public-health narrative and fiscal carrots rather than through a sober, locally informed cost–benefit calculus.

The human toll of these policies has been devastating and well-documented. The Australian Human Rights Commission’s Collateral Damage report chronicles more than 5,000 personal stories of the suffering they caused: families kept apart, last goodbyes missed, jobs and businesses lost forever, and a pervasive sense that basic freedoms had become an afterthought. Independent studies have found that children and young people suffered markedly worsened mental health and educational setbacks whose consequences they will carry for years from repeated lockdowns and school closures. These harms did not fall evenly. Disadvantaged and remote communities – including many in Western Australia’s far-flung regions – bore a disproportionate share of the burden.

Scholars such as Paul Frijters, Gigi Foster and Michael Baker in The Great Covid Panic, have argued that the sweeping package of non-pharmaceutical interventions adopted around the world (and harshly in Australia) in response to covid inflicted damage on life, liberty and livelihoods out of all proportion to their benefits. Canberra’s reaction was a textbook case of how an over-centralised system behaves under stress: it ignored established scientific protocols, doubled down on control, treated rights as negotiable, and refused to admit error even as evidence of collateral harm mounted. The virus has faded; the debts, broken businesses, lost livelihoods, learning losses, psychological scars and institutional distrust the Commonwealth has left in its wake will not. For Western Australians, the pandemic years grimly illustrated what governance from afar looks like when fear overrides reason. These events reinforced a central lesson: our fate cannot safely remain in the hands of a distant Commonwealth whose first allegiance is to its own apparatus, party machines, and unelected global bodies – rather than to the people of this state.

A New Constitution or the Old Chains?

Why has all this come to pass? Not by accident, but by design. The Australian Commonwealth’s Constitution – often invoked as the sacred covenant of federation – has proven impotent to prevent this travesty. It provides no strong safeguards against party domination or executive overreach; indeed, its creators almost surely never foresaw the rise of disciplined party machines that would render Parliament a rubber stamp. The Senate, meant to protect state interests, instead operates on party lines, too often serving the same eastern metropolitan agenda as the House. Australia’s founding document contains nothing like the checks essential in modern democracies – no corruption commission with teeth, no direct democratic tools like regional veto or recall of failing leaders, no enshrined rights for states over their own natural wealth. In short, our Constitution catalysed the capture of the state by party elites and the siphoning of resources from one region to another, all under a veneer of legality. Western Australia’s travails are not a temporary misfortune but the predictable outcome of a federal system insufficiently protected in the long run against corruption and centralisation. As Paine cautioned that a constitution should be judged by its results, so we judge Australia’s: it has delivered party rule in place of popular rule, and extraction in place of equity.

This is why the vision of Pilbaria – an independent Western Australia with its own modern Constitution – has taken root again. The Pilbaria Constitution (outlined in Chapter 16), drafted with the lessons of the failures sketched above in mind, offers what Canberra will not: a government truly of, by, and for Western Australians. It establishes stringent checks on executive power – including citizen-led oversight bodies and even a fourth branch of government devoted solely to preserving the integrity of governance – and it enshrines resource sovereignty, ensuring that the wealth beneath Pilbaria’s soil directly benefits its people (with royalty levels closer to Norway’s model than to Canberra’s giveaway), making possible a near-zero overall taxation environment for Pilbarian citizens. It also establishes bulwarks against takeover by a single party or the strangulation of democracy, creating a unicameral Congress and other provisions designed to break the weather-worn duopoly grip. Finally, its governance model is once again local and accountable, rejecting the distant centralism that has failed us for so long, placing responsibility for stewarding our way of life back where it belongs, within local communities. In short, Pilbaria’s founding charter promises Western Australians the self-government and safeguards that the Commonwealth has persistently denied.

Conclusion

Western Australia stands on the threshold of a new chapter, with its People called now to define the course of its future history. We have petitioned; we have waited; we have given the Commonwealth every chance to govern us justly. It has answered our hope with indifference and our loyalty with exploitation. In 1933, our Western Australian forebears voted overwhelmingly to leave a federation that had short-changed them; today the stakes are even higher. Let this polemic serve as both a warning and a rallying cry. Everyone deserves a government that treats then as citizens, not colonies – one that protects our prosperity instead of pilfering it.

We undertook the lengthy creation of this manuscript not out of malice toward our fellow Australians, but out of necessity. As co-authors, we often reflected when creating Pilbaria that Western Australia’s secession could prove to be a blessing to the other states (and Northern Territory) as well – the first successful break that spurs democratic renewal elsewhere in the country. By taking the lead in casting off a broken system, we may inspire Australians to the east of us to awaken from their own somnolent acceptance of the status quo and demand accountable government for themselves. The hardships and disaffection felt in so much of Australia today need not be endured as fate; if Pilbaria can show a better way forward, others can follow. In this way, the cause of Western Australia may light the path to a broader continental revival.

Paine wrote in Common Sense: “Time makes more converts than reason.” After decades of reason falling on deaf ears in Canberra, time now demands we convert our frustration into action. The cause of Western Australia – like the cause of America in 1776 – is in great measure the cause of all who believe in self-determination and good government. It is time to cast off the old chains, to reject the false choice between two Eastern parties, and to take our future into our own hands. Pilbaria shall be free.

Julian Gillespie

Professor Gigi Foster

Michael Baker

Professor Ian Brighthope

14 December 2025

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