Federal election 2025: All three candidates hopeful of success to win WA’s newest seat of Bullwinkel

All eyes are on Western Australia’s newest seat of Bullwinkel in Perth’s Hills, which is shaping up to be a fierce three-way race between Labor, the Liberals and the Nationals. Despite being a notionally Labor-held seat with a margin of more than 3 per cent, opinion polls are predicting a win for Liberal candidate Matt Moran, ahead of former State Nationals leader Mia Davies and Labor candidate Trish Cook. The seat spans nearly 10,000sqkm across the Perth Hills and pushing out into the farming heartland towns of Northam and York. Voters in the seat are concerned about the cost of living and housing but also want improved telecommunication services and climate change action — given much of the area is a bushfire-prone zone. The more regional areas of Bullwinkel also have many voters up in arms about the live sheep export ban — which Labor has legislated to start in 2028 but the Coalition will repeal if they win government. Even though they’re not the favourites, the Nationals are leaving nothing on the table in their pursuit of the seat. Ms Davies has deployed WA’s former “kingmaker” Brendon Grylls as her strategic weapon, vowing she has no “plan B” and is in it for the long haul. Ms Davies vowed to stand up to Opposition leader Peter Dutton to set herself apart from Mr Moran. The Coalition pair often stand side-by-side on the campaign trail. “It’s made me sharpen the pitch a fair bit,” she said. “You need to have a party structure that is going to give you the voice within that structure to actually get things down. And with the Nationals there is a pathway to a senior position. “I don’t have a plan B. When I know the outcome of the election I will take some time to assess the opportunities, but at the moment my attention is focused 100 per cent on winning Bullwinkel” Encroaching on metropolitan area in the new WA seat that is part-bush and part-suburbia, Ms Davies said her friend and predecessor as WA Nationals leader, Mr Grylls, pushed her to think differently. He told Ms Davies she was “mad” to run, but agreed to chair her campaign on the promise she make a 12-year commitment. “Because Canberra is hard, Canberra is hard and you’ve got a to have a 12-year plan,” he said. Ms Davies is the only candidate with parliamentary experience, first elected to State Parliament in 2009 and rising to become Nationals Leader in 2017 and Opposition Leader in 2021. She doesn’t mind being the underdog, in a new electorate that stretches from her comfort zone in Northam and York into the metropolitan fringes of Armadale and Gosnells. Ms Davies concedes fewer city voters knew her, when she started door knocking. “It’s getting better. Not going to lie, it was hard yards when we first started,” she said. “That was brand new territory, but now there’s definitely a higher recognition rate and people are wanting to engage.” Ms Davies is not the only Coalition candidate in the seat, with Mr Moran the frontrunner to win the seat. A former military public relations officer and journalist, Mr Moran has centred much of his campaign so far on cost of living and improving infrastructure for the region. While Mr Moran was unable to be interviewed, his social media posts have pointed towards his cost of living focus. “Bullwinkel deserves a strong voice, they deserve a Liberal party who will help deal with the cost-of-living pressures and make housing more affordable,” he said. Labor has seized on mail-outs by the two Coalition candidates to suggest there is little difference between them. Both warn “Australia has had the biggest fall in living standards in the world” and use the same slogan promising to get Australia “back on track”. Both list lower inflation, cheaper energy, affordable homes and safer communities as priorities, though Ms Davies nominates “better healthcare” versus Mr Moran’s promise of “quality healthcare”. They have appeared together with Mr Dutton and other senior Opposition figures, to make the same funding commitments for telecommunication and road upgrades. Despite running against both Coalition party candidates, Ms Cook said she was just focused on her own campaign. “I’m just running my own race, I’m speaking to as many people as I can,” she said. “Labor looks after people, that’s what we do, the measure of a society is how well you treat people when they’re vulnerable and we all have vulnerable times in our lives and we need support and that’s what the Labor Party does.” The former nurse and City of Mundaring councillor was quick to point out despite the seat’s urban and rural make up, issues such as access to healthcare were common across the area. “I’ve been at the end of receiving health policies when Peter Dutton was a health minister and it was a terrible time when he ripped money out of the hospital, he wanted to charge a fee for going to the emergency department, this is not the way we want to go,” she said.