The right-wing Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) made its foray into Western Australia on Friday night, with no sign of One Nation in a scene dominated by liberal politicians.
The event, called Reset the West, was a call for Conservatives to work together, but what emerged was an attempt by the Liberal Party to rebuild the centre-right with itself at its centre.
It comes after the Liberals’ disastrous performance in state and federal elections, with polls now showing One Nation eclipsing the Liberals with 20-25% of the primary vote.
Federal Liberal MP Andrew Hastie attacked Labour’s immigration policy and simplistically linked it to the housing crisis. He told the audience of 240 attendees, mostly older, that the politicians had made a mistake.
“Immigration numbers are too high, while standards are too low. Our infrastructure has not kept pace with population growth,” he said.
“People see this growth pressure on the roads, in our hospitals and in our essential services, and it is also fueling our domestic inflation, which remains at 4.9%. That’s why people are angry.”
Australia’s annual inflation rate is 3.8%, but at the end of 2025, Perth’s figure was 4.9%.
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Hastie said Australians blamed the Liberals and Labor for a broken system, and that this had fueled the rise of One Nation, the Teal independents and the Greens.
But economic models suggest that eliminating migration over the next decade would leave property prices 2.3% higher in the mid-2030s than in a “base case” of migration continuing as expected.
CPAC is part networking body and part political rally. In the United States, it focuses heavily on Maga’s populist ideology, Trumpism, and anti-immigration and anti-woke rhetoric.
While Friday night’s event in Perth addressed some of those points, the overall tone was much more subdued. It seemed more like an attempt by liberals to prevent One Nation than to unite the entire political right.
With a speaker list that included WA Liberal leader Basil Zempilas, his upper house Liberal counterpart Nick Goiran and former politician turned CPAC chair Warren Mundine, some in the audience questioned the notable absence of One Nation.
While CPAC has fielded One Nation representatives at its federal conference, in WA director Andrew Cooper said it had selected senior figures from the Liberal Party.
“Andrew and Basil are quite senior Conservatives, so we prioritized them, and Nick is the leader of the house,” he said. “We’re pretty agnostic.”
The “great Australian dream” of home ownership took center stage on Friday, with a focus on WA’s record housing affordability crisis.
Zempilas said: “At the same time Cook’s Labor government has run up multi-million pound surpluses… we hear almost nothing about the worst housing crisis in the state’s history and what it is doing to the social fabric.”
He said access to affordable housing was an important factor in determining whether young people had faith in governments. “A whole generation of Western Australians” were losing hope of ever owning a home, he said.
Zempilas admitted the WA Liberal Party had lost Perth’s outer suburbs and called them “the lost Australians” because they had lost faith in political parties. “The Liberal Party needs to focus on these lost Australians. Our electoral success depends on it.”
University of Notre Dame political scientist Martin Drum said people blamed immigrants for housing becoming unaffordable, and that was fueling One Nation’s support.
“One Nation has always been very anti-immigration and has been more forceful about it than any of the main parties, because the main parties are thinking about what skills we need for our economy and what businesses need,” Drum said.
“Inflation is rising, people are worried about what their jobs will be like in a transforming economy and I think in a general sense there is a bit of anti-globalization,” Drum said. “There is a lot of economic anxiety.”
Drum said anti-immigration messaging at the CPAC conference was not aligned with what WA businesses are saying, particularly in the construction industry.
“We don’t have an adequate influx of skilled immigrants,” he said. “Businesses in Western Australia are asking for more workers in defined areas and the state government has responded by asking the Commonwealth government for help in that regard.
“Immigrants are blamed for the housing shortage, but there is a shortage of workers to build those houses.”
