In his first major interview as Liberal leader, David Honey spoke to Business News about his childhood, desire for a compassionate society, and threats to WA’s prosperity.
A bush shack without power or running water is a long way from leafy Cottesloe and the halls of Parliament House.
But it’s a 60-year journey new Liberal Party WA leader David Honey believes has helped him better appreciate the fragility of Western Australia’s prosperity.
He lived his early years on a 400-hectare farm near Cranbrook in the Great Southern, where his family raised sheep and goats.
“(I) grew up in very humble circumstances as a child,” Dr Honey told Business News.
“It wasn’t that uncommon back then.
“When I was a little kid, we had no electricity, no running water, a bush shack.”
His dad had bought a generator and television for the Moon landing, which was in 1969 when David Honey, the fourth of five children, was 11.
That generator replaced kerosene lamps.
“Growing up in the bush you know the realities of life, you rely entirely on yourself for everything. We didn’t have government services, as such,” Dr Honey said.
“You learn about the important things in life.
“Our physical circumstances were pretty tough, but I had a fantastic childhood; two parents who loved me.
"I knew they were doing everything they could to make my life better.
“It’s not the physical circumstances you live in that matter but having parents who love you and care for you and knowing that you’re loved.”
He said he learned practical skills on the farm and, as he grew up, discovered a proficiency for the more technical parts of farm life.
“When I was 12 years old, I could strip down a diesel engine and put it back together by myself,” Dr Honey said.
Perhaps this will give him the resilience needed to rebuild the Liberal Party.
Another aspect of country life that remains with Dr Honey to this day is the sense of community and shared concern for others.
He said while vulnerable people seemed to disappear in the city, and were often overlooked, those living in regional towns had more active involvement in each other’s lives.
“In a regional community everyone was important … [they] actively cared for each other,” Dr Honey said.
Dr Honey said people often seemed to forget there may only be a narrow gap between a good life or a deprived life, because circumstances could change.
“It’s too easy to marginalise people, too easy to just walk by disadvantage and do nothing about it,” he said.
While there was no shortage of government agencies eager to help in remote and disadvantaged communities, society needed to engage on a personal, compassionate level, he added.
Another example was the overwhelming level of automation in federal welfare services, Dr Honey said, with some people unable to set up or use government accounts because they did not have a phone or internet access.
“This is just cruel,” he said.
“We don’t have a human-centric [welfare] model.
“[It] just perpetuates all the other social issues.”
A contrasting example was in Israel, he said, where one individual from the government was assigned responsibility for a family in need, contacting and coordinating other agencies as required.
Career
After studying at Hampton High School in Morley, Dr Honey attended the University of Western Australia.
There, he was president of the Science Union student body and was involved in student politics with some familiar names.
Among contemporaries were Deidre Willmott, who was then UWA Student Guild president and later chief executive of the Chamber of Commerce and Industry of WA, and Michael Huston, another guild president and recently a Liberal candidate for the Legislative Council.
That involvement led Dr Honey to attend conferences of the Australian Union of Students, which was a famed 1980s battleground for many eventual political heavyweights.
The views expressed at those conferences helped cement his own political position as leaning Liberal, believing the political right side was more practical.
But even now, Dr Honey said he was not particularly dogmatic or obsessed with ideals.
He studied a doctorate in chemistry and worked as a forensic scientist for the state government, then in environmental science and for mining companies.
In 1994, Dr Honey became president of the WA division of the Liberal Party, a position he held until 1997; he also worked for Alcoa, including as global residue manager.
He also headed up the Kwinana Industries Council.
For a time, Dr Honey said, he felt he had let politics go past him, until former premier Colin Barnett retired from the seat of Cottesloe in late 2017.
WA’s challenge
Dr Honey’s advocacy for hydrogen and the potential of green manufacturing shows his thinking on the future for WA.
During the 2021 election, he and (then) leader Zak Kirkup proposed a three-stage plan to create a green manufacturing sector, a policy that attracted plenty of criticism.
The first stage was to close Synergy’s coal generation fleet by 2025 and replace it with a 1.5-gigawatt solar and wind precinct in the Mid West.
Sources speaking to Business News at the time estimated such an offtake deal would cost $230 million a year, a number later cited by Dr Honey.
Stage two was for the Mid West precinct to expand into green hydrogen production, with 3GW of capacity to power electrolysers to produce hydrogen.
Then, pending the economics, hydrogen could be used to produce green steel and alumina locally, creating a green manufacturing industry.
While the Liberal Party came under fire for being unable to explain the details of the proposal, Dr Honey has a strong view that governments are not doing enough to prepare WA for economic challenges ahead.
“I’ve had the most wonderful opportunities in life,” he said.
“If you go forward 50 years or even less in WA, that may not be the case.
“I don’t think people really reflect enough on the fact that the lifestyle we enjoy here is quite remarkable on a global scale.
“If you look at the things that sustain that, natural resources, they’re all finite.
“The business I was employed in [Alcoa], in 50 years’ time largely the bauxite reserves will be exhausted.”
The state’s biggest industry, iron ore, faced similar challenges. Exports of the steelmaking commodity hit $115 billion in 2020, more than a third of the state’s economic output.
While he acknowledged the abundance of iron ore reserves, Dr Honey said grades would decline over time and there were medium-term risks to demand.
China was increasing its use of recycled steel, and he said it had been accumulating scrap metal at a growth rate of 5 per cent annually.
Then were also other potential supply sources, such as Guinea, and a lack of alternative countries prepared to buy.
WA’s oil and gas sector also faced challenges, aside from the obvious pressure for emissions reduction.
Dr Honey said the state’s affordable gas reserves may be depleted within 30 years.
“Our gas is expensive on the world stage already,” he said, compared to exporters such as Qatar and the US.
And this was where WA should be thinking ahead.
“If you look at the things that sustain our economy, they’ll be gone,” Dr Honey told Business News.
The US city of Detroit, in Michigan, was a good example of how things can go wrong. When he was young, Dr Honey said, it was a premier economic city.
“Detroit was the glittering citadel globally of technical excellence in the world,” he said.
“Now it’s got about 600,000 people and they’re bulldozing suburbs.
“There’s no intrinsic reason Perth could not (become) Detroit.”
The City of Detroit, which is the central jurisdiction in a much larger metropolitan area, had a population of about 1.8 million in 1950, according to the US Census Bureau, declining to about 670,000 in 2018.
Detroit’s metro was a renowned hub of manufacturing, particularly cars, but the city gradually declined and decayed.
Manufacturing jobs roughly halved from 2000 to 2010, according to the US Bureau of Labour Statistics, although General Motors, Ford Motor and Fiat Chrysler still have operations in the metropolitan area.
There’s continued debate about the causes for the multi-decade decline, including high tax rates in the city, poor manufacturing competitiveness leading to industry moving offshore, and excessive payments for workers.
Pensions for manufacturing and public sector workers were locked in over many decades and helped drive the City of Detroit into bankruptcy in 2013.
Interviewed for a 2013 New York Times article charting the city’s decline, Northwestern University history professor Kevin Boyle said Detroit had suffered particularly because it did not have a diverse economy.
Professor Boyle said the heyday of the auto industry had been similar to Silicon Valley in the 1980s, and officials had not seen any reason to prepare for a different approach.
Dr Honey said the potential risks for Perth and WA were real. Perth was at the end of a trading network, rather than in the centre as was Singapore, Dr Honey said.
And while it had a good climate and agricultural land, that would not be enough to sustain the lifestyle.
WA would need to reconstruct manufacturing or create industries that could replace mining, he said.
Photo: David Henry
Inclusive intent
In order to chase these ambitions, Dr Honey and his alliance partners, The Nationals WA, will need to win 24 seats from WA Labor in a chamber of 59 districts.
It follows a historic loss for the Liberal Party, which has been reduced to just two seats in the Legislative Assembly and seven in the upper house.
So, Dr Honey is in a unique position as leader of the state’s Liberal Party: he is not opposition leader, as the party has fewer seats in the Legislative Assembly than the Nationals.
He is responsible for state development in the alliance arrangement between the two parties.
Nationals leader Mia Davies is leader of the opposition, and Liberal Steve Thomas opposition leader in the Legislative Council.
While the Nationals managed to avoid the huge losses suffered by the Liberals in metropolitan areas at the March election, its primary vote dropped 1.4 percentage points to 4 per cent.
Dr Honey said the next four years would be a team undertaking.
“In terms of style, I do want to see a fundamental cultural change within the [Liberal] party,” he said.
“For some time now, we’ve had this presidential-style of leadership.
“Everything focused on the leader.
“That has been at the root cause of electoral problems we’ve had going back to the end of the Barnett government.
“It’s a style I utterly reject.
“This idea you’re going to find the messiah as leader ... is fraught with danger.”
An example of a team approach would be shadow health minister Libby Mettam, who would be focused on ambulance ramping and hospital issues.
“I intend to maximise the collective wisdom and input of every member of parliament,” Dr Honey said.
“And much more engagement with the whole party, the business community, small business in particular, and not for profits.
“I am determined that we will have a party that ... involves everyone.”
