West Australian premier-elect Colin Barnett has today unveiled a 17-member cabinet featuring three Nationals MPs and an independent, Liz Constable. The Liberals formed a minority government this week after gaining the support of the Nationals in the state’s hung parliament.

Colin Barnett’s administration is barely ready for government. Whle the front bench will include some talented performers, for the most part the Liberal Party has spent the past 3 1/2 years as a rabble. However the soon-to-be-minted premier is a substantial figure and will now carry the all-important gravitas of incumbency.

Labor called the state election one day after Colin Barnett was elected Liberal leader, making this year’s election the earliest in 100 years. The first half of the campaign was timed to overlap the Olympic Games, to drown out the Opposition. That tactic backfired and Barnett got a two-week honeymoon.

The latest Newspoll reveals that Labor’s lead of 54 per cent to 46 per cent has been eroded to such a point that little now separates it and the Opposition on a two-party-preferred basis, with Labor just ahead at 51 per cent to 49 per cent. Combined primary support for the two conservative parties — the Liberals and the Nationals — jumped seven points to equal Labor on 42 per cent.

With the disgraced leader Troy Buswell at the helm, West Australian Premier Alan Carpenter was coasting to victory. Buswell was doing all of Labor’s work. But with Colin Barnett in the chair, the premier and his well-oiled Labor machine now have a completely different equation with which to deal.

Mr Buswell, 42, denied he was pushed from the leadership of the West Australian Liberal Party after a series of scandals that included the admission he had sniffed the chair of a female staffer. But he admitted that he spent the weekend talking to a small group of senior party members about his future.

The West Australian Opposition Leader, who has been in the job for just seven months, made international headlines over a chair-sniffing incident involving a female Liberal Party staffer. It is believed that internal party polling was the catalyst for Mr Buswell’s resignation.