State daddy issues: who or what was Mark McGowan — man or meme?

To quote the great poet Buck Nasty: Mark McGowan — our former WA premier and “state daddy” — is bombed out and depleted. 

And fair enough. Three-plus years of being fetishised by the world’s weirdest 19-year-old 37-year-olds would surely take a toll on your psyche, especially one as otherwise plain as McGowan’s, who has only ever fetishised the defence reserves. 

The problem with yassifying anyone — or anything — in Perth is that our accent tends to make the American drag queens’ pronunciation of “yasss” (as in yasss, queen) sound vaguely South African, and thus deeply off-putting. 

McGowan’s brand has existed in this hi-vis state of hollow signifiers for the better part of his tenure as premier, with the man and his policies getting lost somewhere in a discourse that hinges more on Instagram infographics than any actual analysis. 

Despite how our paint-guzzling national commentariat made it seem, McGowan’s border lockdown was incredibly popular in WA. Sure, it ticked off Clive Palmer, the prime minister and yours truly, but it was, ultimately, seen as a decision that got the job done. 

Thanks to McGowan’s zealous approach to the pandemic, the worst of it passed us by like it was another touring pop star. As much as it upturned lives and made some people (hello) feel as if they were trapped in an Escape from New York-type scenario, McGowan’s border policies meant our pandemic felt like more of the same, more of the same being WA’s bread and butter. 

Through a combination of cabin fever, Stockholm syndrome and a sudden lack of access to Bali, Western Australians of a certain stripe started fantasising about their premier like a hallucinating 15th-century monk mistaking a tree stump for the madonna. 

Suddenly a man previously comparable to a relief teacher who builds models of World War II battleships in his spare time became “state daddy”. The premier had become more than the premier: he was a meme. 

People were getting state daddy tattoos. People were starting cult-like Facebook pages. People were writing songs of the kind they’d blast at prisoners in solitary confinement. People were uploading deepfake McGowans to “the WACAverse”. There was even a limited-edition State Daddy-Os cereal, which I imagine tasted like iron ore and lithium. 

One of the genuinely endearing McGowan tributes from this time was artist Emma Buswell’s knitted jumper paying tribute to the premier’s admittedly timeless “There’s nothing unlawful about going for a run and eating a kebab” quote from the peak of pando-paranoia, a quote that should be put on the plaque of the statue of him that Rio Tinto will someday place in the lobby of its Perth office. 

For all the flak McGowan was copping for being an egotistical dictator, he seemed to absorb this weirdness as excitedly as a man raised in ALP factional conflict could: something to leverage for — or against — someone, maybe, who knows. 

Any transcript of any interview where this phenomenon was raised with him scans like a Voight-Kampff test designed to make an android’s GPU explode.

Take, for example, this exchange with Pete of Pete, Matt & Kymba Mix94.5 “fame” from July 2021, where the premier’s told he’s going to be made “honorary no-cap” of an e-sports team, and is asked what he’d like his jersey to read:

Pete: You’ve got two choices: you can have premier or state daddy. 

McGowan: [beleaguered laughter]

Kymba: Which would you prefer? 

McGowan: Well, what are they gonna think in Iceland if they see ‘state daddy’ written on the back?

It’s easy to lose McGowan the premier in the Wonka tunnel that is McGowan the meme. He swept into office on a state’s utter exhaustion with the slick-backed, back-handed mismanagement and corruption of the long-reigning Colin Barnett Liberal government.

For McGowan, who as a boy wished to be the next John Curtin, COVID offered a chance to get as close to this fantasy as he could, and despite critics having gripes with his approach, he steered the state through a once-in-a-generation crisis.

The goodwill — heck the badwill — masked a premier who seemed intent on delivering more of the same: a state government totally in the thrall of the mining industry, letting the economic disparity wreaked by that industry go unchecked, while doubling down on a racist, tough-on-crime mode of violent policing that does nothing but continue the state’s long legacy of the same.

With the state opposition all but blasted away like so much Indigenous rock art, McGowan had little to do but steer a steady course to reelection. He stuck his thumb in the eye of Canberra — and east coast high-hatters — and won, and there’s nothing Western Australians, of any voting bloc, love more than that. 

But daddy is oh so tired, and must rest. So he goes, into the west like Gandalf the Beige, never to return to the Facebook-brained wine mums and irony-cooked parochial meme pages that loved him so.

Not to worry children! Pop-pop shall return to us as a lobbyist for the oil and gas conglomerates he and his party love so, so much, and I’m sure he’ll come bearing gifts (offshore drill sites) for all the little fly-in-fly-out orphans. 

Until then, let him enjoy a run and a kebab — there’s nothing unlawful about it.