The rightwing Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) made its foray into Western Australia on Friday evening, with no sign of One Nation on a stage dominated by Liberal politicians.

The event, dubbed Reset the West, was a rallying call for conservatives to work together, but what emerged was a Liberal party attempt to rebuild the centre-right with itself at its core.

It comes after the Liberals’ disastrous performance at state and federal elections, and polls now showing One Nation eclipsing the Liberals with 20–25% of the primary vote.

The federal Liberal MP Andrew Hastie attacked Labor’s immigration policy and simplistically linked it to the housing crisis. He told the audience of 240 predominantly older attendees that politicians had got it wrong.

“Immigration numbers are too high, while the 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’s also fuelling our domestic inflation, which remains at 4.9%. That’s why people are angry.”

Australia’s annual inflation rate is at 3.8%, but by the end of 2025, Perth’s figure was 4.9%.

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Hastie said Australians blamed a broken system on the Liberals and Labor, and that this had fuelled the rise of One Nation, the teal independents and the Greens.

But economic modelling suggests eliminating migration for the coming decade would leave property prices 2.3% higher by the mid-2030s than under a “base case” of migration continuing as expected.

CPAC is part networking body, part political rally. In the United States, it focuses heavily on Maga populist ideology, Trumpism, and anti-immigration, anti-woke rhetoric.

While Friday night’s Perth event touched on some of those points, the overall tone was much more moderate. It appeared more as an attempt by the Liberals to head off One Nation than to unite the entire right wing of politics.

With a speaker list that included the 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 platformed 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 pretty senior conservatives so we prioritised them, and Nick is leader of the house,” he said. “We are pretty agnostic.”

The “great Australian dream” of owning a home took centre stage on Friday, with a focus on WA’s record-breaking housing affordability crisis.

Zempilas said: “At the same time when the Cook Labor government have banked multibillion-dollar 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 a major factor in whether young people had faith in governments. A “whole generation of West Australians” was losing hope of ever owning a home, he said.

Zempilas admitted that 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 has to focus on these lost Australians. Our electoral success depends on it.”

Notre Dame University political scientist Martin Drum said people were blaming migrants for housing becoming unaffordable, and that was fuelling One Nation support.

“One Nation has always been very heavily anti-immigration and they have been more forceful about it than any of the major parties, because the major parties are thinking about what skills do we need for our economy and what do businesses need,” Drum said.

“Inflation is on the rise, people are worried what their jobs are looking like in an economy that is transforming and I think in a general sense there is a bit of anti-globalisation,” Drum said. “There is a lot of economic anxiety.”

Drum said the anti-immigration messaging at the CPAC conference was misaligned with what WA businesses are saying, particularly in the construction industry.

“We don’t have the right skilled immigration intake,” 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 assistance in that respect.

“Immigrants are being blamed for the housing shortage, but there is a shortage of workers to build those houses.”