WA may be another disaster for ALP in 2016

The good news for Labor is that their stocks in Western Australia are set to improve in the federal election.

The bad? That is largely because things have never been worse and the only way would seem to be up.

Labor holds only three lower house seats in WA compared to the Liberals' 12 - which includes Foreign Minister Julie Bishop - in what has long been a Liberal stronghold.

In the Senate, the party has only three out of 12 WA seats.

Labor's fortunes in the west have been mostly declining for more than two decades, since John Howard ended the party's Hawke-Keating years.

Labor's primary vote hit an historic low of 30.8 per cent at the 2013 federal election.

Kevin Rudd and then Julia Gillard's troubled federal Labor governments were seen as wanting to steal WA's resource riches through a mining tax, while a carbon tax, ongoing leadership turmoil and soaring numbers of boat people arrivals off the WA coast hurt too.

As the state's economy boomed and many people became rich, Liberal state Premier Colin Barnett reaped the political benefits and embarked on major public works.

Federal Labor was so unpopular the state party started calling themselves WA Labor.

However, the abrupt end to the mining boom and large state and federal debts could mean a rethink from WA voters, who are proudly independent from the east but suddenly less confident about their futures.

The most recent Newspoll had Labor's two-party vote in WA up to 36 per cent and the Coalition's down to 47.

Labor has their eyes on four Liberal seats held by a margin of less than eight per cent.

They are all located around Perth, including the new seat of Burt, Cowan, Hasluck and Swan.

However they might not win any and are no guarantee of retaining the three seats they do hold.

All are held by small margins of less than six per cent and have new candidates because the existing MPs have retired.

"That doesn't exactly suggest a party that's about to surge forward," professor in politics at Curtin University David Black says.

Labor has won the two-party preferred vote only three times in WA and each of those occasions was under PM and party legend Bob Hawke in the 1980s.

However current Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull seems conscious of needing to keep West Australians on side.

Recently he has promised the state $490 million to make up for getting the lowest share of GST revenue in Australia by a long way and promised $260 million to pay for the Perth freight link tunnel.