Secession by Western Australia: Next Steps

A couple of weeks ago I told you about the launch of a new book, Secession by Western Australia, to discuss their separatist vision for a potential new nation, free of federation.

There was strong interest, with tickets selling out.

On the book website you can find a video of the evening including my Q+A with authors Julian Gillespie and Prof Gigi Foster exploring what secession might look like.

Julian Gillespie at the Secession by Western Australia book launch, 13 March 2026. Image: Andrew Milner.

The next step is to see if there’s enough interest - and money - to turn the idea fleshed out in the book into a political movement.

I’ll let the authors explain further:

Thank you for the interest you have expressed in the Western Australian secession project that we revealed publicly on March 13 with the Perth launch of the book, Secession by Western Australia. You can (re-)watch the launch and read reviews of the book on our main book website, here: https://www.secessionwabook.shop/home

Over the coming months, we plan to continue building the base of support for this initiative, and to put together the founding building blocks of the CoreWest Institute whose mission will be to further develop the blueprints and implementation plans outlined in the book, drawing on expertise from around the world and input from Western Australians. To keep up to date with developments, we strongly encourage you to subscribe to the Secession by Western Australia substack, here:

Going forward, this substack will be the primary means through which we will communicate with supporters about the secession project. We envision that this substack will be populated over time not only with our own writings but with contributions from the community that are aligned with the goal of WA secession. Please put your hand up at any stage if you would be interested in penning a contribution for us to consider for the substack, or would like to refer us to someone who does.

Other ways you can assist our efforts include the following:

• Connecting us with supporters of secession who have the financial capacity to help fund the CoreWest Institute. To this point, our work has been a labour of love, but this necessarily limits the scale of what we can achieve. Without funding, our initiative cannot succeed. Please ask potential funders to email us at SecessionWA@proton.me.

• Indicating if you have interest in participating in the political advancement of secession. While the authorship team are not politicians, we envision that a new political party will need to be set up in order to carry the proposal of secession to the WA state elections in early 2029. We are happy to facilitate connecting people to this end, although we will not ourselves be taking any political roles at any stage in the process.

• Going onto Amazon and posting a public review of Secession by Western Australia: https://www.amazon.com.au/Secession-Western-Australia-Julian-Gillespie/dp/1764485114# which will assist in drawing attention to the book. (Note that you can still get a far better deal if you purchase copies of the book directly from our main book website here: https://www.secessionwabook.shop/home.)

• Requesting that your local bookstore and your local community, school, or university library stock Secession by Western Australia, and informing us on SecessionWA@proton.me if they have trouble sourcing it, so we can follow up with them and their suppliers.

Finally, if you have particular professional experience or knowledge that you are prepared to contribute on a paid or unpaid basis to our initiative as it matures, please kindly let us know. We will maintain a roster of this information to call upon as needs arise over the coming months and years.

If this movement can get some serious money behind it, it will no doubt generate some worthwhile discussions on how to improve governance and conditions in Western Australia.