Teal candidate who waited EIGHT days to report husband missing after drunken late-night swim looks set to beat Labor in seat it has held since 1934

A Teal candidate who waited eight days to report her husband missing after he went for a drunken swim is leading in the Labor-held seat of Fremantle.

Kate Hulett has a narrow 50.1 per cent to 49.9 per cent lead over incumbent Labor MP Josh Wilson, after scoring a massive 17 per cent swing against Labor in the gentrified portside Perth electorate.

If the trend continues, with 79 per cent of the vote counted, Labor would lose a prized seat it has held continuously since 1934, with wartime prime minister John Curtin and former West Australian premier Carmen Lawrence among its high-profile former members.

Ms Hulett, a Climate 200 candidate, lost her husband Matthew Bale during a holiday in 2016 when he tried to swim from Rottnest Island to Perth, but was never seen again.

A coronial inquest found Mr Bale, then 38, had disappeared by misadventure on March 21 that year, following a late afternoon argument with his wife about his drinking problem when she smelt vodka on his breath.

He left their holiday accommodation after an argument, taking a ferry ticket with him, but missed the last ferry and attempted to swim the 20 kilometres back to Fremantle at night.

Ms Hulett and Mr Bale’s British parents Alan and Brenda Bale stayed on Rottnest Island for three more days after he left, and it was only when they returned to Fremantle that they realised he was not there.

Ms Hulett waited until March 29 – eight days after she last saw him – to go to police and report him missing.

WA Deputy state coroner Barry King handed down his inquest report into Mr Bale’s death in June 2019.

‘The deceased asked Ms Hulett for his telephone, his ferry ticket and some money,’ the inquest found. 

‘She gave him the ferry ticket since the ferries had stopped running for the day, but she did not give him his phone or any money.

‘He left through the back door after punching the screen door.’

The inquest also noted Ms Hulett and her parents-in-law continued their holiday even after Mr Bale had disappeared.

‘When the deceased had not returned to the unit by the next morning, Ms Hulett and the deceased’s parents assumed that he had caught the ferry back to Fremantle,’ it said.

‘They decided to stay on Rottnest Island for the remainder of their booked holiday.

‘When they returned to Fremantle on March 24, 2016, it became apparent that something was wrong.

‘There was no sign of the deceased at home or work, and his bank account had not been used.’

But after returning home to Fremantle, Ms Hulett waited another five days to report him missing to the police.

Ms Hulett almost won the overlapping state seat of Fremantle at Western Australia’s March state elections, scoring a 26.4 per cent swing against Labor after she campaigned to ban billionaire Kerry Stokes from owning media outlets because of his oil and gas interests.

State Industrial Relations Minister Simone McGurk held on with a bare 0.8 per cent margin.

As a federal candidate, she scored 23.3 per cent of the primary vote, coming second behind Labor’s 39.4 per cent but was narrowly leading with 50.1 per cent after preferences.

During the federal campaign, Ms Hulett addressed her husband’s disappearance from Rottnest Island on in a campaign podcast video.

‘To come to the dramatic end, his mum and dad were over one time from the UK and we were in Rotto and basically he went missing one night,’ she told her ‘A Piece of Kate’ Podcast.

‘There was this big blow-up where he was kind of trying, like, poke his mum and dad, snapping at him, saying, “You’re a horrible son”.

‘He was just trying to get something, don’t know what, and he just stormed off and he didn’t come home and I was, “Fine, he’ll just be sleeping on the beach or something”.’