On Tuesday, Grylls conceded defeat. An airconditioning fitter from Karratha, Labor's Kevin Michel, had won.

Grylls should have known better. Within a fortnight of proposing the tax in August the miners had mobilised.

Campaign spearhead

Political campaign strategist and communications specialist Joey Armenti was brought in to work with the mining lobby group Chamber of Minerals and Energy, which would spearhead the campaign.

Armenti, CME chief executive Reg Howard-Smith and corporate services director Julie Hill held weekly meetings with communications executives from BHP (George Wright) and Rio (Ben Mitchell) and representatives from the Minerals Council of Australia.

Geoff Denman, who worked on the creative campaign against the former Labor government's mining tax, was recruited.

Bulk advertising was booked to bombard not just the residents of the Pilbara but the entire state. Spots were booked right up to the March poll and ran during the Australian Open, during summer cricket test matches, and almost everything in between.

BHP went as far as using anti-mining tax messages as screensavers for its local workforce.


The CME is collating the final figures but expects to have spent more than $2 million. The final figure is likely to be less than $5 million, which Grylls suggests they spent.

Independent market analytics company Ebiquity estimates the CME spent $1.5 million on its ad blitz. But this does not include money spent on regional TV, research and consultants.

Misjudging mood for change

Grylls admits he misjudged the mood for change from the electorate and if voters were not as keen to oust former premier Colin Barnett things may have been different.

"Give me this campaign in four years time when there isn't a mood to change the government that has been in charge for eight years and I think it would be different," he says, ever the optimist.

As the campaign had gathered momentum polling showed support for tax dropped.

And it's the polling booths that tell the story.

At two booths in Newman, a town established by BHP in the 1960s and largely populated by its workers, Grylls attracted between 10.4 per cent and 13.8 per cent of the primary vote.


At Wickham, a Rio Tinto town, he got 14 per cent.

This compares to about 30 per cent in booths in Karratha and Port Hedland, two towns that have benefited enormously from Grylls' signature Royalties for Regions program.

Job security hot topic

One mining worker based in the Pilbara told AFR Weekend that Grylls' mining tax spooked people already jittery about losing their jobs in the wake of relentless cost cutting by BHP and Rio.

"Job security has certainly become a massive issue," the worker says.

"There are so many people hurting who are out of the money on big home loans on property that isn't worth that much anymore."

The worker says sentiment shifted from people appreciating the better facilities spending from Grylls' Royalties for Regions delivered to worrying about the future.

"Yes, facilities are nice but I just want to keep my job," he says.


Voter backlash

The Nationals' overall vote held ground relative to the rejection delivered to the government it shared power with – slipping 0.7 per cent to attract 5.4 per cent of the vote.

This compares to a 16 per cent swing against the Liberals, which lost seven cabinet ministers to record the biggest backlash against a sitting government on record.

But the Nationals vote crashed in the Pilbara, a region dominated by the miners and traditionally held by Labor. Grylls suffered a 13.7 per cent swing against him.

University of Notre Dame political analyst Martin Drum says the campaign waged by the miners was "extraordinary in its breadth" but believes Grylls may have found it hard to hang on even if he wasn't pushing the tax.

"We have seen a massive, landslide swing to the Labor Party and so it would have been hard for him to hold out against that anyway, even if he didn't have his mining tax," says Drum.

Election analyst William Bowe thinks Grylls may have hung on, had he ditched the tax because of the backlash he sustained from Liberal and One Nation voters.

"I think he probably would have held on, if he hadn't done the tax. The flow of Liberal preferences is extraordinary," Bowe says.

"Labor got about half the preferences from Liberal and One Nation voters. If Liberal voters had behaved like they normally do on preferences he would have won. Why didn't they? The only answer is the mining tax."