WILLAGEE Labor MP Peter Tinley is on the political comeback trail.

Eighteen months after resigning from the shadow cabinet to deal with a family business deal that soured, he’s told leader Mark McGowan he’s ready for a portfolio.

Not that anyone on the front bench is offering to step aside for the decorated retired SAS commander, long touted as a future Labor leader.

Mr Tinley signalled he was ready for more responsibility by getting elected as Labor state president in the party’s first rank-and-file ballot for the position (defeating MUA organiser and Fremantle branch member Adrian Evans).

He has also taken on the presidency of the party’s caucus and sits on its property and finance committee.

With his wife’s company in receivership after its plans to build a hotel near the Port Hedland airport fizzled, he says he now has “more time and capacity to contribute”. “We’re through the majority of that and trying to claw our way back,” is all he’ll say of his affairs.

Mr Tinley says he felt honoured to run Labor’s state conference, which put the sword to factional warlords harvesting blank ballot papers to fill out themselves.

“You will no longer see delegates running along scooping up the ballots and filling them out enmasse,” he told the Herald. Mr Tinley says there’s a genuine feeling of resurgence within the party, which also adopted long-promised reforms to give branches a greater say in preselecting candidates. Previously the party’s central committee and factional and union leaders made those decisions.

“There’s a great sense of renewal. The changes are not really all that well understood because they are fairly fresh, but now is a great time to be Labor.”

He says one of his roles as president will be to understand members’ mood and to bring a historic context to contemporary debates.

by STEVE GRANT