The Dominion League of Western Australia was established in 1930 to lobby for secession, with leading campaigners including newspaper editor James MacCallum Smith and businessman Keith Watson.

The referendum was held simultaneously with the 1933 Western Australian state election, with Mitchell losing office to Philip Collier, who opposed secession.

A parliamentary joint select committee ultimately ruled that the Statute of Westminster 1931 had rendered the British parliament powerless to unilaterally amend the constitution.

[2] Secessionist sentiment was quick to arise, driven by the detrimental impact of the federal government's protectionist economic policies on the state's agricultural and mining sectors.

As early as 1906, the Western Australian Legislative Assembly passed a resolution calling for a secession referendum, although no action was taken by the state government.

[4] The Great Depression had a significant impact on Western Australia, leading to increased dissatisfaction with the federal government and support for secession.

The Nationalists did not take an official position, whereas the opposition Australian Labor Party (ALP) led by Philip Collier was against secession.

[8] The Dominion League "crafted a mythology of oppression and played on a sense of 'lost liberty' and 'distinct identity', and not only economic injustice, in order to galvanise a mass movement".

[20] The state government nominated London-based former premier Hal Colebatch as leader of the delegation, with the other members being leading secessionists James MacCallum Smith and Keith Watson and barrister Matthew Moss as legal adviser.

[21] The petition was ultimately rejected by the joint committee in November 1935, which found that the Statute of Westminster and Balfour Declaration of 1926 had made it incompatible with the "constitutional conventions of the Empire unless the demand for such legislation came as the clearly expressed wish of the Australian people as a whole".

[28] The results of the 1933 referendum have often been invoked by later revivals of the secession movement and by other Western Australian groups dissatisfied with the actions of the federal government.