Tag: Arthur Calwell

Back in 2012, a major study on the selection and removal of party leaders in Anglo parliamentary democracies was published. After the defeat of Malcolm Fraser at the 1983 federal election, the Liberal Party changed leaders six times, eventually settling on John Howard in 1995. Following the defeat of Paul Keating’s Labor government at the 1996 election, Labor has had eight leadership changes, a remarkable feat considering that two of those leaders – Kim Beazley and Bill Shorten – have between them tallied up almost 13 years. The rest – Simon Crean, Mark Latham, Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard – do not account for even a full decade between them. Australia did not begin discarding party leaders and even prime ministers yesterday. It’s hard to overlook one or two parallels in this scenario with the current state of play in Australian politics. He might have been the classic “rat”, but even once he switched sides he remained true to many of the policies long favoured by his former party. It is about how we do politics. But the Liberals have not travelled down this path, and the destabilisation of Turnbull is one of the results. For Turnbull, it is starting to look like it might be too late.