With Malcolm Turnbull replacing Tony Abbott as Liberal leader and Prime Minister, we have now had three parliamentary terms in a row where the sitting Prime Minister has been rolled by their own party. We’ve also seen numerous cases of state Premiers being turfed, and of course large numbers of Opposition Leaders losing their job in ‘midnight coups’. It’s started to look like a pattern, and has been described as a “coup culture“.
There are obviously a bunch of reasons why this has happened, but at least one of those reasons is: because they can.
In other developed western democracies, it is normal that ordinary party members have some say over who the party leader is. In addition to changing the balance of who decides who wins the leadership ballot (which you may or may not like) it also makes a leadership election more like any other type of election – you need a timetable, opening of nominations, a period of voting and a result. You can’t just do it all in the halls of Parliament on one Monday night.
I previously wrote about this for New Matilda in 2012, and numerous times here on the blog.
The Australian Labor Party introduced a new direct election model following the 2013 election, and we haven’t seen any serious discussion about a challenge to Bill Shorten since he was elected. If Shorten was doing particularly badly you would expect to see a challenge, but it isn’t in anyone’s interests to undermine Shorten to trigger a spill, since the bar is set so high.
Of course, involving members in decisions can result in uncertainty and unexpected results, as recently seen in the UK Labour leadership contest. Having said that, Jeremy Corbyn’s overwhelming margin of victory suggests that the specific election model is not responsible for his victory.
Meanwhile, Australia now has a new Prime Minister, and we’ll wait to see how he performs. You would expect Turnbull to benefit from a short-term jump in polling, but recent history has taught us that popular alternative leaders can struggle to maintain their popularity once they take over the leadership.
The problem with direct election is that a party’s supporters are almost always more hardcore than the parliamentary wing. As we see with Corbyn, this can lead to the grassroots electing the person who is most ideologically pure rather than the one who has the best chance of actually winning elections. There’s no point being pure and passionate and idealistic if you can’t win government.
(You see the same thing now with right-wing commentators sooking about Turnbull….they’d rather lose with a “real conservative” than win with a moderate?)
Plus, MPs are the ones with their backsides on the line…they’re the ones out of a job if they lose office. Direct election could result in them being given a leader who they don’t want and have no confidence in. This is hardly a recipe for “stability”.
And the reason Shorten hasn’t been challenged is that he’s doing well in the polls. Nothing to do with the leadership rules…if Shorten was polling terrible numbers, he’d be out on his ear.
Yeah, I’m actually relatively happy with the current voting method. I think it’s important in a Westminster democracy that the leader of the party must actually be able to maintain the confidence of the party room. That was why John Howard so successfully held back any challenge from Peter Costello – because he maintained the party room’s confidence.
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