Who'd Want To Accept The Poisoned Chalice?

John Nethercote - Canberra Times

If the prime ministership is the great glittering prize of Australian politics, there can be no question that leadership of the Opposition is the slough of despond. Most leaders of the Opposition would empathise with John Nance Garner, the first of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's three vice-presidents, when he said the vice-presidency was not worth a pitcher of warm piss.

Notwithstanding, poisoned chalice as it might often be, leadership of the Opposition has one particular quality which provokes politicians to yearn for it: it carries with it the opportunity to run for the prime ministership.

If Kim Beazley's challenge next week succeeds, but his conviction that he can lead the ALP to election victory proves false, he will join Herbert Vere Evatt and Arthur Calwell as Labor leaders to have led the party to defeat at three consecutive elections. George Reid, the first leader of the Opposition also failed on three occasions, but he had a turn as prime minister between the second and third elections.

In Australia's national political history, no-one on either side has yet succeeded in a third bid after two defeats. Those to win at a second try have been Scullin (1929), Menzies (1949), and Whitlam (1972).

Apart from George Reid in the opening decade, Menzies is the only person on his side of politics who, having lost an election, has been at the helm next time around. Two, Andrew Peacock and John Howard, had a second go after an interval.

If Crean fails to keep his leadership, he will be the first Labor leader not to take the party to the polls. He would also be the third major party leader not to have had the opportunity.

Latham, leader of the Nationalist Party after its 1929 defeat, stood aside for Lyons when he left the Labor Party in 1931 and took the leadership of the new United Australia Party, of which Latham became deputy leader.

Latham's rewards included senior ministries in Lyons Government, and eventually the chief justiceship of the High Court.

More than 60 years later, Alexander Downer finally yielded the Liberal Party leadership to John Howard for his second successful bid for the prime ministership. His reward has been an unfinished seven-year term as Foreign Minister and prospects of another turn at the party leadership, especially if his one-time deputy, the petulant Peter Costello, falters.

Of the 26 politicians to have previously been leaders of the Opposition, 11 have gone on to the prime ministership, though only Andrew Fisher, Joseph Cook, Malcolm Fraser and Bob Hawke have done so at their first election as leader.

Hawke pro tem has the unusual double of being the second-longest-serving prime minister and the shortest-serving leader of the Opposition. Indeed, he never met Parliament as leader of the Opposition, the only one not to do so.

Fisher, the first leader of the Opposition to win the prime ministership as a result of a general election (1910), also had a period as prime minister in 1908-09 after Labor withdrew its support from Deakin's second government and before the protectionists and free traders had come together now that the tariff question had been settled.

Menzies, Artie Fadden and Ben Chifley were all prime ministers before becoming leaders of the Opposition. Fadden is the only Country Party politician to be a leader of the Opposition.

Up to a point, a leader of the Opposition with luck goes simply from that post to prime minister, but never returns.

This was the path followed by Fisher and Menzies in their final prime ministerships; it was also the path of two prime ministers who died in office, Lyons and Curtin.

Curtin's path to the prime ministership is distinctive. The second time he led Labor in an election resulted in a hung Parliament. Menzies kept office with the support of a couple of Independents.

Internal discord in the Coalition, and Curtin's own inspired leadership, saw them swing their votes Labor's way. Labor kept office until the 1943 election which it won handsomely.

The two prime ministers most recently defeated at the polls, Fraser and Keating, left Parliament immediately rather than returning to opposition and another shot at the spoils of office. Keating joined Billy Hughes as the only Labor prime minister not to have led the party in opposition (excluding caretaker leader Frank Forde). Bob Hawke likewise chose resignation rather than continue in Parliament after losing the Labor leadership to Keating.

It was not so in the past: defeated prime ministers Fisher, Cook, Scullin, Menzies, Fadden, Chifley, Gorton and McMahon all remained in Parliament and (save for Gorton and McMahon) continued to lead their parties; in Menzies case, after an interval. S. M. Bruce might well have done so except that he lost his seat at the 1929 election.

Fisher, Cook and Menzies all brought their parties back to office. So, also, did Fadden, but as junior partner in the coalition. Neither Harold Holt nor John Gorton led the Liberal Party in opposition.

Two leaders of the Opposition, Bill Hayden and Alexander Downer, have been deposed but nonetheless gone on to high ministerial office both as ministers for Foreign Affairs. Another, Bill Snedden, took the Speaker's wig when the Coalition returned to office after ousting the Whitlam Government, and left Parliament following the defeat of the Fraser Government.

For some Opposition leaders the post is the end (if not necessarily the pinnacle) of their political careers. Frank Tudor, a former minister in the Fisher and Hughes Labor governments, led Labor to two defeats before his death in 1922. His successor, Matthew Charlton, never received the seals of ministerial office; nor, subsequently, did the now bitter John Hewson, whose crusade for power was crushed by Paul Keating.

Little more than a year after the Fightback election he lost the leadership in a challenge from Alexander Downer, backed by Costello who became deputy leader.

He served briefly in the shadow ministry before resigning in a dispute with the new leader.

Having little stomach for the fight, especially once Howard was back in the leadership, Hewson departed for the business world, ultimately returning to academia.

Evatt and Calwell, three time losers, had extensive ministerial experience, but neither was to sit on the right hand side of the Speaker again after going into opposition in 1949.

In the first decade leadership of the Opposition was shared by George Reid (Free Trade) and Labor, when Reid himself was prime minister.

This division of the office is partly explained by the de facto alliance between the protectionists and Labor, and partly by the fact that Reid was almost as unwilling to surrender leadership of the Opposition to Deakin as the latter was to surrender the prime ministership to him. They even had a scuffle on the floor of the House over it in 1904 after Deakin lost office to Labor.

Where Opposition leaders are not making a mark, there is always a question of when to leave. Reid eventually went to London, partly to facilitate the fusion of the free traders and protectionists.

In the early years, leadership tended to change within a year or so of an impending election: Deakin yielded to Cook in January 1913 and Charlton to Scullin in the lead-up to the 1928 election.

The ailing Scullin himself left a year after the 1934 election; the delay was long enough for newly-re-elected John Curtin to establish himself sufficiently to defeat the deputy leader, Frank Forde, by one vote.

After the 1943 election Menzies faced little challenge when he resumed the leadership of the UAP and the Opposition. A quarter century elapsed before the Liberal side would have a ballot for the party leadership (though there was plenty of life in contests for the deputy leadership in 1956 and 1966).

Evatt went off to the Supreme Court of NSW early in 1960, a little more than a year after the 1958 election.

Having walked into the job, Simon Crean must now fight for it.

Calwell, on the other hand, waited almost until the Parliament met for the first time in 1967 to call a party meeting to elect new leaders after the debacle of 1966; it was this meeting which brought Whitlam to the leadership or, as he put it, his destiny.

Given the vulnerability of Australian party leaders, it cannot be surprising that leaders of the Opposition are more exposed to challenge than prime ministers.

John Gorton is the only prime minister to have been challenged after an election. Fisher, Tudor, Evatt, Whitlam and Hewson are among Opposition leaders who have faced a ballot after an election defeat.

They are also more open to challenge, implicit or explicit, between elections, as Charlton, Evatt, Calwell, Whitlam, Snedden, Peacock, Howard, Hewson, Downer and now Crean can testify.

Simon Crean has some grounds for complaint. He is the first Labor leader to be challenged for the party leadership before he has been to the polls. Even Whitlam, who put his office on the line in April 1968 after only 15 months in the job, at least had the opportunity to parade his talents at the Senate election in 1967. His fight was with the party's federal executive. But it was Cairns who put his hand up in the caucus, aided in his campaign by publicist Phillip Adams. Whitlam won, of course but with a reduced majority.

Beazley and Crean, like Hewson before them, have previously walked into the job without a ballot Beazley twice and Crean once. Now they must fight for it!