No Rules When The Knives Are Out

John Nethercote - Canberra Times

The leadership challenge is a distinctive feature of Australian parliamentary politics. Australia is not alone in having political parties in which major figures think they can do better than the incumbent leader, but elsewhere the business of unseating an incumbent is far more complicated.

It is not a matter of bringing on a party meeting and having a vote, in which an interval of a week or 10 days before the vote is taken constitutes inordinate notice.

In Britain and Canada there are complex procedures regarding notice, votes among the membership and, in the case of Canada, party conventions similar to those used in the United States for choosing candidates for president.

The leadership challenge in Australia is a consequence of the fact that the party room not only controls but monopolises the choice of leaders. Little or no notice is required; nor must a winner secure a special majority.

So few are the rules that, in the Labor Party, willingness to go straight to a secret ballot, presumably not on a show and tell basis, becomes a virility test for incumbent leaders under challenge.

The conventional form of the challenge is a contest between a veteran incumbent and a rising politician, often the deputy; less frequently it is a competition between peers.

Beazley's challenge to Crean is unique in that it takes the form of a veteran emerging from a semi-retirement to reclaim a mantle apparently voluntarily surrendered less than two years earlier.

It is, otherwise, in the modern mould: it is explicit and almost unmarked by subtlety. In its formative phase, the challenge was implicit. The often dynamic, hyperactive aspirant for elevation had to bide his time in the hope, even expectation, that the top post would, preferably sooner than later, fall his way.

So it was for Billy Hughes in his impatience to replace three-time prime minister Andrew Fisher. Hughes never challenged Fisher the Prime Minister.

But Fisher the Leader of the Opposition was a different matter. After Labor's 1913 defeat Fisher faced a ballot; he won overwhelmingly; one challenger now lost to history received 14 votes; the only person to vote for Hughes was (apparently) Hughes himself!

Fisher brought the party back to office in 1914 but stayed only a year before heading for London as high commissioner. He went at a time of his own choosing but there are signs that he found the increasingly tense politics of the war distasteful.

In the vote for a new leader, no-one opposed Hughes. As Nationalist Prime Minister from 1917, his position was secure until a suitable successor came on the scene.

Stanley Melbourne Bruce, Gallipoli veteran, urbane, photogenic, 20 years younger, readily slipped into the post once Hughes's position became untenable when the Nationalists lost their majority in the 1922 election. Hughes's removal was part of the Country Party's price for coalition.

Both Bruce and Hughes figured in the dramas that marked Joe Lyons's last years as prime minister. Although the first Australian party leader to win three consecutive elections (1932, '34, '37), there was much restiveness from late 1938. Robert Menzies, Attorney-General and Deputy Leader, was clearly unsettled. Bruce counselled him about Lyons's election-winning talents and the need to "steer" him between elections; Country Party leader Page encouraged Menzies to be patient.

Eventually Menzies resigned from the Government when it abandoned its national insurance program. Lyons died a few weeks later. In the leadership contest Menzies found his toughest opponent was Billy Hughes after Page and Casey, another contender, had failed to persuade Bruce to return from London to take the prime ministership again.

Hughes eventually did lead the United Australia Party.

The Coalition went into Opposition when Labor under Curtin took office in October 1941. Menzies thought the Leader of the UAP, the larger party, should become Leader of the Opposition.

Others thought Fadden, who had been Prime Minister at the time of Coalition defeat, should take the post. Menzies told them that a party that did not wish to lead did not deserve to be led.

Two years later, after the 1943 election, Menzies resumed the leadership without a contest.

Following Chifley's death in 1951 the challenge as a political mechanism entered a new, explicit phase. The Labor Opposition almost invariably had a leadership ballot after each election; in the 1950s, Dr H. V. Evatt won on each occasion but with increasingly smaller majorities. Arthur Calwell, his successor, was the first party leader to be challenged mid-term. Whereas Evatt had a different challenger each time, Calwell always faced his articulate, well-groomed, impatient deputy, Gough Whitlam, who saw the Labor leadership as "his destiny". He ultimately came into his destiny in February 1967.

Within 15 months, and a successful Senate campaign behind him, Whitlam himself brought on a fresh vote for the leadership after a contretemps with the ALP's Federal Executive. He narrowly defeated Jim Cairns, his main opponent in the 1967 contest, but this time by a smaller margin. Cairns was actively supported by then advertising executive Phillip Adams, who, in the current contest, has been damning of Kim Beazley's qualities and aspirations.

For the next seven years it was the Liberal Party that actively honed its skills in the challenge. John Gorton, the first senator to become prime minister, was also the first prime minister to face a party-room contest after an election victory; a mid-term challenge; and to lose the prime ministership in a tie by casting a vote against himself.

The Coalition's prospects at the up-coming 1972 election were so forlorn that no-one bothered to challenge McMahon, though there was occasionally press talk of reinstating Gorton.

The next Liberal prime minister, Malcolm Fraser, won the party leadership by first destabilising Bill Snedden in November 1974, after a closely contested double-dissolution election, and then unseating him early the next year. When he relinquished the leadership after his 1983 defeat at Bob Hawke's hands he had faced but one party vote, precipitated by himself, in mid-1982. Andrew Peacock lost by a margin of two to one.

Meanwhile, Labor was giving new shape to the challenge. It reelected Whitlam as leader, but in a ballot, and decided to have another vote mid term. Whitlam survived this second vote by one. Liberal Deputy Leader Phillip Lynch chided him that but for his vote, and that of his son, Tony, he would now be history; as, indeed, he was after the 1977 election.

For his successor, Bill Hayden, the threats largely loomed from outside the caucus. The increasingly successful NSW Premier, Neville Wran, was often mentioned, but ACTU president Bob Hawke was an altogether more ominous presence once he won preselection for the safe Melbourne seat of Wills in 1979.

If Whitlam thought leadership of Labor was his destiny, Hawke knew that the prime ministership of Australia was his. Problems in settling into parliamentary life did not prevent a strong showing just a few votes short of victory when Hayden called on a leadership vote during the party's 1982 National Conference.

Early in 1983 Hayden was prevailed upon to stand aside. Hawke led Labor to victory in an election announced on the day of Hayden's resignation; Hayden himself thought a drover's dog could have won.

The action soon shifted back to the Liberal Party. Fraser left a divided legacy. In the succession he supported Peacock, the challenger in the previous year's contest, rather than Howard, the former Treasurer and deputy leader.

An uneasy relationship came to a head in 1985; Peacock sought assurances that Howard would not challenge, which Howard declined to give. After some party-room votes, Howard emerged as leader. He in turn was ousted in 1989 by Peacock.

After the 1990 election John Hewson, a comparative newcomer, moved into the party leadership and it seemed that the party had had a generational change. Hewson enjoyed a honeymoon while Paul Keating was pressing his claims against Hawke, a four-time election winner. The challenge itself was being remodelled. This challenge was frontal; it was almost expressly based on the view that it was Keating's turn.

Hawke resisted a vote, narrowly won a first ballot, and narrowly lost six months later. Keating went on to vanquish Hewson in the "Fightback" election of March 1993. Hewson lingered in the leadership for another year before Alexander Downer and Peter Costello combined to remove him.

Downer's leadership was ill-starred; after a short honeymoon his ratings in the polls plunged and with relief he left the leadership in January 1995.

Andrew Peacock having just left parliament, nothing stood in the way of John Howard's returning unhindered to the leadership. Although he has disappointed Peter Costello in staying on beyond his 64th birthday, he has remained unchallenged in the party room for eight years, longer than any other party leader in the past half century, apart, of course, from Sir Robert Menzies. No-one has challenged him; such is the strength of his position that he has not even needed to call on a vote to confirm his leadership.