Australian politics is cutthroat!

So I'm reading this article and I have some thoughts, so I'll write them out here so that I won't bore Lydia and Spencer with them.

Australia has a very accelerated election cycle -- parliamentary elections are held every 3 years. The US election cycle is faster, with the House being up every 2 years, but the President is the main focus of the government and has 4 years between elections. Also, separation of the legislative and executive means the President can't get dumped by the legislative caucus and is also somewhat isolated from the political jockeying in the legislature.

In Australia, the power plays and the business of governing are thrown together and linked with a need to maintain political popularity in the short term, which seems to have lead to instability in leadership in the last 8 years. Three prime ministers have been overthrown by their party in the middle of their terms, and it looks like it might happen again despite the fact that an election was held just last month. What's up with that?

Here's the background: Australia has a weird mix of a strong two-party system in the lower house and a multi-party system in the Senate. The House chooses the Prime Minister but the Senate still needs to pass any legislation (like in the US but unlike the UK or Canada). The House is elected via ranked-choice voting in single member districts (hence the two-party dominance), while the Senate elects 6 members from each state by ranking either party lists or individual candidates and then distributing the votes. This makes for a roughly proportional seat assignment but the way minor parties can accumulate votes for the last few seats make the end process a little wacky. More on that later.

The main party on the center-left is the Labor Party (spelled the American way because apparently at some point Australia had a fad for 'modernizing' spelling). They're pretty much what you'd expect, with strong ties to labor unions and strength in the inner cities. As far as I can tell, Labor seems to have held up better with what in the US we'd call the 'white working class' vote than equivalent parties in Europe or the US. I'm not sure why, though it may just be that immigration and racial dynamics are different in Australia, or that the outlets for anti-partyism are different. Maybe compulsory voting also plays a role -- since everyone legally has to vote, people who might feel left behind and stay home instead still vote Labor or at least pick them as their second choice.

For the main center-right party it gets a little more complicated. It turns out there are two main center right parties, the Liberals and the Nationals, but they're in a permanent coalition called, appropriately the Coalition. There's some history there where the Liberals were big in the suburbs and the Nationals formed in rural areas because they felt neglected. The Liberals are mostly in charge and provide the PM but the Nationals control some rural seats and ministries have their own priorities. And they can run in the same seats without splitting the vote thanks to ranked-choice!

There's a fourth important party, the Greens, that have a consistent presence in Parliament. They only have one seat in the House, but get ~8% of the primary vote, most of which gets transferred to Labor. They also control the third largest block in the Senate. They're pretty much what you'd expect, to the left of Labor notably on refugee issues. The rest of the House is a couple of independents.

Then there's the mess of 'minor parties' in the Senate. Unlike other countries with multi-party systems, the extra minor parties are not so much ideological as personality-based. Basically in any country there are going to be people who vote for major, organized parties and then people who vote for anti-establishment candidates. In Australia that vote gets concentrated in Senate elections. Since votes get transferred, all the tiny vote percentages that in other countries would get wasted due to PR thresholds gets accumulated. This means wacky candidates with low ties to any real 'party' organization get elected to senate seats, while they get blocked from House seats, which makes for a strange dynamic. Since neither main party has a majority in the Senate, usually, they have to make deals with the assorted essentially independent Senators to pass legislation.

Anyway, back to cutthroatedness. Here are the main players: for the Labor Party, Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard; for the Liberal Party, Tony Abbott and Malcolm Turnbull. These four politicans have been the last four Prime Ministers and yet all four have been deposed by revolts within their party.
It started in 2007, when Rudd let Labor to victory over John Howard's 11-year Coalition government. In 2008, Turnbull was chosen as the leader of the opposition. However, Turnbull soon got into trouble. The problem was that Turnbull came from a business background and was a moderate. His big sin was supporting the Labor government's cap-and-trade proposal. So the climate change denier faction of the party revolted and installed Abbott, a conservative, instead.

Then in 2010, three years into the Labor government and as an election was coming due, Labor MPs had their own turn to be restive. Some faction of the Labor party (which is very factional -- there's some stuff with left and right factions of the party in the various states conspiring against each other) decided they didn't like Rudd's leadership style and thought his polling numbers were too low, so they held a leadership election and replaced him with his deputy, Gillard. She then had to call an election and managed to use the fact that Abbott was very very conservative to squeak into a victory.

This worked ok for the next few years but the Labor government's popularity kept sliding (I think sexism didn't help Gillard, she had some of the public opinion problems Hillary has), and by 2013 even Abbott wasn't scary enough to keep Labor in government for the looming election. Therefore the Labor MPs decided Gillard was no good and held a coup to put Rudd back in power in hopes to bounce up the poll numbers (they always are watching the poll numbers). By then all this drama was a bit much for voters and when Rudd held an election, Abbott won in a landslide.

Of course now that the Coalition was in power they were ready for their own backstabbing! Abbott, being very weird as well as very conservative, had a very short honeymoon and saw his popularity slide. A year into his term, the Liberals were losing state elections they had won in landslides three years earlier, presaging a defeat after just one term, a rare occurrence. Abbott survived for two years, but by 2015 rumors of a coup by his caucus abounded. Finally, in September, his deputy Julie Bishop turned on him and Abbott was replaced by Turnbull. The hope was that his non-partisan moderate image would fix things, and he did get a massive poll bounce for the Coalition. However, by the time he had to call an election in 2016 his popularity slid, and in July he won a bare majority in the House, a big loss from the 2013 landslide.

And now we get to the article. Turnbull's underperformance in the election means that the conservative wing of his party are using the occasion to get restive again. He's having a hard time balancing his ideological moderateness and desire to implement popular policies (e.g. gay marriage) with his need for support from conservative party members. The article suggests that Abbott may attempt to lead a comeback. This is hilarious because in 2013 the Liberals ran against Labor dysfunction and coups, and now are embroiled in their own identical disputes.

As for Labor, they dumped both Gillard and Rudd after 2013 and Bill Shorten has been leader since then. He's relatively successful, especially with his overperformance in the 2016 election. However, right after the election, there were already articles about how the guy he beat, Anthony Albanese, was considering a challenge! In then end he didn't go for it, but we'll see what the future holds ... Though they did add a membership vote component to the leader selection, so it'll be harder to change leaders than the purely caucus-based old method.

Its hard to tell if fatigue with the major parties is causing constant leadership turnover, or if the coups are themselves causing voter fatigue. Anyway it sounds like this period of drama and caucus rebellions is far from over in Australia. As an observer from afar its pretty fun to watch, though maybe not so much for Australians themselves.

For the article, this was the paragraph I found most descriptive: "Ideally, a leader enjoys the support of caucus colleagues and the voters. Some, like Julia Gillard, get by with just the former. Others, like Kevin Rudd, seize office relying on the latter. Turnbull is losing in both groups, and without the support of the electorate or his party room, he can’t survive."