Victoria has a new premier today, after the Labor Party finally did what many observers thought it should have done months ago, dispatching its previous leader Jacinta Allan. Her replacement, Ben Carroll, has exactly four months before what is clearly going to be a difficult election. Something had to be done: it might not work, but the alternative definitely wasn’t working.
So this is a good opportunity to reflect on the record of late leadership change (building on an analysis I did for Crikey some twenty years ago). I’ve identified 35 state or federal elections in the last fifty years in which either government or opposition changed leaders in the twelve months before polling day. On one occasion (Tasmania 1982*) they both did it, giving us 36 cases in total.
Oppositions do late change more than governments: 26 cases involved the leader of the opposition against ten for the premier or prime minister. That’s what you’d expect; it’s usually a matter of desperation (almost all the leaders departed unwillingly), and in Australia oppositions are more likely to be in desperate straits than governments. The non-Labor parties have also done it more than Labor (25 to 11) – partly no doubt because they’ve spent more time in opposition, but even independently of that they seem a bit more ruthless with their leaders.
Mostly it’s a losing strategy. Of the 36, only 14 have gone on to win the subsequent election (four from government, ten from opposition). That’s also what you’d expect, since the parties that tried it were mostly in trouble anyway. It doesn’t necessarily mean it wasn’t worth taking the chance, and sometimes defeat or victory is a poor measure anyway: John Olsen (South Australia 1996) and Malcolm Turnbull (Federal 2016) both won Pyrrhic victories, while Tony Abbott (Federal 2010) lost but did unexpectedly well, setting himself for a win three years later.
Labor, for a smaller sample, has a better record, having won with five out of its 11 late changes – all of them from opposition. The Coalition has done better when it makes the change while in government, with four wins out of seven. There’s no great variation either by jurisdiction (nowhere is the overall record better than 50-50) or by era, although there was a period around the turn of the century when late changes were especially unsuccessful.
There also doesn’t seem much relationship between how early the change is made and its chance of success, although those who took the job three or four months out have had a uniformly bad record (not a good omen for Carroll). But longer isn’t always better: the two who had the shortest time, Bob Hawke (federal 1983) and Ray Groom (Tasmania 1992) both won their election.
It would be remiss not to also mention New Zealand, which as we’ve noted before behaves a lot like an Australian state. Sure enough, it’s had six late leadership changes in the same period, about the same as an average state. But the strategy does particularly badly there, with only one of those six going on to win.
That one, however, became famous: Jacinda Ardern took the Labour leadership two months out from the 2017 election and led it to victory (albeit only by taking the far right into coalition), thereby, as I put it, “replac[ing] Victoria’s Steve Bracks as the poster child for last-minute leadership change.” And the same Bracks, who won against the odds back in 1999, was fronting the media today, promising that “Carroll will be an outstanding leader of the Labor party, an outstanding premier.”
Well, maybe he will; he’s certainly got an uphill task ahead of him, but Labor has probably given itself as good a chance as it could have in the circumstances. Perhaps he (and it) should have moved earlier this year, but the additional months allowed for a stronger consensus to form behind him, and this way at least there is less time for the electorate to get sick of him. But it’s going to be a very interesting election.
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* The year I cite is always the year of the election; in some cases the leadership change was in the previous calendar year. I may well have missed a case or two somewhere, but that won’t change the overall picture. Only 35 individuals are involved (31 men and four women) because Kevin Rudd appears on the list twice, taking over once as leader of the opposition and then again as prime minister.
The World is Not Enough 