3 weeks ago
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February 5, 2026 — 11:30am
We’ve seen it before. We’ll see it again.
Years ago, during one of the eruptions over leadership that are a feature of federal politics, the ageing Labor wag Fred Daly, long retired but visiting Canberra because he couldn’t resist the fun, offered me a deathless observation.
“The words change, but the melody lingers,” he mused.
And here we are again.
A rattled Nationals leader, David Littleproud, has a hissy fit and leads his little party out of the Coalition, hollering that while Liberal leader Sussan Ley remains in her job, the Nationals won’t be back.
The ambitious Andrew Hastie and Angus Taylor, keen to take advantage of Ley’s precarious position, butt heads over who should get what might laughingly be called the spoils.
Flying to Melbourne to mourn one of their own departed – Professor Katie Allen, a woman of distinction whose memory does not deserve to be mixed with cheap intrigue – Hastie and Taylor and their lieutenants (all men, naturally) sneak off to a supposed secret meeting in the suburbs. Naturally, they’re caught on camera.
Ostensibly, they can’t reach a decision. The next day, Hastie withdraws from the contest. He didn’t have the numbers, he says, despite his supporters previously boasting he was way ahead.
Another version is that the numbers men explained how the carve-up would work. It was Taylor’s turn because at 59, he was the elder. Hastie, at 43, could wait.
Not quite the Kirribilli Agreement that set Bob Hawke and Paul Keating up for years of antagonism, but close enough. Call it the Suburban Stitch-Up.
The pity of it is we haven’t still got the partnership of Clarke and Dawe, Australia’s greatest televised satirists, to explain the schoolyard nature of leadership showdowns.
In 2003, Kim Beazley and Simon Crean and their supporters were at each other’s throats over the leadership of the Labor Party, then in hopeless opposition to John Howard’s government.
Beazley wanted Crean’s job. Crean wouldn’t hand it over. Beazley’s consiglieri said the electorate had stopped listening to Crean.
Clarke and Dawe appeared in their regular timeslot on ABC TV, with John Clarke (who died in 2017) playing a truculent schoolkid named Kim, and Bryan Dawe the exasperated head teacher.
“Come on, tell me what is going on with Simon,” demands headmaster Dawe.
“Won’t give us a go on the bike,” whines Kim/Clarke. “He doesn’t even know what he’s doing. He doesn’t know how to ride the bike. We’re gonna kick him off the bike. He’s no good at riding a bike anyway. Really useless.”
Headmaster Dawe: “You’re a big boy now, Kim, I would have thought you’d have taken a much more mature attitude to this.”
Kim/Clarke: “I am mature, and I got a lot more friends than Simon. Simon, no friends at all.”
And so it went. Kim was reminded he’d had two goes at riding the bike and fallen off both times. (Beazley as opposition leader from 1996 to 2001 had failed to defeat Howard’s government at two elections, in 1998 and 2001.)
Beazley, it turned out, didn’t get to ride the bike again.
Crean dismounted within six months. He was replaced by Mark Latham, who crashed into a wall at the 2004 election and stalked off to publish his diaries attacking the entire political system that he had ridden almost to the top.
Unanticipated consequences followed.
Latham was expelled from the ALP (he says he quit) and after various adventures of the bizarre variety, flew into the arms of Pauline Hanson’s One Nation.
As leader of One Nation in NSW, he won election to the state Legislative Council in 2019, but was booted from the leadership after a falling-out with Hanson.
In 2023, Latham resigned from One Nation to sit as an independent, where he remains.
Whatever we might think of Latham – and there are sensible reasons why we might wish not to think of him at all – he wrote in those long-ago Latham Diaries a passage that spookily predicted the basis of today’s hysteria among federal conservatives, and which keeps long-sighted Labor statisticians, faced with a stubborn and historically low primary vote, up at night.
“The electorate has worked out the artificiality of it all,” Latham wrote of the political system.
“They can see through the spin doctors, the publicity stunts, the polling and the tricks of marginal-seat campaigning. This is why people now talk about politics with a cool anger. They have a clear feeling that the system is far from genuine. That the robots, in fact, are tin men.”
That anger across part of the electorate, heated up for years by right-wing media voices and sooled along by One Nation’s victimhood whinging and populist solutions – big cuts in immigration, renouncing net zero targets, more coal-fired power, and an “Australia First” approach aping Donald Trump’s MAGA – has spooked mainstream politicians.
The Coalition’s second separation in less than a year followed by the most inept leadership tomfoolery since Labor started the serial silliness early this century (taken up with gusto by the Liberals since then) has simply accelerated voters’ dash for the doors.
Hanson’s recruitment of Barnaby Joyce and arch-conservative Cory Bernardi is interesting in an entertaining manner (the Addams Family, anyone?), but the former Coalition, in melting before this renewed Hansonite assault, is surrendering too soon.
Hanson has spent her career falling out with recruits and political partners, starting way back with founder David Oldfield, whom she expelled in 2000.
One Nation also has a history of blowing itself up. Remember the party’s astounding success at the 1998 Queensland state election, when it polled 22.7 per cent of the vote (around the same as most polls suggest today) and won 11 seats?
Whoops. All 11 of those One Nation MPs split from One Nation within two years.
Since then, the party’s only serious federal successes have been a handful of seats in the Senate.
The Libs and Nats might consider calming themselves by reciting that though the words might change, the melody lingers.
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