LETTER 364 Whose Politics Are More Turbulent, America’s or Australia’s?
The Australia Letter is a weekly newsletter from our Australia bureau. This week’s issue is written by Julia Bergin, a reporter based in Melbourne. President Biden had just announced that he would bow out of the 2024 presidential race, throwing American politics into fresh tumult, when Prime Minister Anthony Albanese of Australia was asked this week if he was worried about the United States, his nation’s most important ally. In private, for months now, officials with his government have expressed a mix of concern and cautious confidence. But Mr. Albanese went one step further. Knocking his own country down a peg, he said he was in no position to criticize America’s political turbulence given Australia’s own record of intraparty squabbles and changing leaders. “If I get re-elected as prime minister, that will be the first time that a prime minister has been re-elected after having served a full term since John Howard in 2004,” Mr. Albanese said in a radio interview with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation on Monday. “So, we have certainly been much more turbulent than the United States has been over the last couple of decades.” He’s right that Australia has churned through many leaders over the past 15 years or so — Kevin Rudd, Julia Gillard, Mr. Rudd again, Tony Abbott, Malcolm Turnbull, Scott Morrison, and finally, Mr. Albanese, who was elected in 2022. Four of these changes stemmed from internal party revolts, leaving Australia with a prime minister who was not the leader of his or her party when it won elections. This revolving door of prime ministers has earned the country an international reputation as the “coup capital of the democratic world,” but is Mr. Albanese correct in arguing that Australian politics is more turbulent than what we’ve seen in America in recent years? Analysts took issue with Mr. Albanese’s comment. Australians cast their ballots primarily for political parties under a system that allows for changes in leadership, they said. Voters and candidates accept that and trust the results, something they noted that many Americans seemed to struggle with in 2020. “We have leadership fights, but for all that, the electoral process is stable,” said Kevin Bonham, a political commentator. “In Australia, we haven’t had ‘defeated candidates questioning the election’ type turbulence,” he said, referring to former President Donald J. Trump’s baseless claims of fraud in the 2020 election. The churn in leaders “may have been traumatic for the Canberra bubble to live through,” but the guardrails of Australian democracy held, said William Bowe, an election analyst. Elections that followed were accepted. What the two countries do have in common, Mr. Bowe argued, are leaders with less political authority. Leaders in Australia, he added, did not in the past govern as though they might be toppled at any moment. “Since the demise of Kevin Rudd, governments no longer have the confidence to take command of a three-year term,” Mr. Bowe said. One factor that may be undermining a more assertive approach is that the two major political parties in Australia no longer enjoy the support from voters that they once did, a phenomenon also seen in the United States. In Australia, there has also been a rise in independent and third-party candidates. For Mr. Bonham, this shift away from major parties justifies a broader definition of “turbulent politics.” Whether it’s a hung Parliament that can’t do anything, a coalition government at risk of collapsing on a weekly basis, or a two-party electoral system rapidly losing relevance, he said turbulence in Australian politics comes in many shapes and sizes. But for him, none of that is as bad as the United States — where a gunman recently tried to kill former President Trump, and where there have been numerous attacks on presidents and presidential candidates, some fatal. Benjamin Jones, a political historian, agreed. “For all of Australia’s ‘coups,’ we’ve not had people trying to kill the prime minister,” he said. But, he added, comparative democratic “health checks” were necessary because Australia’s Constitution was based on both British and American politics. “That’s why we’re sometimes described as having a ‘Washminster’ system,” Mr. Jones said, referring to a portmanteau of Washington and Westminster. For now at least, it appears a midterm churn in Australian leadership is unlikely. Mr. Albanese, as his comments indicated, expects to be at the helm of the country until next year’s election. If he wins, perhaps he’ll talk more about stability than turbulence. Australia and New Zealand
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