My, hasn’t the political arena been interesting lately? From an outsiders perspective it seems like our very own version of government Bold and the Beautiful. First there was the surprise election in WA, followed by the so called “bloodbath” in NSW resulting in a new premier and his mostly under-experienced cabinet been handed the difficult task of cleaning up the mess left by Morris Iemma.
Now, not only do we have a new WA premier and a sparkling new Liberal-National partnership, but we also have a new leader of the opposition. News straight from Liberal headquarters says that Malcolm Turnbull defeated Dr Nelson 45-41 in a surprise ballot called by the former opposition leader just after his jet-lagged rival returned from Italy.
Despite speculation early this morning that Dr Nelson might just scrape by, in hind-sight it’s easy to say that this change is probably for the better. Since before the last federal election, Mr Turnbull has been slowly coming more and more into the public eye and the Liberal party obviously hopes this will put an end to the never-ending leadership question. That is, until Peter Costello comes into the spotlight again.
Now we must all wait to see whether the new Opposition Leader will be able to turn around the last poll showing Dr Nelson trailing far behind Kevin Rudd 16 per cent to 62 per cent as preferred Prime Minister. The PM reckons he can, saying that, with the easing of all that tension that has been building over the last few months, a surge in the opinion polls is “a normal thing”.
From a voters point of view I really don’t think the PM should be worried. Putting aside the fact that he has been described as one of our most popular Prime Ministers (with his time in office still in its infancy); consistent opinion polls show that the Liberals have some catching up to do.
Putting weight behind that argument is the wonderfully lazy way in which Australians seam to choose their leaders. It seems that we elect one major party into power and leave them there for a good 7, 10 or even for 26 years. The other major political party more or less holds all the state governments and then once a decade or so, we switch!
One interesting point the change of leadership does bring up is the question of an Australian republic. Rudd says that Turnbull has long been an advocate of the change and bipartisan support is needed to get it happening. If true that means we could all be in for a bigger change than your average switch-the-state-governments-over swap, although the wonderful thing about democracy is that the public gets to shelve that plan if we don’t want to say goodbye to the mother country just yet.
One certainty is that we are all in for an action-packed show over the next few months.
