The 34 ways every Australian Prime Minister has left office
- Aisling Blackmore
- Sep 15, 2015
- 3 min read
Note: This was originally published on my Wordpress blog on 15 September 2015 and has not been updated since. Still, interesting enough to reproduce here!
Australia has a new Prime Minister (PM) again today, and the media has been sharing some interesting statistics, including that this will be our fourth prime minister in two and a half years, and our fifth PM in five years. More concerning, there is still some commentary which reinforces a mistaken belief that the Australian electoral system includes voting for the Prime Minister and we the people have somehow been betrayed or silenced.
The assumption is that the Australian public have some influence over who becomes the PM. This is a mistake. By convention in the Australian system, the PM is the leader of the majority party. The only people Australians vote for in our Federal elections are their local member in the House of Representatives and their state or territory Senators. Some people may feel like they vote for the leader, and there has been a strong shift towards American presidential-style campaigning during elections, but it is not the case.
In 2010, when Deputy PM Julia Gillard replaced Kevin Rudd as PM, the then opposition leader Abbott said in Parliament that “[Rudd] should have been allowed to face the judgment of the Australian people, a midnight knock on the door, followed by midnight execution is no way that the Australian prime minister should be treated.” source
He has continued to reinforce his idea that PM’s should only ever enter and exit the office via election over the last five years – and it seems to have stuck in the minds of Australian people and media figures.
So I decided to break down the various ways that every PM has left office, to show that these kinds of leadership changes are in fact the norm in the Australian system. Only one third of Prime Ministerial changes are the result of an election loss.
Some notes:
There have been 29 Prime Ministers of Australia, but the Prime Minister has changed 34 times. This is because four men have served multiple times in the role.
The spacing on the timeline is not an accurate representation of the time in office, it’s purely aesthetic.
The tally of exits is as follows Lost leadership: 14 Lost elections: 11 Deaths: 3 Caretakers: 3 Career change: 1 Sacked: 1 Retired: 1
Between September 1903 and June 1909, the Prime Minister changed five times. Each time, the PM resigned because he could no longer control the parliament and lost a vote of no confidence within the parliament – in contrast to the events of the last 5 years in which PMs have lost the confidence of their party. These are similar situations though, as early in the life of the Federation, leaders depended on fairly unstable coalitions and minority governments to pass legislation. At the end of the timeline I have grouped these kinds of events together, as an exit due to political machinations.
Billy Hughes survived more political machinations than most sitting PMs. In 1916 he was expelled from his party, so he started a new one. In 1917 he resigned after losing plebiscite on conscription and a vote of no confidence from his party, only to be immediately re-appointed by the Governor General. He was finally forced to resign in 1923.
January 1966 was the last time someone voluntarily gave up their role as PM, and it was Robert Menzies. Since then, every PM has either been deposed by their party or their party has lost an election.
