Markets 
Opinion
A dullard prime minister mocked as the “nasal knight” will soon be replaced in Downing Street by a more swashbuckling former mayor known as the “King of the North”.
It is out with Sir Keir Starmer, a banal politician who, despite winning a mammoth parliamentary majority in 2024, almost instantly became a hate figure for British voters, and in with Andy Burnham, a jovial everyman with a popular touch. Westminster, which will soon have viewed five PMs in as many years, is being called “Rome on the Thames”, given the churn of national leadership that resembles Italy. A more accurate comparison, given the similarities between the political cultures of the two countries, is with Canberra during its coup capital phase.
In the 10 years since the Brexit referendum, Britain will have had seven different prime ministerships. Australia, from the final days of John Howard in 2007 to the ascent of Scott Morrison in 2018, had the same number.
UK politics, as I have written before in this masthead, has a long history of mimicking its Australian cousin. Tony Blair’s New Labour project was a reworking of the Third Way policies of Bob Hawke and Paul Keating. When inflatable vessels packed with asylum seekers started crossing the English Channel, the slogan “Stop the Boats” found an echo in Downing Street. The Rwanda solution, a failed plan to relocate migrants to Africa, was modelled on John Howard’s Pacific Solution. Starmer, in one of his last meaningful acts as prime minister, proposed a social media ban for kids aged under 16.
This decades-long conveyor belt of policies and, also, personnel – Aussie election guru Lynton Crosby is known in Britain as the “Wizard of Oz” – has been largely one-way. Could Canberra now take a leaf out of the Westminster playbook by looking beyond the benches of Parliament House for future leaders? Andy Burnham, the former mayor of Manchester, is now the second politician to go from running a city to running the country. Boris Johnson, who was twice elected mayor of London, was the first. It seems odd to me that successful state premiers do not flick the switch to federal politics, especially when Canberra’s talent pool is hardly the deepest of billabongs.
In the past 20 years, when state politics were usually more stable and frequently more productive than the coming and goings of the bush capital, there has been no shortage of potential candidates. Mark McGowan was dubbed the “King of Westralia”, especially after declaring quasi-independence at the start of the COVID pandemic. Annastacia Palaszczuk, for the same reason, could easily have been given the moniker the “Queen of Queensland”. Then NSW premier Gladys Berejiklian was another stand-out during the pandemic. At a time when the Commonwealth came to resemble Westeros on The Games of Thrones, a continent of seven rival kingdoms, state premiers outshone Scott Morrison. When in 2021 The Australian Financial Review published its annual power list, it placed all of them above the then prime minister.
Had things gone differently, in her personal life more so than her public, Berejiklian could have made an eminently more popular Liberal leader than Peter Dutton, and surely stuck around longer than Sussan Ley. Mike Baird, her likeable predecessor, would also have been preferable to swaths of voters than “Scomo”, who prompted Starmer-like levels of animus.
Bob Carr, NSW’s longest continuous serving head of government, is the only former premier in recent times to have made an impression in federal politics, and then only fleetingly when he was parachuted into the Senate to serve as foreign affairs minister by Julia Gillard. Imagine, though, if he had made that journey down the Hume Highway years earlier. At a time when Labor was scratching around for a leader who could take on John Howard, surely Carr would have fared better than Simon Crean or Mark Latham, perhaps even Kim Beazley.
The Joh for Canberra campaign in the late-1980s – when then Queensland premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen, the Huey Long of Australian politics, made an ill-fated insurgent bid for the prime ministership – might have shut down that path to power. If so, what a loss, because over the past 30 years state politics has produced an impressive bench of premiers with proven vote-winning capabilities and track records of executive accomplishment. Peter Beattie in Queensland, Jeff Kennett and Steve Bracks in Victoria, Mike Rann and Jay Weatherill in South Australia, Geoff Gallop and Colin Barnett in Western Australia. At the height of the resources boom, Barnett, who served as WA premier for almost a decade, even ran what was essentially his own foreign policy with China.
There is no shortage of eye-catching premiers now. Chris Minns in NSW, who has become something of a pin-up boy for the Murdoch press – partly, one suspects, to needle Anthony Albanese. Peter Malinauskas in South Australia, who won a landslide victory in this year’s state poll. David Crisafulli of the Liberal National Party in Queensland. Lia Finocchiaro of the Country Liberal Party, the chief minister of the Northern Territory.
As anti-establishment sentiment has fuelled the rise of One Nation, there is an obvious political logic for both major parties to harness the insurgent appeal of politicians from outside the Canberra bubble. And as Andy Burnham champions what he calls “Manchesterism”, a pragmatic, action-orientated approach to government blending private investment and public support for left-behind communities, a dose of Adelaidism, Perthism or Brisbanism might have a jolting effect.
Clearly there are downsides. Leaders of national parties would not only have to look over their shoulders for potential knife-wielders in their party rooms but deploy satellite-like vision over the entire country. Federal politics is unstable enough already without a destabilising new political dynamic. Yet maybe the reason why Australia has had such needless prime ministerial churn is that some of the country’s best political talent never made it to Canberra. A Beattie, Berejiklian or Bracks might have been an Australian Andy Burnham.
Nick Bryant, the author of The Rise and Fall of Australia: How a Great Nation Lost Its Way, runs the History Never Ended podcast.
Nick Bryant is a former BBC correspondent and the author of The Forever War, America’s Unending Conflict With Itself.From our partners
Read the full article here
