Of all the four seasons, summer has a habit of being the most politically portentous. December is obviously known as the killing season in Canberra with good reason, because so many spills and knifings have occurred with carol music wafting in the background. Kevin Rudd ousted Kim Beazley in the final parliamentary sitting week of 2006. Tony Abbott successfully moved on Malcolm Turnbull on the day in December 2009 when children opened their first advent calendar windows.
Is a summer holiday spoiler lurking for Prime Minister Albanese?Credit: The Age
Reaching back further to the early 1990s, Paul Keating killed off Bob Hawke just six days before Christmas. Less dramatically, December 2007 marked the formal end of the Howard years, with the swearing-in of the new Labor ministry. Mid-way through the month, John Howard also accepted his 33-year parliamentary career had drawn to an end by finally conceding defeat in his Sydney seat of Bennelong.
As well as the deadly December effect, there is also the delayed December effect, since wounds inflicted around Christmastime often end up being terminal. That was true for Scott Morrison in December 2019, when pictures of him emerged relaxing in Hawaii in the midst of such a destructive bushfire season. Mark Latham’s Labor leadership effectively came to an end in December 2004, after being absent in the aftermath of the Boxing Day Asian tsunami. December, then, has arguably become the red letter month in the political calendar, with the crimson signifying blood.
Peter Dutton is unlikely to give Anthony Albanese much let up as 2024 gets under way.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen
Recent history also suggests, however, that party leaders should beware the ides of January. The month that we ordinarily associate with political rest has a habit of injuring politicians who go into summer hibernation.
Kevin Rudd’s ill-fated first term ran into trouble in the early months of 2010 when he seemed to lose his mojo following his government’s inability at the end of the previous year to push its Emissions Trading Scheme through parliament and the failure of the Copenhagen climate summit – at which Rudd was appointed a “friend of the chair” – to produce a binding deal cutting global emissions. In his absence, Tony Abbott made all the political weather, ridiculing Rudd’s government that January as “perhaps the most over-hyped political outfit in Australian history”, the first in a barrage of stinging lines. Rudd never fully regained his footing. Six months later, he was gone.
Something similar happened this time last year, when Peter Dutton made so much of the running on the Indigenous Voice to parliament. It was in mid-January that the opposition leader fired off what was described as the opening salvo of the political year, a letter to Anthony Albanese demanding answers to 15 questions about the Voice to parliament. “I believe you are making a catastrophic mistake,” wrote the opposition leader, “in not providing accessible, clear and complete information regarding your government’s version of the Voice, condemning it to failure”. What Albanese described as a “culture war stunt” ended up being devastating. That January letter framed the debate for the next ten months.
Counterintuitive though it seems, then, January has become an unusually consequential month. This is worth reflecting on, for it reveals a lot about the shifting rhythms of the Australian political year, and the manner in which politics is conducted and consumed.
An obvious reason for January’s heightened significance is meteorological. In a country experiencing the catastrophic effects of climate change earlier than most other advanced nations, January is a month of extreme weather events, whether they be fires, floods or a combination of the two. At a time when most politicians would prefer to take a well-earned holiday, we expect them to be in crisis mode. Indeed, natural disasters can present prime ministers with an ultimate test of their leadership, as Morrison discovered in 2020, when he followed up his Hawaii holiday howler with a verbal gaffe for the ages: “I don’t hold a hose, mate.”
January’s heat can catch you out – and careless leaders often get burnt
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05.01.2024
Of all the four seasons, summer has a habit of being the most politically portentous. December is obviously known as the killing season in Canberra with good reason, because so many spills and knifings have occurred with carol music wafting in the background. Kevin Rudd ousted Kim Beazley in the final parliamentary sitting week of 2006. Tony Abbott successfully moved on Malcolm Turnbull on the day in December 2009 when children opened their first advent calendar windows.
Is a summer holiday spoiler lurking for Prime Minister Albanese?Credit: The Age
Reaching back further to the early 1990s, Paul Keating killed off Bob Hawke just six days before Christmas. Less dramatically, December 2007 marked the formal end of the Howard years, with the swearing-in of the new Labor ministry. Mid-way through the month, John Howard also accepted his 33-year parliamentary career had drawn to an end by finally conceding defeat in his Sydney seat of Bennelong.
As well as the deadly December effect, there is also the delayed December effect, since wounds........
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