SA Weekend 10 Year Special: Politics in Australia? It’s no party

If the 24-hour news cycle is a long time in politics, a decade is eternity — so it is a little tempting to wonder if the smiling Deputy Prime Minister Julia Gillard, who graced SA Weekend’s first cover, would have persisted if she knew what lay ahead.

Steven Marshall and Peter Malinauskas with older editions of SA Weekend. Picture: Russell Millard

• SA Weekend: South Australia’s best stories

• SA Weekend: Where we were, are and will be next

• SA Weekend: A decade of news in South Australia, and abroad

If the 24-hour news cycle is a long time in politics, a decade is eternity.

The willingness of the two major parties to discard Prime Ministers in such bitter succession earned us a degree of international scorn – and it is tempting to wonder if the smiling Deputy Prime Minister Julia Gillard who graced our first cover would have persisted if she knew what lay ahead.

Nationally, the political landscape has swung to and fro, from Labor to Liberal and now heading determinedly back to Bill Shorten’s Labor.

The amount of blood left on the floor has been impressive; we started with Kevin Rudd who was elected in 2007 and held office amid the swirling rumours of meltdowns and micromanagement until the middle of 2010 when he was booted out by his own party in a coup that installed Gillard as Australia’s first female Prime Minister.

Malcolm Turnbull, Julia Gillard, Kevin Rudd & Tony Abbott — The start of a new week

She held on for three years until Rudd re-emerged for a brief, desperate stint before being struck down by a surge of national hope that elected Tony Abbott.

He lasted less time than a Labor PM, holding on for two turbulent years – remember “Sir” Prince Philip? – before the more moderate Malcolm Turnbull came in through yet another coup.

The party erupted into chaos again last year which propelled Scott Morrison into facing an imminent election hoping to be returned as the sixth Australian leader in a decade.

And don’t lose sight in this of Julie Bishop, the former South Australian and part owner of Bishop’s cherry farm in the Adelaide Hills, who may not have relinquished hope of winning the party leadership.

As for our other prominent South Australian federally, Christopher Pyne, his relish for the political game seems undiminished.

Leaving the dramas aside, the political scene has changed so decisively that once prominent faces have disappeared.

Nick Xenophon, who featured on our cover a record three times – twice as a profile, once with a black eye as Jake LaMotta from Raging Bull in our Oscars issue – has vanished into the suburbs after a badly misjudged bid to elect candidates to the state Lower House and possibly elevate him to the premiership.

Xenophon’s wildly successful political career, which created its own national party, grew from his exposure as a suburban lawyer to the personal cost of poker machine gambling addiction, and his rise was emblematic of the growing power of Independents.

As political trust has unravelled, so the electorate has walked away from the two-party political divide.

While significant third parties have been with us for a long time, never have the crossbenches, which include SA’s Sarah Hanson-Young, been so heavily populated and so influential, even if South Australian Senator Cory Bernardi’s Australian Conservatives are still looking to find traction.

Exit stage-left: Once-SA Best leader Nick Xenophon for SA Weekend. Picture: Matt Turner.

The Greens MP Sarah Hanson-Young as The Hunger Games’ Katniss Everdeen for SA Weekend in 2017.

On the state front, Liberal leader Isobel Redmond came and went, former Premier Mike Rann can probably thank his lucky stars the she-said, he-said Michelle Chantelois parliamentary waitress scandal – denied emphatically by Rann – didn’t happen in the less forgiving MeToo era.

He was able to hand over Premiership to Education Minister, Jay Weatherill, whose two SA Weekend covers had charted his quiet ambition.

One former Premier, John Bannon, died in 2015 after a long illness and was mourned at a state funeral attended by a who’s who of politicians, including the former Prime Minister Bob Hawke who called Bannon a decent man of enormous capacity who accepted responsibility for overseeing the disastrous State Bank’s $3.1 billion debt.

Former household names like the Liberals leader Martin Hamilton-Smith and former Labor ministers Kevin Foley and Pat Conlon are nowhere to be seen while Redmond’s replacement, Steven Marshall, hung in there after an unexpected first-time defeat to finally claim his prize.

He looks now like a man having fun.