January’s heat can catch you out – and careless leaders often get burnt

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 has also become a fighting season in the culture wars, because of the ongoing dispute over Australia Day. Dutton has already launched a preemptive strike, by lambasting Labor councils which have decided not to hold citizenship ceremonies on January 26 and attacking Australia’s High Commissioner in London – the former Labor foreign minister Stephen Smith – for cancelling a charity event due to be held that day over “sensitivities” about the date. “Labor is undermining the significance of Australia Day and is laying the groundwork to abolish January 26 as Australia Day,” read a media release this week from Dan Tehan, the shadow minister for immigration and citizenship, using the kind of shrill rhetoric that worked so well ahead of the Voice referendum.

The fact that the Liberal Party released this statement on January 2 – and accompanied it on the same day with attacks on the Albanese government for its “unreliability” as an ally of Ukraine and for setting up “debt traps” for struggling students – underscores a broader point. Australian politics has become a permanent campaign, in which ceasefires and pauses in the fighting are increasingly rare. Less than ten seconds into his Christmas Day message, for example, Dutton raised the cost-of-living crisis, and though he did not specifically blame it on the Albanese government, that hardly needed saying. It is an “everything, everywhere, all at once” approach to politicking, and it speaks of a wider problem of over-politicisation and hyper-partisanship that is making mature democracies look ever more puerile. Here in Australia, it is exacerbated by three-year terms, which mean both major parties are constantly on a war footing.

Journalistically, January is also when a new year’s narrative takes hold. Embattled governments and troubled parties hope to make a fresh start, a prime reason for all those leadership hit-jobs in December. A summer political storyline often emerges that can last well into the autumn and winter. In 2007, the beginning of an election year, it was the unstoppable rise of an ambitious new opposition leader Kevin Rudd. In 2010, post-Copenhagen, “Kevin07” had disappeared from view. In 2020, reporters were already penning Scott Morrison’s political obituaries.

This January, after its end-of-year travails over the Voice referendum and the High Court detention ruling, Labor will clearly be hoping for a reset. An upbeat Albanese fronted the press three days into the new year, promising action on the cost-of-living crisis and also, coincidentally, calling for four-year terms. For his part, Dutton will keep on pummelling the government.

My hunch, though, is that a clean narrative might not immediately emerge, if only because the polls are telling us different things. They suggest that Labor has lost ground, but also that Albanese still enjoys a commanding lead as preferred prime minister.

Certainly, it is hard to imagine the start of 2024 turning into a summer of love for the opposition leader. Despite his successes last year, listening to Dutton still feels like being lectured by an undertaker, to steal the line that the then-union leader, Greg Combet, used against the then-minister for employment and workplace relations Kevin Andrews. His presentation style sounds like what British journalists would call “plod-speak”, the lifeless monotone often adopted by police officers when giving evidence in court. Rather than reinvent himself, however, he’s calculating that the “full Dutton” will appeal to potential Labor defectors in the “battler belt”, even if it continues to alienate Liberal defectors in blue-ribbon seats that turned teal.

In high summer, are voters paying any attention? Probably not in a day-to-day sense. But I suspect many people pick up on the political mood music, even if they are not listening attentively. Besides, conversation at barbecues and lazy beach days often turns to politics, if only because you cannot spend the entire time discussing house prices, schools, the over-representation of New South Welshman in the Australian cricket team and the lunacy of casting Dominic West as Prince Charles in The Crown. January is also the time when the financial hangover of Christmas often hits, and when concerns over the cost of living cloud the summer skies.

So who will create the political weather? An embattled prime minister hoping Christmas was a circuit breaker, or a relentlessly oppositional opposition leader determined to start the new year as he ended the last. The answer may be of vital importance. For as goes January, so often, goes the rest of the year.

Nick Bryant is the author of The Rise and Fall of Australia: How a Great Nation Lost its Way and When America Stopped Being Great: A History of the Present.