The best – and worst – of 2024: My list isn’t objective, but that’s the fun of it

The festive season is a time for lists. Shopping lists. Christmas card lists. (Of course I still send Christmas cards.) Lists of New Year’s resolutions. And, for newspapers, lists of the best (and worst) of the past year. There isn’t any objectivity about them. There isn’t meant to be. They unapologetically reflect the interests, sympathies and prejudices of the compiler. That’s what makes them fun. Here are 10 things that stood out for me in 2024.

On my list, for better or worse: Justice Michael Lee, Donald Trump, James Paterson, Don Farrell and Jacqui Lambie.Credit: Graphic: Monique Westermann

1. Best performance by a minister. Don Farrell. Nicknamed The Godfather, the minister for trade flies below the radar. A consummate dealmaker and political fixer, he is the quiet achiever among a cabinet of high-profile mediocrities. In a government dominated by Labor’s Left, Farrell owes his power to his control of the right-wing shop assistants’ union (the “shoppies”). As a social conservative, he would give John Howard a run for his money. Farrell is emblematic of an older Labor Party – a living reminder of the days when Labor politicians were real working people, not apparatchiks, activists and ambulance-chasers. Also the deputy Senate leader, his negotiating skill makes him much better at winning over difficult crossbenchers than the famously rude Penny Wong.

2. Best performance by a shadow minister. James Paterson. Elected to the Senate in 2016 aged just 28, the Liberal Party’s youngest-ever senator soon lived down the view that he was too young for the job. First as chairman of parliament’s intelligence committee during the Morrison government, then as shadow minister for home affairs, he quickly mastered the national security brief. Paterson’s indefatigable presence in the media, where every answer is word-perfect, as well as his lethal performances in Senate estimates have won him a deserved reputation as a baby-faced political killer.

Jacqui Lambie in the Senate in November.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

3. Best performance by a crossbencher. Jacqui Lambie. The Tasmanian senator may not be an orator of Ciceronian eloquence. Much more importantly, she is a down-to-earth, fearless, passionate fighter for her causes. And her causes are not the vaporous abstractions so beloved by wealthy teals, but real people – the classic Aussie battlers, like Lambie herself, who suffer from real injustices. In particular, veterans. She is hugely effective at getting results out of the supine bureaucrats who live in fear of her. If there were one politician I’d want in my corner if I had a fight on my hands, it would be Jacqui.

4. Best performance by a judge. Justice Michael Lee. This pleasingly idiosyncratic jurist – one of his hobbies is collecting Richard Nixon memorabilia – has presided over some of the Federal Court’s most complex cases. But it was the way he handled the Bruce Lehrmann defamation trial that rocketed him to public acclaim. It is exquisitely difficult to conduct the hearing of a case which is already a cause célèbre, yet his honour did so with exemplary skill. His judgment was painstaking, fair and – important, given the huge public interest – comprehensible. He even managed to be drily humorous – which, given the sensitivity of the issues, was no mean feat. He also gave us the word of the year, “omnishambles”. Appointing Lee in 2017 was one of my best decisions as attorney-general. But, in a spirit of full disclosure, I must confess I also gave Lehrmann his first job in Parliament House, which was undoubtedly one of my worst. In the Federal Court in Sydney this year, my alpha and omega came face to face.

5. Gutsiest small country. Moldova. This tiny nation of 2.4 million people, landlocked between Ukraine and Romania, held elections late this year. Russian military units were encamped along its eastern flank in its breakaway province Transnistria. Further to its east, Russian armies continued to butcher Ukraine and its people. Its western neighbour Romania elected a Putin apologist as president. Yet Moldovans heroically withstood immense regional pressure, overt Russian threats and industrial-scale election interference to stare Vladimir Putin down. During the first round of voting on October 20, they also approved (by the wafer-thin margin of 50.35 per cent to 49.65 per cent) a referendum to include the goal of European Union membership in the nation’s constitution. Then, in the second-round voting on November 4, they re-elected the pro-European President Maia Sandu over a Putin-backed goon, by 55 per cent to 45 per cent – an important event that was barely noticed because of another election, elsewhere, the following day.

“You’re not my king”: Lidia Thorpe heckled the visiting King Charles in Canberra.Credit: Getty Images, Alex Ellinghausen

6. Most successful stunt. Lidia Thorpe’s rant at the King and Queen in Parliament’s Great Hall. The Green-turned-independent senator’s ratbaggery made headlines domestically and internationally. Predictably, it dominated the news in Britain. Australia’s tabloid media furiously denounced her attention-seeking as they gave her all the attention she sought. And an honourable mention for the year’s best display of sangfroid: King Charles’ majestically benign reaction. (Equally priceless was the Queen’s perplexed expression of astonishment and bemusement.) Although constitutional monarchists condemned Thorpe’s behaviour, many of us were also secretly delighted: such displays set back the republican movement even further. Which brings us to ...

7. Greatest lost cause. Australian republicanism. A campaign once led by public figures of the stature of Malcolm Turnbull and Paul Keating is now the preserve of nonentities. In January, the co-chair of the Australian Republican Movement, former Labor senator Nova Peris, declared that the failure of the Voice referendum meant a republic was off the agenda for the foreseeable future. Peris and her co-chair later fell into a bitter public dispute over Gaza; both resigned and the ARM has fallen into disarray. Meanwhile, partly thanks to people such as Thorpe, support for a republic has plummeted to its lowest in decades. At this rate, the next King of Australia who may have to worry about his antipodean crown will be George VII.

Powerful speech: Julian Leeser.Credit: The Sydney Morning Herald

8. Greatest display of moral clarity. Julian Leeser’s speech on antisemitism in the House of Representatives on June 6. Leeser, one of only four Jewish MPs, moved to establish a judicial inquiry into antisemitism. In the course of his speech, he said: “I am so sick and tired of this government ... being unable to say antisemitism without saying Islamophobia in the same breath. To fail to singularly identify and call out the particularity of antisemitism ... is itself antisemitism.” Leeser’s words skewered the cowardly, dishonest narrative that there is no difference between Jewish Australians and the apologists for Hamas and Hezbollah terrorists who force them to live in fear of attacks on their schools, their synagogues and their homes. He captured the nauseating evil of moral equivalence perfectly. Predictably, his motion was voted down by the government.

9. Writer who caused the most trouble. Joe Aston, by the length of a straight. His bestseller The Chairman’s Lounge, a book about the corporate culture of Qantas, lit a political brushfire that scorched Anthony Albanese before spreading across the aisle to singe the opposition and expose the hypocrisy of sanctimonious teals. I don’t read many business books, but I hugely enjoyed the skill with which Aston unpacks Qantas’ financial statements in language that is at once analytical, witty and bitchy. (Think of an auditor’s report written by Dame Edna Everage.) As well as his mastery of the comedic possibilities of a sarcastic footnote.

10. Greatest political comeback. We all know who that is. Unfortunately.

Happy new year.

George Brandis is a former high commissioner to the UK and a former Liberal senator and federal attorney-general. He is a professor at ANU.