The tally room, like the sure thing that was Bob Hawke, is no more

Bob Hawke, the Silver Bodgie, emerged waving as if he were visiting royalty, which in that place at that time, he may as well have been.

Pandemonium erupted.

Bob Hawke greets the crowd at the national tally room in Canberra on election night, 1983.Credit: National Archives of Australia

The crowd that had been waiting in the national tally room for this moment stampeded towards Hawke and his wife Hazel. A trestle table holding reporters’ typewriters collapsed. A galloping television cameraman ran out of cable and landed on his back.

It was March 5, 1983.

Malcolm Fraser weeps after the Coalition lost the federal election in 1983.Credit: Paul Wright

Hawke had won the federal election in famous style, trouncing Malcolm Fraser’s Coalition.

Fraser, a man of such typically stony demeanour that cartoonists drew him as an Easter Island statue, appeared on TV and broke down in very human tears shortly before Hawke and Hazel brought down the house.

As Anthony Albanese prepares this weekend to announce a federal election it seems reasonable to reflect that we are unlikely to witness anything quite so unambiguously triumphant when this latest election day rolls around, or really, any time in the foreseeable future.

Election nights at the draughty old tally room at Canberra’s showground were such theatrical events you had to compete for a ticket to get in.

A giant scoreboard spread itself across the front of the room, the tallied votes from electorates and senate seats constantly changing as unseen operators rotated the numbers from behind.

“A landslide,” journalists and number crunchers breathed as the numbers rolled.

Yes, indeed.

When it was done, the Coalition held only 50 of the 125 seats in the House of Representatives, and Fraser’s political career was over.

Hawke went on to win elections in 1984, 1987 and 1990, and the man who unseated him as prime minister, the quicksilver Paul Keating, won another in 1993. That 13-year hold on power was – and remains – the longest period Labor has ever been in government at the federal level.

The Liberals revolved chaotically through five leaderships – Andrew Peacock, John Howard, Peacock again, John Hewson, Alexander Downer for several months (yes, really!) – before John Howard returned to lead the Coalition back into government in 1996.

Former prime minister Scott Morrison concedes defeat after the 2022 election.Credit: AP

Howard’s subsequent 11 years in power made him Australia’s second-longest-serving PM after Bob Menzies.

That disastrous result from 1983 couldn’t be repeated, Liberal analysts imagined. And yet, it did, though it took another 39 years.

At Australia’s last federal election, in 2022, Scott Morrison’s Coalition was all but slaughtered, the depth of its defeat eclipsing even Fraser’s Waterloo: the conservatives were reduced to their smallest share of seats in the House for at least 70 years.

So that would mean the victor, Anthony Albanese’s Labor Party, could look forward to a happy long Hawkesque period at the top, surely?

Not on your nelly, according to current polls, which put Labor in a losing position against Peter Dutton’s Coalition.

It is not simply that Albanese is no Bob Hawke or Paul Keating, which has been plain to see for a long time now.

The times have changed so radically since long-ago periods of extended and (relative) political stability that no leader, no matter who they may be, can rely on back-to-back victories these days.

Incumbency across the roiling Western world has become a curse, and Australia’s major parties have gone out of their way to make it so here, too.

Former Labor leader Kevin Rudd took big policy ideas to the 2007 election.Credit: Glen McCurtayne

Australian voters came to loathe the spectacle of leadership self-immolation that followed Howard’s loss and Kevin Rudd’s victory in 2007.

Labor suffered Rudd-Gillard-Rudd from 2007 to 2013, followed by the loss of the unlosable election by Bill Shorten in 2019. The Liberals had the madly turbulent Abbott-Turnbull-Morrison period from 2013 to 2022.

Albanese and Dutton have managed to avoid such self-destructive shenanigans over the past three years.

But the damage was done by the time they arrived.

Monique Ryan speaks to ecstatic supporters on election night 2022 after winning the seat of Kooyong from Josh Frydenberg. Credit: Joe Armao

Many voters had already fled to independent and small-party land in disgust, leaving the legacy parties, particularly Labor, with such low primary votes that a clear victory currently seems beyond the grasp of either of them.

Dutton, nevertheless, is considered likely to regain much of the ground lost by Morrison through a combination of voter dissatisfaction, particularly with the cost of living, and his embrace of populist “anti-woke” stances.

Following the rise of US President Donald Trump, supporters of Australia’s hardline opposition leader are all but asserting the times will suit him.

They might be getting ahead of themselves.

John Howard thought the times would suit him in 1986. They did not.Credit: David Bartho

When Howard famously declared to Anne Summers, then with The Australian Financial Review, that “the times will suit me”, it was 1986.

Australia was suffering such an economic crisis at the time that treasurer Keating had warned that the nation was heading towards “banana republic” status.

Paul Keating won “the sweetest victory of them all” in 1993. He lost to John Howard three years later. Credit: Amanda Watkins

The Hawke government was in disarray and commentators were starting to talk Howard up as the next prime minister.

“Howard was confident the country would respond to a radical economic alternative to get itself out of this mess, and he was offering himself as a Reagan-Thatcher clone, willing to do what had to be done to get the country back on track,” Summers wrote years later.

It didn’t work. It took another decade before the times suited Howard enough to become prime minister.

Predicting election results is, anyway, often enough a fool’s errand, as anyone who lived through John Hewson’s loss to Paul Keating in 1993 and Bill Shorten’s loss to Scott Morrison in 2019 will tell you.

There can be no certainty now like the sure thing that was Bob Hawke in 1983.

There is no national tally room any more, either.

Lightning-fast digital technology, fancy TV studios and expert analysts like the ABC’s Antony Green – who could call an election result in his sleep, if required, and will do it for the last time this year – made the old room redundant long ago.

And yet, federal elections remain about the most compelling theatre in the land.

Every three years, they remind us that democracy remains in our own hands, even as it fractures elsewhere, along with old alliances.

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