Malcolm Turnbull needs to deliver us political stability

It is right to observe that the extraordinary instability in the prime ministership has done some damage to Australia’s standing internationally and our reputation for stability. Which is just one of many reasons it is important Malcolm Turnbull now succeed and deliver us sensible, stable, economic ­reform-minded government.

In explaining our new instability we can look at international trends, such as the rise of instability, and political extremes, in numerous European nations such as Greece and even France. The comparison doesn’t work, though, with the Anglophone countries we normally compare ourselves with, such as Britain, Canada, New Zealand, Ireland or even the US. All these nations have had stable political leadership while we have churned through PMs.

A more useful interpretative lens might be our own history. Australia is widely known for several things: glorious weather, ease of lifestyle, sporting prowess, the quality of our fighting men and our political stability.

We have been a stable nation but we have often teetered on the brink of serious social instability, and have endured leadership instability quite like that which we have now. The conscription referendums of World War I led to bitter and intensified sectarian divisions between Catholic and Protestant, which were not really resolved until the 1960s.

After a turbulent 20s, it was only the prime ministership of the much underrated Joe Lyons, who defected from the Labor Party to form a conservative government, which led to the pre-war stability and avoided more profound social conflict.

The success of the Russian Bolshevik revolution in 1917 led to the formation of a communist movement in Australia that was the cause of grievous social unrest.

At the start of World War II, Labor opposed Australia sending troops to fight the Nazis and many Australian trade unions tried to sabotage the war effort because numerous unions were controlled by communists and in 1939 Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin were allies.

Australian communists backed the war only after Hitler attacked Russia. Then, after the war, communist economic vandalism again became socially destructive, so much so that the sainted Ben Chifley called out the army to break the miners’ strike in 1949. Imagine the way history would treat that if Chifley had been a conservative prime minister.

After 1949, we got the long Menzies stability, from 1949 to 1966, when he retired. But this stability was hard-won and fragile, and encompassed a savage and sectarian split within the Labor Party. Even John Howard’s long, productive, stable term in office looks much more inevitable in retrospect than it did at the time. Howard lost the popular vote in 1998, was behind in 2001 until the Tampa refugee boat hove into view, and in 2004 hit the lead only in the last week of the election campaign.

The long Hawke-Keating period of stable government from 1983 to 1996 was also chancy.

Bob Hawke nearly lost in 1984, and did lose the popular vote in 1990 and then was hurled from office by his own party.

But in terms of our present instability perhaps the period that most comes to mind is the interregnum between Robert Menzies’ end in 1966 and Malcolm Fraser’s ascent in 1983.

In that period we had Harold Holt, John Gorton, William McMahon and Gough Whitlam as a series of unsuccessful, unstable leaders.

Holt won a landslide victory in 1966 on the basis of support for the war in Vietnam, but after that everything went wrong. By the time of his sudden death at the end of 1967 there were serious leadership rumblings. He was succeeded by the chaotic Gorton, who was effectively removed from office by his own party. His supporters foolishly moved a vote of confidence in his leadership. The vote was tied, which meant Gorton had to resign, not least because he had a minuscule majority in parliament and several MPs would have crossed the floor to vote against him.

McMahon has no friends in history and is our only PM about whom no biography has been written. In fact he was an important and early economic dry within the Liberal Party. He also arrested the party’s terrible internal chaos, made a reasonable fist of the economy and narrowly lost to Whitlam in 1972.

Whitlam was by a long distance our worst prime minister. Although he was positively worshipped by the commentariat of his day, he was in office a brief three years, scoring the narrowest possible re-election in 1974 before losing in 1975. Whitlam wrecked our economy, gravely endangered national security and tore up conventions — such as the Commonwealth Police not raiding ASIO headquarters — which had never before been in question.

History has been kind to Whitlam, because it has mostly been written by his partisans. But the judgment of Australians who lived through the Whitlam government was evident in the 1975 and 1977 election results. In 1975, Whitlam suffered the worst electoral landslide defeat in our history. In 1977, when he ran again as opposition leader, he suffered a similar electoral annihilation.

The aloof, patrician and deeply conservative Fraser was never popular, but the electorate deliberately chose to elect him three times to repudiate the instability of Whitlam and the period immediately preceding him.

The long Hawke-Keating stability, which had good economic policy and sound national security behaviour, was based in part on Labor learning the lessons of the Whitlam failures and Hawke and Paul Keating determining to govern as the un-Whitlams, if not the anti-Whitlams.

The point is that as a society we were scared of the instability we had flirted with and strove to correct it with the best alternative we had on offer. But what would Australia have been like if we had re-elected Whitlam in 1977, with none of the lessons of the Whitlam government disasters having been learned by the Labor Party? That is what beckons now. Instability and crisis do not always produce a sensible response. Look no further than Greece, Spain or France.

The economic problems of today resemble the politics of the 80s rather than the 90s. Fiscal consolidation is urgent and necessary and cannot be accomplished without pain. It was to our immense national benefit that we achieved this in the 80s under Hawke and Keating, with the support of Howard in opposition. Their micro-economic reforms also freed up the supply side of the economy.

Bill Shorten is a good man with strong national security instincts but the Labor Party of today has no policies at all that address our urgent economic problems and is even more in thrall to the destructive impulses of the union movement than in the past. The original sin in policy terms today was Kevin Rudd abandoning fiscal responsibility and Labor re-regulating the labour market. The original sin politically was the caucus assassinating Rudd.

We need now a Hawke, or at least a Fraser. Can Turnbull lead us back to the stability we crave?