Call that a political defection? Here are the deserters for the ages

They don’t do political defections these days with the wild abandon and firecracker scandal of the past.

Jacinta Price grabbed the headlines a few weeks ago, but hers wasn’t much of a defection, really.

Australia has a long, and frequently unhappy, history of political defections.Credit: Marija Ercegovac

It was a scuttle from one confused Coalition outfit to the other in quest of the deputy leadership of a broken-down opposition.

It got her next to nowhere, which is to say, to the outer shadow ministry of a barely stapled-together set-up.

A reminder that political defections rarely end happily.

Most are performed by the unsung on the road to obscurity, their reasons lost on the rarified parliamentary air, their seats soon enough occupied by others.

Even their names melt away. Politics is a ravening game, gobbling up and secreting the players and forever moving on.

Who can name the seven who quit their various parties in the last parliament alone?

Only the voluble Lidia Thorpe and the first woman to wear a hijab in parliament, Fatima Payman, who became a member of the exclusive club of those who’ve dared to abandon the Labor Party, readily spring to mind.

Even the roll-call of MPs who famously made it to parliament using the purse strings of Clive Palmer before defecting have largely been forgotten, apart from Jacqui Lambie. These days, the Jacqui Lambie Network itself has a small list of those who fled or were expelled.

We won’t even get started on Pauline Hanson’s One Nation, where expulsions, defections and meltdowns have become splendid entertainment over the years.

The latest political defector is Dorinda Cox, a Greens senator from Western Australia until Monday evening when she was granted asylum within the Labor government.

The headlines described this as a “shock” defection. The main shock, you might think, was that she’d hung with the Greens for so long after this masthead reported last October that 20 staff had left her office in three years, with several lodging formal complaints alleging a hostile culture where employees felt unsafe. Allegations strongly denied by Cox and all since dealt with, of course.

Regrettably, no one captured a video of Albanese, who has been at virtual war with the Greens, toasting himself with fruit of the vine and performing a triumphant jig through the halls of The Lodge.

The name Dorinda Cox will most likely fade to little more than a Labor number as she is absorbed within the unforgiving maw of major-party politics.

You couldn’t say that about Cheryl Kernot. Or Mal Colston. Or Peter Slipper.

They remain forever enshrined as the grand champions of political absconding, largely because of the scandals that ensued.

Kernot was the popular and high-achieving leader of the Australian Democrats when she suddenly decamped to Labor in 1997, causing something akin to a political earthquake.

It wasn’t until after her political career flamed out a few years later that the backstage drama emerged.

Cheryl Kernot, Kim Beazley and Gareth Evans after the former Democrats leader announced her defection in 1997.Credit:

She wrote a book purporting to be her story of life in politics, which omitted to mention an elementary detail relating to Gareth Evans, Labor’s marvellously volatile foreign minister much credited with facilitating Kernot’s defection.

Political journalist Laurie Oakes helpfully filled in the detail. Kernot and Evans had been in a secret, extramarital relationship for five years, including the period of the Democrats-Labor shuffle.

The headlines barely paused for months. Kernot and Evans have since separately carved out successful post-politics careers.

Colston was a time-serving Labor senator whose craven appetite for rorting the system, particularly travel expenses, was little known outside the party.

Mal Colston in 1998. He was branded the “quisling Quasimodo from Queensland” by one of his former Labor colleagues.Credit: Andrew Meares

Wily prime minister John Howard seduced Colston in 1996 with the juicy offer of deputy president of the Senate. Colston duly quit Labor to become an independent and, not long after, gave his treasured vote to Howard on contentious legislation.

His former party assailed Colston with a fury rarely seen before or since.

Labor senator Robert Ray called him the “Quisling Quasimodo from Queensland”. Boxes of documents detailing Colston’s years of rorting were mysteriously retrieved from a ceiling in a house in Queensland. The Sunday Age’s Paul Daley exposed leaked details of Colston’s monumental defrauding of the public purse.

Colston was eventually charged with 28 counts of fraud, but they were not pursued after he revealed he was suffering from cancer. Colston retired from parliament in 1999 with superannuation reported to be worth up to $1.5 million and died in 2004, remembered as a Labor “rat”.

Slipper was a Liberal MP from Queensland, but quit the party (known by then as the Liberal National Party) in late 2011 to get the Labor Party’s endorsement as Speaker of the House of Representatives.

This unsurprisingly infuriated the Liberals. Because he became an independent, he deprived the party of the chance to expel him. At the same time, the former speaker, Harry Jenkins, returned to the floor of the House, giving Julia Gillard’s hard-pressed minority government an extra vote.

What was initially seen as a masterful switcheroo was managed by none other than Anthony Albanese, Gillard’s chief strategist at the time.

It looked less masterful when Slipper, who took to wearing a gorgeous old-time robe in the speaker’s chair and parading weekly through parliament in full regalia, became mired in scandal over allegations he had sexually harassed a staffer, James Ashby, and misused Cabcharges.

The harassment charges were later dismissed and Slipper’s initial convictions for misusing travel entitlements were set aside on appeal.

But the political damage was done, particularly when text messages were read in parliament in which Slipper referred in the most vulgar terms to female genitalia. Given that he was supported by Gillard, Australia’s first female prime minister – who deflected the issue by delivering her famous misogyny speech directed at Tony Abbott – the game was well and truly up.

Slipper resigned in October 2012, and later became a bishop of an Australian branch of a breakaway Catholic Church established in Brazil.

They really don’t do defections like that any more.

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