Verity Barton is a former member of the Queensland Legislative Assembly and is President of the Australian Liberals Abroad in the UK. She works as a strategic communications advisor in the City.
Political leadership is a lot like trust: once it’s damaged, it’s irrevocably lost forever. “hen you abrogate the most basic foundations of leadership voters will give you the short shrift – whether you’re at the start of a bid for re-election, like Rishi Sunak, or fresh off the back of a miraculous win seven months earlier, as was Scott Morrison (ScoMo) in 2019.
They say Australian politics is brutal; and it is. But that means there is much about leadership that can be learned, and warnings that warrant heeding.
In December 2019, I went from weeks of door knocking in the cold and rain to a summer Christmas back home in Queensland. After months of Brexit discord and deadlock, I was looking forward to a few weeks of fun in the sun without having to worry about politics and politicians.
And then Australia’s prime minister, the everyday man and dorky dad many Australians felt they could relate to, did the unthinkable: he went – and stayed – on an overseas holiday while the country burned. Furious voters back home mocked him, asking ‘Where the bloody hell are ya?’, a catchphrase made famous by an Australian tourism campaign he designed. He defended his decision by saying, “I don’t hold a hose, mate”.
That ill-considered quip about a hose would go on to become one of the defining maxims of ScoMo’s premiership. Similarly, so too will Sunak’s petulant attempt at seeking a reprieve for leaving the D-Day commemorative events early by saying: “But I attended the British events.”
The wizardry of Australian political campaigning genii Sir Lynton Crosby and Isaac Levido has been at the backbone of recent Conservative success stories. But for all the lessons that should’ve been learned, or mistakes dodged, one might have thought that being a leader in those ‘big’ moments would feature prominently on that list.
In politics, sliding doors moments don’t just change the life of one person; they change the trajectory of an election, a political party, and in some cases, a country.
When people think about what makes a good leader, we often think about things like strength of conviction, the ability to communicate with voters and vision. They’re all important. But so too is judgement, and that’s often the one that can muck things up.
Peter Beattie, former Labor premier of Queensland, made an art form of seeking forgiveness, winning support to fix his own government’s failures. But he was a political unicorn cast from a similar mould to Boris Johnson. He was someone people could relate to and wanted to have a beer with while watching football. Those are qualities Sunak is struggling to convince voters he has.
How leaders react in the big moments matters. To borrow Macmillan’s words: events, dear boy, events. They don’t just throw leaders off course, they define them. How they react influences our perceptions of them, increasingly so in a modern political world dominated by social media more so than what the newspapers are saying.
John Howard, Australia’s second-longest-serving prime minister, spent most of 2001 trailing Labor in the opinion polls – and then events changed the course of his political fortunes.
In August 2001 a Norwegian tanker rescued hundreds of asylum seekers in the Indian Ocean and wanted to take them to Australia. Howard said no. It was the catalyst for Australia’s new border protection laws, the Pacific Solution, that would dominate the election in the November of that year.
On September 11, 2001, Howard was in Washington. His response was to invoke the 50-year-old ANZUS Treaty and stand steadfast with the US. A week before the 2001 election, he said: “We will decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come.” When people looked to their Prime Minister to lead, he stood up and led.
But leadership isn’t just about conviction. Humanity and emotion are qualities not often highlighted in politicians. We look to our leaders to be calm and resolute, but sometimes we just need them to show they care – and that they mean it. In the aftermath of the 2002 Bali Bombings, Howard said a leader needs to balance having no emotions and not being able to control them.
In 1996 following the Port Arthur Massacre, Howard’s instinctive response when he saw a man shaking with grief and emotion was to give him a hug. It is one of the enduring images of that tragedy; as Australia’s leader, he showed the importance of being there for the big moments too.
Contrast this with Scott Morrison’s interaction with victims of the 2019/20 bushfires. As he toured the fire-ravaged town of Bega in New South Wales, Morrison reached for a pregnant woman’s hand after she refused to shake his, awkwardly and patted the hand of a volunteer firefighter who said he didn’t want to shake his.
Howard led; Morrison embarrassed himself.
As Sunak stood in the pouring rain on the steps of Downing Street, with the New Labour anthem roaring over him in the background, many predicted the outcome of the election as he was calling it. After 14 years of Conservative government, three prime ministers in the past five years, and more u-turns than a lost driver, the Prime Minister had failed to give people a reason to vote for him. He was a leader couldn’t work out how to lead, who looked tired and over it.
But then came the debate. It wasn’t going to shift the dial, but Sunak stepped up and showed he could lead from the front. Huzzah, he said; Labour will put your taxes up £2,000 he cried.
He put Sir Keir Starmer on the back foot, making him look evasive on detail and uncomfortable when challenged on his plan. I watched it thinking, this might not turn things around, but it could stop the annihilation of a generation of Conservative politicians and give activists a reason to get back out on the doorsteps that weekend.
And then he left the D-Day Commemorations early. On 6 June, he failed to be the leader our country needed.
Sliding doors moments in politics, as Sunak is discovering, will define a legacy. The unfortunate irony is that if both he and Morrison had taken a moment to reflect and used some common sense, things could have been different. This abrogation of leadership is a reminder that what my mother tells me rings true: the thing about common sense is that it’s not very common.