Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Humanities/2015 September 16

Welcome to the Wikipedia Humanities Reference Desk Archives
The page you are currently viewing is an archive page. While you can leave answers for any questions shown below, please ask new questions on one of the current reference desk pages.

September 16

Monday's leadership spill

I just discovered Liberal Party of Australia leadership spill, September 2015, and the situation left me somewhat confused on the formal procedure. When you lose a leadership spill, do you resign, or do you advise the G-G to replace you with the new guy, or is there a confidence vote in the House of Representatives, or does something else happen? I'm not seeing anything in this article, Abbott's article, or Leadership spill. I was confused to discover that the Liberal senators joined in the vote (apparently because they're among the most prominent members of the party, so they play a part in internal party matters?) and also confused that the Nationals don't even get mentioned; how is this a Liberal matter, and not a Coalition matter? Nyttend (talk) 13:15, 16 September 2015 (UTC)

First of all, when Tony Abott is challenge as the leader of the Liberal Party, he has to prove that he has the support of the MPs in his party. If he loses the support, he is no longer the leader of the Party. He does not have to resign. He is automatically no longer the leader. 220.239.43.253 (talk) 15:23, 16 September 2015 (UTC)

The prime minister is the leader of the political party that wins the election. If the leader of the party changes, then the G-G needs to be informed by the outgoing leader. And the new leader needs to under go the swearing in ceremony. 220.239.43.253 (talk) 15:33, 16 September 2015 (UTC)

(EC) Despite the confusing wording in our article, the spill was for the leadership of the Liberal Party of Australia and would follow the rules of the Liberal Party as to who gets to vote. Because the coalition has a majority in the House of Representatives, and the agreement is that the Liberal Party leader will be PM, the winner will eventually become PM, but that is still a seperate matter from the leadership spill itself.

I don't know much about the coalition agreement with the Nationals beyond what the article says, but it's fairly unlikely it allows them to have an official say in the leadership of the Liberal Party. They do get the Deputy Prime Minister after all, and I fairly doubt they would be interested in the Liberal Party having a say in their leadership. If they aren't happy with the leadership, they could always break the coalition agreement.

In terms of becoming PM Australians will correct me if I'm wrong but having lost the leadership of the Liberal Party, Abbott resigned (handed in his commission) as PM as was expected of him [1]. The Governor-General of Australia then appointed the (new) leader of Liberal Party as the new Prime Minister of Australia [2] as was expected by convention given that the Coalition had the majority in the House of Representatives and the Coalition expected the leader of the Liberal Party to be the Prime Minister. If Abbott had refused to resign, then things would have been a bit messier, I suspect it's likely a confidence motion would have been called in parliament. Realisticly that was never going to happen.

Nil Einne (talk) 15:50, 16 September 2015 (UTC)

I agree with all that. One thing that surprised me, though, was that the Coalition agreement had to be renegotiated between the Nationals leader Warren Truss and the new Liberal leader, Malcolm Turnbull, and certain new concessions were demanded by the Nats which had not been part of the agreement with Tony Abbott. I always believed the Coalition agreement was between the 2 parties for the life of the parliament, regardless of who their respective leaders happened to be at any point in time. The last time this was an issue was in 1967, when Liberal PM Harold Holt drowned, and the Country Party (as the Nationals were then called) under John McEwen immediately announced that they would leave the Coalition if the Liberals elected Holt's presumed successor William McMahon (whom McEwen despised, not least because he believed he was a homosexual). So they elected John Gorton instead. That was all about acceptance (or not) of the leader personally, not about any matters of policy. I don't remember the agreement having to be renegotiated when Gorton resigned in mid-term in 1971, but that's a while back. The Abbott/Turnbull turnover is the first time since then that a sitting Liberal PM has left the job (although there were plenty of such changes at the top when they were in Opposition). -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 20:26, 16 September 2015 (UTC)

Conversely, the Nationals changed leaders twice during John Howard's PM-ship, giving him 3 Deputy PMs (Tim Fischer, John Anderson and Mark Vaile), and again I don't remember any renegotiation going on when the Nats leader changed each time. Warren Truss is a sort of bland Mr Nobody to most Australians, but he knows political opportunities when he sees them. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 21:33, 16 September 2015 (UTC)

The reason I asked about the Nationals' input: what if they had continued supporting Abbott? I'm just imagining the National representatives uniting with the Abbott-favoring Liberal representatives, choosing him to remain as leader of the Coalition. Or is this something that wouldn't happen, because it would violate longstanding norms? I'm familiar enough with the average Westminster system to understand its normal workings, but the idea of a party supporting a government (long-term, as opposed to temporary coalitions as seen all the time in countries like Israel) without having a voice in picking its membership is simply weird to my mind. Nyttend (talk) 22:53, 16 September 2015 (UTC)

The bottom line is that the issue was the leadership of the parliamentary Liberal Party, and nobody who was not a member of that select club, not even their Coalition partner the Nationals, had any say in the matter. All the Nationals could do was to seek to reaffirm (= renegotiate) the coalition agreement once the Libs had made their choice. But, as I say, even that seems to be a new development. And such discussions most certainly could not have extended to keeping Abbott as the leader of the Coalition despite not being the leader of either party. What happened in Queensland in April 2011 - when Campbell Newman became Leader of the Liberal Party despite the fact that he was not at that stage, and had never been, a member of parliament (he was first elected in March 2012) - was a crazy scenario that led to the party's defeat in 2015 and Newman ignominiously losing his own seat, and was an experiment unlikely ever to be repeated. That's the closest parallel I can think of to what you're alluding to. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 23:15, 16 September 2015 (UTC)