With Bill Shorten now a distant, lonely figure vanishing in the rear vision mirror, Labor are ready to select their new leader – the person who will fume in the House of Representatives for the next three years.
And let’s just cut to the chase: it’ll almost certainly be Anthony Albanese, as the party have clearly decided that they can’t afford a difficult, brutal factional public stoush in the wake of the election loss.
So it’s a shame that their most popular and high profile political headkicker is not an option.
We get it, John. We get it.
The cry went up early on social media: Penny Wong should lead the Labor party and become the stern, slightly disappointed aunt that our nation clearly needs guiding the opposition in parliament.
And there are a bunch of reasons she can’t. Most obvious is because she’s in the senate.
You’d hopefully be aware that there are two chambers in our all-action bicameral government – the Senate and the House of Representatives – and since government is formed in the lower house Leader Wong wouldn’t be able to advise the Governor General of her intention to form government in the event of a win.
It’s not *technically* impossible, but it’s so impractical that no party would do it and the leader of government business in the House would seem like the de facto PM.
…thereby setting a premise for an exciting new parliamentary reboot of this classic sitcom!
And others have pointed out that certain sections of Australia may not enthusiastically embrace a PM-aspirant who is female, gay and of Chinese-Malaysian descent.
After all, if the problem is Queensland – the state where One Nation saw a disconcerting bump in their vote, along with other far-right groups – she might not be the ideal person for the times.
But here’s the big hurdle to a Wong government: she’s in South Australia.
Look, it’s a lovely place to live.
There is a small but absolutely real bump to a party’s fortunes in the state that the leader comes from.
It’s mainly because local media will cover, say, the leader taking the family to the Royal Show or attending a gala event, or the local radio will be able to get hold of the leader their opinion about The Big Sports Match and they’ll have a passionate take. It’s great background PR.
And in, say, NSW that influence is spread to 47 electorates. In Victoria, it’s 38. In Queensland, 30.
In SA, it’s ten.
It’s not the smallest number of electorates – that honour goes to NT with two, the ACT has three and Tasmania has five – but those locales are unlikely to produce a leader for the same reason: that this local bump is too big an advantage to squander on a tiny state that doesn’t decide elections.
And so, all things being equal, parties will more readily choose their leaders from the east coast states where name recognition is in the millions rather than the dozens.