It's another success for voters in the Next Leader To Go Not-A-Poll as the outright majority favourite was indeed the next leader to depart, improving the record of Not-A-Poll to 8/15 including six of the last seven.
When I opened voting on 13 February there was a spirited initial battle between Jacinta Allan and Angus Taylor with the lead swapping a few times over several hours. In following days Allan built a large lead with for some reason a lot of votes for her on 18 and 20 February. Over time this grew into a majority. Allan was a promising bet because her dire leadership ratings and her party's wobbly voting intention polling suggested there were two different ways she could go, and nobody else seemed especially likely to go before the Victorian election.
Allan formally resigned but was facing an active challenge that appeared very likely to succeed. Had Allan resisted (assuming she had sufficient signatures) there would have been a member ballot in which she would have needed an overwhelming margin to defeat Ben Carroll.
Allan is the first ever female Australian Premier to be in effect rolled by her party. Five previous female Premiers lost elections, one resigned under corruption investigation and one resigned while not under active pressure. At Territory level two female Chief Ministers lost elections (one after also being temporarily out of the job through a mid-term change of office), one lost a no-confidence vote, two resigned without threat of challenge (one to move to federal politics) and one resigned in disgrace. One is still there and Lia Finocchiaro is the only federal leader of an Australian government. For the first time since February 2015 there are no female Premiers.
Filling the very big shoes of Daniel Andrews, Allan took over at a time when there was remarkably little leadership satisfaction polling. The only reading in her first year in office was a net -6 from Redbridge after only a few months in the role. By the time personal ratings for Allan were seen again she had been in office for almost a year and a half, and every net rating for her from then on was net -28 or worse, culminating in a final net -46 from Newspoll (the worst for any state Premier in Newspoll's history).
I think Allan to some degree bore the brunt of dissatisfactions with her ageing government that went beyone her own leadership, but she was also seen as lacking cut-through and unwilling to act on Victoria's longrunning union corruption crisis.
In preferred leader polling (which favours incumbents) Allan initially had satisfactory leads over John Pesutto but these soon shrunk to inadequate and Pesutto even managed a pyrrhic 1-point win in his final poll as leader. Allan trailed Brad Battin in every poll during his leadership by an average 8.8% and Jess Wilson by an average of 16.1%.
There is very strong history that unpopular state Premiers either lose or are removed. The writing has been on the wall re Victorian Labor's likely fate if Allan took them to an election for well over a year, obscured only by the possibility that the Coalition's national malaise would save them. And yet it has taken til four months from the election for Labor to do something. If they had a messiah they would surely have done so before.
Ben Carroll takes over seeking to buck a different pattern. Governments under their third Premier or Chief Minister of a term tend to lose, frequently heavily. The last exception was the CLP in the NT in 1987, and that was in the days when the NT was practically a one-party territory. Four months generally isn't long enough for a new Premier to establish themselves, so it won't be easy for him. Some particularly awkward lines from interviews from the last round of leadership speculation in June are also already appearing as the easiest of attack ads ever made.
Will anyone else go before the election? Angus Taylor has yet to lead the Coalition to any serious recovery in their polling and there remains talk that Andrew Hastie might be lurking awaiting a go, but maybe not that soon. Jeremy Rockliff's minority government has had more lives than a cat but has recently lost two ministers to integrity and misleading-the-house matters and the Premier himself has been censured; how long will his heart be in it and what will the parliament do next time? If you meet people involved in ACT politics the subject of Andrew Barr moving on at some time is never far away, but perhaps the recent resignation of his Deputy would make him more inclined to continue to ensure the party can re-stabilise. Anthony Albanese has ordinary ratings but doesn't seem likely to go anywhere soon, and nor do any of the others. There was however some recent federal speculation about Peter Malinauskas, which he was quick to hose down. Over to you, voters; I suspect I'll be back for another episode sooner rather than later!
