Who is the PM referred to in the title? Is it Julia Gillard? Or is it one of these other Australian Prime ministers who also were not elected to the position by the people of Australia.

But first, what this post isn’t about. It’s not about the relative merits of Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard. It’s not about the effect of the change of PM on the result of the forthcoming election. It’s not about internal ALP politics. It’s about whether the recent change of PM is a sign that something has gone wrong with our democracy.

In the wake of the change of PM the comment threads at the ABC and elsewhere started filling up with

a) People complaining that they didn’t vote for Julia Gillard, and
b) other people pointing out that the first group of people didn’t vote for Kevin Rudd either (even if they thought they did).

I initially sided with group b). Clearly lots of people didn’t understand our political system. Unless they live in the electorate of Griffith then they didn’t vote for Kevin Rudd at the last election, and if they do, and they did vote for him then it was as member for Griffith, not PM. After this initial reaction though I started to think about it a bit more – after all, facts aren’t everything in politics, perception is important. It surely matters that people perceived that they were voting for Kevin Rudd, whether they technically were or not. Really it goes beyond perception, if they voted Labor (or many cases just preferenced Labor above Liberal) then they were effectively voting for Rudd as PM in a very real sense. There’s more to it than that and to give credit where it is due it it was primarily this post by Mark Bahnisch which made me really reconsider the whole issue (see also latest LP discussion here). Perhaps the key is to turn it around and think not so much about who put the PM there, but who takes them away. While people may complain that they voted in Rudd, perhaps it’s more the way that the right to vote out a PM appears to have been usurped. Of course those complaining loudly weren’t in a hurry to vote him out, but resent anyone other individuals or groups being able to do it instead. Which obviously brings up comparisons with the Whitlam dismissal, while the circumstances are very different, there is that same feeling that someone else has taken the power of removing the PM out of the hands of the public (and of course those most aggrieved at the removal of Rudd are likely to be people who exercised their power to remove a PM at the last election). This raises the question of who did remove him then? The easiest answer is factions within the ALP, but this still shifts the question to the factors which motivated them. If you read enough blogs and newspaper columns then there are lots of culprits out there – the media, the mining industry, the very nature of modern politics … personally I’m still trying to get my head around it all and am not going to be pointing the finger, but the idea that a PM has been removed as a result of these sort of influences is a worrying one. Is our political system broken as Mark Bahnisch claims?  I’m still not sure, I certainly hope not.

Pulling back from the bigger picture of the implications for our political system and back to the fact that Kevin Rudd is no longer PM, there are some other factors to consider. One is that we are nearing the end of the electoral cycle, the new PM who has not lead her party to a general election will be doing so shortly. If a party is successful at election does that then mean that they have to go into each subsequent election with the same leader until they choose to retire or are defeated (sounds familiar doesn’t it … I’m sure plenty of Peter Costello supporters weren’t happy with that model). If not then when do they change? Surely now is pretty much the time when it would happen … when the previous leader has served most of their term and delivered on as much of their legislative agenda as is possible, but early enough to give the new leader a chance to properly contest the next election.  Even if you put aside the technicalities and say that people are effective electing a PM then isn’t that to serve one term, or are they also voting for the right to vote for them again next time.

One final point (in post that has, admittedly, meandered around without really concluding anything), is that I hope that for those people who are generally shocked to see the PM they thought they’d voted for (this time in the technical sense) booted out of office will give a bit of thought to how our electoral system works as a result, I think that we’ve gone too far into treating elections as personality contests between the two major party leaders. This incident is a very strong reminder that we need to weigh up a number of factors when we choose who to vote for – sure, the personality of the leader who may become PM is important, but we also have to take into account the party they lead and what they stand for (amongst other things, such as who your local candidate is, the distinction between the two houses, the potential role of minor parties and independents, the use of prefernences  …).