SPILL SPILL SPILL...
When you see the hashtag #spill trending on Twitter in Australia, immediately you wonder who has been turfed out of power by their own political party. Be it Prime Ministers or Opposition Leaders, when the Festival Of The Thirsty Knife starts again, then backstabbing and blood spilling soon follows. For a crazy period this century, we had 6 Prime Ministers in 10 years, and 6 Opposition Leaders in the same period. When #spill starts trending, those of us who view politics as the perennial sporting contest, start getting excited.
Except on this occasion, this spill was ore boring than soup made from packet gravy. This spill was more boring than a recap and analysis show looking at what happened last week on Neighbours. This spill was more boring than Beatrice and Elizabeth who have tunneled their way from Victoria Cross to Zetland under the harbour. This spill was really boring.
This spill was that Mark Latham has been axed as NSW One Nation leader, after an order from the One Nation Party's Permanent Tsar, Pauline Hanson. In a press conference which I heard on ABC News Radio, Ms Hanson cited the party’s poor electoral performance at the March '23 state election as the reason for the spill.
After having won just 1.8% of the primary vote in the Legislative Assembly and securing exactly zero seats, and 5.0% of the the primary vote in the Legislative Council, thus effecting exactly zero change, this looks like seagulls fighting over a chip at the beach. The actual take-home from this is that Mark Latham will remain in the party even though he isn't leader and even though he still claims to the be the parliamentary leader. The other two One Nation MPs in the Legislative Council have said exactly zero so far.
Why does any of this matter if practically zero has changed? Because what this says is that the One Nation Party is, is still essentially a party of cult and of personality and will no be allowed to breathe under any circumstances. This harkens all the way back to 1996 and the beginning of Ms Hanson's political career.
Way back long ago in the past, Ms Hanson was dumped by the Liberal Party and disendorsed but because she was already listed as the Liberal Party's candidate for the Federal Electorate of Oxley in Queensland, she was voted in by a Queensland electorate who either didn't know or didn't care about the circumstances. It then became really obvious really quickly that Ms Hanson was (and still is) a political hack and an A-Grade nutcase. The long story short is that from 1996 and in the almost 30 years since, both her and her political party which is still apparently about her, have played the role of being perpetual nuisances in every single parliament. This spill is the admission that there is only room for one nuisance in the party and that Mark Latham, isn't it. Probably Mark Latham could have found himself a job on Sky News Australia along with resident nuisance Cory Bernardi, but I fear that Sky News Australia might not have that big a budget.
I suspect that the reason why Mark Latham will retain his place in the One Nation Party and has neither resigned nor been booted, is that just like a ratking, the group works better as a peloton. Rats will only jump from a ship if they fear that the ship is sinking and in this case, with New South Wales' four year fixed term elections, Mark Latham's job as Member of the Legislative Council is safe. I suspect that Pauline Hanson hasn't disendorsed him because if he were to be disendorsed, then she would lose control over who would replace Latham in the event of him quitting or dying. As it is, his resignation left a casual vacancy which she could then fill and which isn't up for reelection until 2027 and Mark Latham himself has a watertight job until 2031.
This spill turned out to be less interesting than what it otherwise could have been. I saw #Spill trending on X and thought that maybe Spud Dutton had finally become so repulsive to the rest of the Liberal Party that they finally decided to fry that potato and replace him with Sussan Ley. That would have truly placed us into some weird political territory but that did not happen. I had hope to whoop from the sidelines: "Political chaos and division is so back, YEAH!" We didn't get that. Instead we got a non-event; in a party that doesn't matter; with a caucus that can fit in the back of a taxi.
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