Photo by Drew Beamer on Unsplash
By Mark Kenny
A version of this article was originally published by The Canberra Times.
Remember Eastman Kodak, the 20th century's leading global brand in photography which somehow failed to surf the digital wave?
Australia's "election winning machine" to use Christopher Pyne's jolly description of the Coalition, looks to have missed a similarly existential juncture.
Right as Sussan Ley's leadership shifted into the "when" phase of scheming by her competitors, multiple cracks were appearing further down the pyramid. Fissures which suggest the party's crisis of purpose is far less personnel-based than it is structural. And attitudinal.
Leadership instability is not uncommon when political parties have grim prospects, but it usually just confirms that they've become inwardly focused, a "clown show" even, in the helpful words of Liberal senator Jacinta Nampijinpa-Price in October.
Dumping a leader seems drastic enough but it is still easier than admitting "the problem is the horse, not the jockey," as barrister and Liberal Party insider Jane Buncle has bravely diagnosed.
In the last fortnight, former radio personality Mark Parton assumed the leadership of the beleaguered ACT Liberals after his predecessor was considered a dud before facing even one election in the post.
In NSW last week, there was a rare double substitution. The Nationals leader Dugald Saunders pulled the pin on Monday and by week's end, Liberal opposition leader, Mark Speakman, had made way for the first-term Vaucluse MP Kellie Sloane.
If that timetable resembled a kind of pre-Ashes test match, Victoria's internally toxic party room put on something closer to the Big Bash.
Brad Battin, the ex-cop who succeeded John Pesutto (spectacularly sued into penury by one of his own hardline MPs) was himself dumped on Tuesday in favour of a first term MP Jess Wilson. The 34-year-old is the Victorian Liberals' first female leader.
In South Australia, the Liberals' mid-term leadership change came in August last year.
Vincent Tarzia will make it to the March 2026 poll as leader but such is Labor's dominance in Adelaide that Tarzia's normally safe seat is slated to fall.
Further west, things may be improving under the pro-net-zero leadership of Basil Zempilas but that comes from a disastrously low base.
Does anyone think all these "jockey" changes are unrelated?
In Queensland the conservatives are ascendent under new LNP Premier David Crisafulli but an illiberal nostalgia is evident in such decisions as reversing Labor's life-saving pill testing at schoolies week which is about to start on the Gold Coast. This is a reaction looking for a rationale. A change tailored for a world that was rather than the one we have. It is objectively dangerous policy.
Kodak was one of the great retail companies of the world. Now, after "phoenixing" out of Chapter 11 bankruptcy a dozen years ago, it's more of a business-to-business outfit. Thinking about this unhappy path, I began to wonder if there wasn't something in this company's particular product that predisposed it to standing still in a world of motion.
Even though it had led key innovations, photography itself, is, fundamentally about stopping time. From the moment the shutter closes, it looks backwards, valorising the past. Its emotional pull lies in its visual codification of countless yesterdays. Or if you're a conservative, countless "better" days.
Paul Simon captured this cultural nostalgia beautifully in his hit song, Kodachrome with its chorus celebrating the film's "nice bright colours" that gave us "the greens of summers" and made you think "all the world's a sunny day, oh yeah".
That was then, which is kind of the point.
Trapped in a romantic-loop and pining for a world that no longer exists, the Liberals face an ever-constricting future because too many in its ranks are happier stopping time than pushing forward and making the new, better.
But not everyone.
In the finest distillation I've read recently of the Liberal Party's historic dilemma, Buncle argues that her party must either "renew or expire". It is that simple.
For her, renewal means accepting that complex economic, social and organisational changes cannot be wished away or trivialised into grievances about the hip-pocket, no matter what Pauline Hanson and the populist chorus on pay TV bang on about after dark.
"The country is moving towards industries that will define the next century, workplaces and public institutions shaped equally by women, an economy driven by innovation, skills and global competitiveness, a society enriched by migration and towards a conservatism that steadies rather than inflames. The question is whether the Liberal Party moves with it - or stands still and slowly shrinks around an ever-narrower core," Buncle writes.
"A conservatism that steadies rather than inflames."
Can the Liberal Party rise to this sophisticated challenge or will it hunker behind reassuring snapshots of a world that was?
It is surely no coincidence that the people writing most perceptively about the Liberal Party's odd aversion to the very tradition invoked in its name, are women. A glance at the federal Parliament reveals they have been given few seats at the table and risk little by speaking frankly.
Neither is it luck that women such as Ley, Wilson and Sloane are embraced at the bottom of the success curve.
This is the "glass cliff" - finally acknowledging competent women when the suits have been exhausted, and the show is basically cactus.
Mark Kenny is the Director of the ANU Australian Studies Institute and host of the Democracy Sausage podcast.