pinaswin88 Whose Politics Are More Turbulent, America’s or Australia’s?
The Australia Letter is a weekly newsletter from our Australia bureau. Sign up to get it by email. This week’s issue is written by Julia Bergin, a reporter based in Melbourne.
President Biden had just announced that he would bow out of the 2024 presidential race, throwing American politics into fresh tumult, when Prime Minister Anthony Albanese of Australia was asked this week if he was worried about the United States, his nation’s most important ally.
In private, for months now, officials with his government have expressed a mix of concern and cautious confidence. But Mr. Albanese went one step further. Knocking his own country down a peg, he said he was in no position to criticize America’s political turbulence given Australia’s own record of intraparty squabbles and changing leaders.
“If I get re-elected as prime minister, that will be the first time that a prime minister has been re-elected after having served a full term since John Howard in 2004,” Mr. Albanese said in a radio interview with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation on Monday. “So, we have certainly been much more turbulent than the United States has been over the last couple of decades.”
He’s right that Australia has churned through many leaders over the past 15 years or so — Kevin Rudd, Julia Gillard, Mr. Rudd again, Tony Abbott, Malcolm Turnbull, Scott Morrison, and finally, Mr. Albanese, who was elected in 2022.
Four of these changes stemmed from internal party revolts, leaving Australia with a prime minister who was not the leader of his or her party when it won elections.
This revolving door of prime ministers has earned the country an international reputation as the “coup capital of the democratic world,” but is Mr. Albanese correct in arguing that Australian politics is more turbulent than what we’ve seen in America in recent years?
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