Laurie Oakes launches Earthquake by Niki Savva

Welcome everyone. It’s a pleasure tonight to be launching Earthquake, allegedly the final book in Niki Savva’s political tetralogy. This launching business suits an old codger like me. It doesn’t pay much, but it’s regular work — one job every three years. That feels about right to me. But I’ve told Niki that if she gets an uncontrollable urge to produce a pentalogy, she’ll need to find a new launcher.

I launched Niki’s last book — Bulldozed — which became the 2023 political book of the year — on the eve of the 50th anniversary of the election of the Whitlam government. This launch is precisely a fortnight after the 50th anniversary of the dismissal of the Whitlam government. If that tells us anything, it’s that Albo has already outlasted Gough, but he hasn’t radically changed Australia yet. People are asking: What’s wrong with him?

Speaking of the Whitlam government, I was pleased by Albo’s announcement that the government is going to commission a statue of Gough. I am puzzled, though, that there is uncertainty about where it will be located. It shouldn’t be in front of Old Parliament House. It shouldn’t be beside the lake either. It should be on the lake. Gough walking across it.

Wouldn’t that look fantastic? I’m sure Gough would think it entirely appropriate. Also, if any pesky journalists wanted to ask questions about the cost or anything else, the PM could simply reply, ‘Sorry, I don’t talk about on-water matters.’

I noticed Albo got into the book-launching game himself recently when he smashed a bottle of champagne across the bows of Troy Bramston’s new Whitlam biography. In his speech, he made it clear that, reading a book about a prime minister when you are prime minister made it a different experience. He planned to learn from it. ‘There is wisdom in here,’ he said.

I was interested because I was reading the proofs of Earthquake at the time, and it seemed to me that, while there were a number of themes, there was a pretty simple story at its core. The story of a bloke who learned from his mistakes and triumphed while his opponents kept repeating their errors and stupidities, and got deeper into trouble. Even now, months after the election, they seem to have learned very little from the drubbing they received.

Earthquake, as most people know, includes some of Niki’s newspaper columns in addition to a heap of new material. The columns lay the groundwork for an extensive analysis of the election campaign and its result and aftermath. And the new reporting and analysis — as we’ve come to expect from Niki’s books — contains no shortage of eye-openers, inside information, shrewd insights, off-the-record material, of course, and — most important — stuff from people on both sides of politics who’ve allowed Niki to quote them.

As I’ve said at previous launches, the remarkable extent to which politicians put their names to their words in Niki’s books gives those books credibility and authority.

If you want to know what Peter Dutton thought of Andrew Hastie, it’s here in Earthquake. If you want to know what Andrew Hastie thought of Peter Dutton, that’s here too. If you wonder what Anthony Albanese and Jim Chalmers were thinking as they put together the tax trap that sucked Peter Dutton into his most disastrous campaign decision, it’s in the book. As are candid comments from Dutton’s colleagues about how dopey and damaging it was for the Liberal Party to go into an election opposing Labor’s tax cuts and promising to repeal them.

There’s a lot more to Niki’s writing about politics, of course. There’s wit, for a start. Sometimes quite subtle wit. I assumed it was a misprint, for example, when I read about former National Party leaders Michael McCormack and Barnaby Joyce doing a provocative rubble-rousing duet over net zero. But then I recalled references to a Liberal Party reduced to rubble by the election, and I realised that rubble -rousing was definitely not an error. It was very deliberate. And clever.

A bonus was that it suggested similarities between Barnaby Joyce and Barney Rubble. Also, considering the Nationals as a comical version of the stone age certainly didn’t seem like much of a stretch.

Of course, key to the racy, hard-hitting style that Niki brings to her writing about politics and politicians is the knowledge and experience that backs it up. And the passion. Above all, the passion. She has no time for those who think politics is boring, or that elections don’t matter. She gets excited by it, knows it’s important to all our lives, and works hard to convey that to readers.

I don’t normally pay much attention to the acknowledgements when I read a book, but I’m glad I didn’t skip them with Earthquake. I’d have missed an insight into what drives the author. Niki tells how she spoke on the phone to Petro Georgiou, an old friend of mine as well as hers, shortly before his death back in April. Petro was pretty special. A former prime ministerial adviser, former Victorian Liberal Party state director, and former long-serving federal MP, he was one of that disappearing breed: a Liberal moderate with the guts to stick to his principles.

Niki writes: ‘As was the way with Petro, he told me my columns were not up to their usual standard. He thought they were better when I was angry’. With Peter Dutton already making mistake after mistake as the campaign loomed, she says, it wasn’t hard to get angry after that. And when Petro died, she got angrier. She was angry, she says, that she had lost a good friend and wise counsel. And angrier still when she thought of the sort of people that the Liberal Party had once attracted, preselected, and elected, the kind who made it a respectable, interesting, reforming right-of-centre party.

Many Liberals from those days, Niki added, no longer recognised the party they once served and loved. The party that began the process of dismantling White Australia. The party that once put One Nation last on its ballot paper, but now selects a lead Senate candidate in South Australia on the promise he’ll attract One Nation voters.

The anger and the passion in this book would certainly have met with Petro’s approval.

Dutton is the cause of much of the anger. He gets a well-deserved pasting, portrayed as lazy, someone who didn’t understand campaigning and didn’t listen, a leader who dodged contact with the public, tended to frequent the dark recesses of Sky News after the sun went down, and took the Liberal Party further to the right.

There is a debate under way — and this book is an important part of it — about the long-term impact of the election shock on the Liberals. The party is no longer a broad church. If Sir Robert Menzies and Malcolm Fraser were around today, I doubt they’d be able to tolerate what the Liberal Party has become, and I doubt that what the Liberal Party has become would be able to tolerate them.

So the question generating much heat is: Will the Liberal Party split? Will the moderates walk? Possibly to link up with other like-minded groups?

Malcolm Turnbull tells Niki there is certainly a market for the emergence of a new, genuinely liberal centrist party, but he does not believe it will happen. Because, he says, the right has already won the fight. There isn’t much of a moderate wing left to split off.

I think that’s pretty accurate.

There is also discussion in the book of the possibility that the right might take the initiative. That the right wing of the Liberal Party might join the Nationals in a formal union, perhaps. Or that the far-right faction of the Liberal Party could split from the rest, then join with the Nationals, One Nation, and other assorted right-wing groups to form a consolidated conservative force.

It’s tempting to see it all as just another bout of squabbling on the coalition side of politics. To me, though, it feels rather more serious than that.

Some moderates — George Brandis is one — suggest that it’s all just a brawl about net zero and climate change. But these people are dreaming. There’s a lot more than that involved.

Immigration is another hot-button issue. Andrew Hastie has already joined with Barnaby Joyce to push abortion into the political debate. The issue of race hangs over attempts by the Liberal right to attract One Nation support. And so on. The problems becoming clear now have been eating away at the party’s support for more than a decade. The consequences are becoming increasingly obvious,

So maybe the Liberals are facing an existential crisis. Pressure is certainly building following Albo’s election win. Something has to happen eventually. Maybe — to steal a good line — it’s time.

And it occurred to me this morning that there is a fairly recent precedent. Scott Morrison’s mate, Emmanuel Macron, built a new centre-right political movement in 2016. It catapulted him into the French presidency only a year later. So, it can be done. All we need is an Australian Macron. A minor difficulty is that they’re a bit thin on the ground.

As you’d expect, given the election outcome, Albo emerges from Earthquake in rather better shape than his opponents. You get a bit of a clue to that in the very first sentence of the book: ‘On 3 May 2025, Anthony Albanese transcended from mere mortal to the pantheon of great Labor leaders, as close to heaven as any prime minister can hope to get.’ I think he’d be reasonably happy with that review.

But Niki gives him a fair old going over on the way through, just the same. Especially in one of the columns included in the book — her final column of 2024, just five months before the poll.

Niki asserted in that column that the Albanese government was in deep trouble. There was a view bubbling away in the wider Labor family, she said, that Albo had lost his mojo. That his judgement had deserted him. Albo’s bad calls, according to Niki, had wasted precious time and eroded public confidence. She described Albo as ‘undisciplined and unprepared’, a PM who tied himself up in knots, one who too often lost the plot. She also referred to ‘the prime minister’s serial acts of self-harm’. The Albanese government was at risk of becoming the first one-term administration since Scullin in 1931, she warned. If Albo couldn’t summon the discipline to shape up, he should ship out and let someone else take over.

When Dutton phoned on election night to concede defeat, Albo told him: ‘You under-estimated me.’ Well, after Albo’s performance through much of 2004, of course he did. Albo was the PM who totally botched the Voice referendum, earned a reputation for allowing small problems to fester until they became big ones, and frequently seemed surprised by, or unprepared for, issues that could and should have been anticipated.

On the basis of his performance, just about everybody under-estimated him. The opposition leader was no exception.

But it turned out to be a good thing for Albo — almost as though he had plotted an ‘underestimation trap’ in the same way he plotted the tax trap — because Dutton thought the message was that he could just coast to victory without worrying about inconvenient details like policies.

Voters were unimpressed. They were impressed, especially when the campaign began in earnest, by the results of Albo reassessing his own performance and lifting his game. He found his inner Travis Head. It’s no wonder the Pommy test cricketers are too scared to take on the Prime Minister’s XI here in Canberra next weekend.

The difference between Niki’s late-2024 bagging of Albo and her post-election portrayal of him was stark. The size of Albanese’s victory, she writes, was due to an almost fault-free performance by him at every level over those five months, forged by hard work, careful planning, and iron self-discipline. ‘During the entire campaign he was across his brief, on message and unrelenting,’ she says.

It’s hard to believe that the 2024 prime minister and the PM who reported for duty in 2025 were the same bloke. It’s as though there were two Albos. Maybe there were. If Vladimir Putin can have all those body doubles, why shouldn’t the Australian prime minister at least have one? (He could be here tonight.)

Just kidding, folks. I think.

One of the things Albo will be thinking about, having read the Gough biography, is how ambitious he should be in the extent and pace of the reforms he undertakes, now that he has accumulated so much political capital via the election. We know he’s already studied and learned from John Howard’s over-reach with WorkChoices. He’s talked about it. That pushes him towards caution. He will study Malcolm Fraser’s failure to adopt a serious reform agenda when he had a huge majority after the 1975 election. That will be an argument for using rather than wasting political capital.

And then there is Whitlam. What lessons to learn from Gough’s mistakes and successes?

Gough is admired for his crash-through or crash approach, and Albo’s current crop of critics seem to want him to emulate that. To be bold. To aim big. But I reckon the Voice referendum was Albo’s go at crashing through, and the result was that he crashed. Badly. With considerable cost to the nation.

He might well learn more from that than from Gough’s death-or-glory style.

I’m probably in the minority, but I have to say that I don’t mind if Albo is a bit cautious. You don’t have to play Bazball all the time. You should take account of conditions and your opponent’s tactics. Protecting your wicket, staying in and building an innings, is important in politics too.

How am I doing with the sporting analogies?

Anyway, finally, I want to mention the impact on our election of the person Rory Stewart refers to as ‘the bloviating orange monster in Mara Lago’. Niki’s book really drives it home. Peter Dutton, she says, enthusiastically embraced Donald Trump from the beginning, and that was a pathway to disaster. Some close to Dutton saw it as the most significant reason the Liberals were routed.

In the words of one Liberal campaign source, ‘Trump made toughness a negative’ while Dutton was trying to portray himself as tough and Albo as weak. People disliked the US president’s nastiness and bullying, and the contempt with which he treated allies. Trump’s tariffs in defiance of a free trade agreement caused anger. Soft voters were concerned about how a compliant Dutton would deal with Trump. There was concern that Australian institutions such as Medicare and the PBS could be threatened by a Trump-style government. Trump frightened Australians, and the constant chaos he created made them nervous and more likely to stick with the incumbent government here. In short, Trump was poison to the Australian electorate.

I thought Albo and Co. handled all this pretty well. Instead of cuddling up to Trump, and in marked contrast to Dutton, they avoided any hint of the old ‘all the way with LBJ’ forelock-tugging. Without attacking the Trump administration — instead, Albo used code, referring constantly to ‘the Australian way’ — they introduced a bit of overdue distance into the Australian–US relationship. It was a healthy response, and Australians obviously approved of that.

The reason I mention all this is that Albo has invited Trump to visit Australia, and I wonder why.

The election campaign confirmed that Australians think Trump is a grub, and they’re likely to show it.

On his state visit to the UK the Brits kept Trump away from ordinary people by sticking him in a gold coach and driving him around inside palace walls surrounded by troops in fancy dress and with the King as babysitter. We have a bit of a shortage in the palace, gold coach, and ceremonial-guard department, and even though Charles is supposed to be our king as well, we don’t get to use him for babysitting.

So hiding Trump from the punters here won’t be nearly so easy.

I fear it could backfire bigly.

I declare Earthquake launched.

— Laurie Oakes