On the 25th of November 2025, Niki Savva launched her new book Earthquake at Paperchain Bookstore in Griffith, Canberra. The author's speech can be enjoyed below.
1 December, 2025
Niki Savva's speech at the launch of Earthquake
It is wonderful to be back at Paperchain, to be surrounded once again by so many friends, family, and people I admire.
I especially want to thank all those who have travelled from interstate to be here, particularly my brother, Steven — the only person left who has known me all my life and, I think, still loves me — and his youngest sons, my darling nephews, Thomas and Christian. Thanks also to my dear husband, Vincent Woolcock, who knows better than most the many challenges of life with a writer. His support and his confidence in me help make it all happen.
This is my fifth book, all published by the remorseless Henry Rosenbloom.
I met Henry more than 50 years ago when he worked for Moss Cass, a Whitlam Government minister.
We lost contact after the dismissal, then Henry rescued me from obscurity and unemployment 15 years ago when he agreed to publish my first book, So Greek. I was deeply grateful and continued the collaboration, partly because I am a firm believer in dancing with the one who brung ya.
It is my fifth book launched by Laurie Oakes, my friend of more than 50 years, my hero, and my teacher on the fine art of how best to prise information out of people who would rather keep it hidden. I only wish I could do it a fraction as well as he did.
Laurie also rescued me, way back in 1975. I was working on The Australian, and was demoted after the Dismissal. My future on the Oz, not for the first time and certainly not the last, looked pretty bleak. Soon after my demotion I quit the Oz, not for the last time.
Laurie, then bureau chief of the Sun News Pictorial, gave me a job. In 1976 I was the first woman to work in the paper’s Canberra bureau. The editor thought Laurie had hired me because we were having an affair. I have said it before and will say it again, although I loved Laurie from the moment I met him, it was not in that way.
I have also said it before and will say it again, because it is as true now as it was when he ruled the gallery for decades, whether in print or on TV, that he is the best of the best. Laurie’s contribution to political journalism cannot be overstated, and it should never be forgotten.
I know I said repeatedly after Bulldozed that it was definitely my last book.
But who could have predicted the magnitude of Labor’s victory on 3 May? Except of course, the prime minister. As he reminded me on a number of occasions. If there is any crow being served, I will chew on it.
The prime minister, and his team — Paul Erickson, Tim Gartrell, Fiona Sugden — with his key cabinet ministers in the frontline, deserved to win well.
It was a disciplined, well-structured campaign executed damn-near flawlessly, without missteps except for that one slip off the stage. Can’t resist mentioning that again.
Labor did not lose a single seat, and it won more seats than any other single party since Federation. It took the Liberals to the brink of extinction, stemmed the rise of the independents, and reduced the Greens to a party of protest in the Senate, which is where they began.
It destroyed the careers of present and future leaders of the left and the right.
It was no ordinary election, yet still there are people who carry on as if it was. The Liberals lost their progressive inner-urban heartland to the teals in 2022 and their suburban middle-Australia stranglehold to Labor in 2025. Now their conservative base is disintegrating.
Sussan Ley told her first party meeting after the election that they had reached rock bottom. As with so many other things, she also got this wrong. The Coalition’s primary vote at the election was 31.8 per cent. Now it’s around 24 per cent. Take out the Nationals’ vote, and it’s around 20 per cent.
With the Libs now able to fit its MPs in a minibus, as Simon Kennedy says, this might look pretty good in a few months’ time after the South Australia election, where Liberals fear they could end up with zero seats.
And in November, if Jess Wilson fails to defeat an ageing, incompetent government, then, as one senior Liberal said to me, they really will be on the path to oblivion.
The federal result reflected the performance of the leader and the calibre of the campaign, which was the worst in living memory.
The question is why? Why did the Coalition vote against a tax cut and promise to repeal it?
Why did they pledge to end working from home, then take so long to dump it?
Why were there so few policies? Why did Dutton refuse to appear at the National Press Club, and why did he avoid press conferences in Canberra?
I think I have managed to provide some answers in Earthquake.
What never fails to amaze me is that different leaders make the same mistakes. They don’t trust their colleagues to do their jobs, they cede too much authority to staff who are not always up to their jobs, and they either spurn advice or listen to the wrong people. They take all criticism personally — even when it is meant to help them — and whatever judgement they had before they became the leader deserts them almost as soon as they get the top job.
Years ago, I confessed that I found Dutton thoroughly engaging. Privately, he was and remains funny and open. He had a dark sense of humour, which every good cop and journalist needs to get through dark times. It has perplexed a few of his colleagues, and angered others, that he has managed to maintain his equilibrium in the wake of such a devastating result.
He told me he meditates and exercises every day, and he does seem at peace with it all.
Unlike his surviving colleagues, who now face a monumental and perhaps insurmountable rebuilding task, and who have a very different perspective from him on what went wrong. Which, basically, was everything, as James Paterson later admitted.
The Coalition remains fragile, and the Liberal Party is still in danger of splitting or disappearing. Andrew Hastie believes it is possible that the party of Menzies, which he says he is committed to recreating, could become extinct.
Malcolm Turnbull is convinced the battle has already been fought and won. By the right, and that the party could be done for. He says the success of the teals shows there is a market for a new, genuinely liberal centrist party, but insists — albeit with a sense of regret, it seems to me — that he is too old to be its founding father. In any case the teals, now considering saddling up to challenge Hansonites in the Senate, see nothing in it for them to hook up with moderate Liberals.
The Liberal Party needs a strong leader who commands respect with a firm policy grounding, and an ability to advocate and compromise without fear of edging to the centre. Sussan Ley does not fit that bill.
She did not once privately or publicly articulate her position on net zero. In the budget lockup in March, she supported Dutton spending more money on defence, but also thought it was a good idea to do something on the cost of living. She became the invisible woman during the campaign. According to colleagues, she or her office leaked against the leader, and she canvassed votes for the leadership ahead of the election she deduced they would lose. She is not without cunning and determination.
Although a few Liberal women have changed their mind on quotas, she is not one of them, asserting she is both an agnostic and a zealot. The photos of children starving in Gaza were distressing, but it took days for her to say they were starving. And Donald Trump got there before her. Can you see the pattern here?
She has also foreshadowed a debate on immigration. I challenge anyone to nominate a time, from the arrival of the First Fleet, through the Gold Rush, to the post-war mass-migration period, to a few weeks ago, to yesterday in the Senate, when Australia has ever been able to have a sensible, bigot-free debate on immigration.
None of this means that Labor can take its re-election for granted. That would be a dereliction of duty.
They have a mandate to implement their election promises, but also an obligation to change what needs to be changed. If the pressure is not applied externally, it will come internally.
It will be an interesting time. To those who ask if there will be another book, and given I have spent more than 50 years trying to tell politicians what to do, the best I can do now is quote Mick Jagger:
I told you once and I told you twice
But you never listen to my advice,
You don’t try very hard to please me
With what you know, it should be easy.
So this could be the last time, it may be the last time, I don’t know.
Thomas and Christian, I will tell you later who Mick Jagger is. Thank you, Paperchain, for hosting again, and thank you all very much for coming.
— Niki Savva
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$36.99 AUD
Earthquake
SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2026 AUSTRALIAN POLITICAL BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARD
SHORTLISTED FOR THE ABA BOOKDATA ADULT NON-FICTION BOOK OF THE YEAR
The best of Niki Savva’s scene-setting newspaper columns from The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald, along with a riveting and deeply informed analysis of Australia’s epoch-making 2025 election.
Labor’s landslide victory on 3 May 2025 wreaked havoc across the political landscape. It triggered ministerial assassinations, trashed reputations, destroyed careers, fractured the Coalition, and threatened to fracture it again. It took the Liberal Party to the brink of extinction and turned Anthony Albanese into a Labor hero.
When the Coalition government was overthrown in 2022 after nine years in office, it was tempting to portray the loss as merely a personal repudiation of Scott Morrison. Then, when opposition leader Peter Dutton torpedoed the referendum on establishing an Indigenous Voice to parliament, his standing as a political leader improved and the prime minister’s nosedived. That was when, according to Niki Savva, the conservative Coalition thought it had the upcoming election in the bag.
But Niki had noticed the ground shifting: the emergence of the teal independents and the long-term threat they represented to the Liberals; the false dawn of Dutton saying no to the Voice referendum; and the overlooked reality, even back in August 2023, that, ‘The 2022 federal election result was no ordinary defeat … It delivered last rites to the broad-church party that Robert Menzies created.’
In her highly popular columns, Niki Savva captured all this and more in her typically uncompromising, penetrating, and prescient way. Now, following on from So Greek, The Road to Ruin, Plots and Prayers, and Bulldozed, she also provides a detailed, considered analysis of what went on behind the scenes, accompanied by her trademark access to important players and eyewitnesses, of an election that transformed Australian politics.
$36.99 AUD
Bulldozed
WINNER OF THE 2023 ABIA GENERAL NONFICTION BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARD
‘The gripping inside story of how Scott Morrison went from miracle man to roadkill. Savva portrays a fatally flawed leader who trashed his government, his party, and his legacy.’
—Laurie Oakes
Between 2013 and 2022, Tony Abbott begat Malcolm Turnbull, who begat Scott Morrison. For nine long years, Australia was governed by a succession of Coalition governments rocked by instability and bloodletting, and consumed with prosecuting climate and culture wars while neglecting policy.
By the end, among his detractors — and there were plenty — Morrison was seen as the worst prime minister since Billy McMahon. Worse even than Tony Abbott, who lasted a scant two years in the job, whose main legacy was that he destroyed Julia Gillard, then himself, and then Turnbull.
Morrison failed to accept the mantle of national leadership, or to deal adequately with the challenges of natural disasters and the COVID-19 pandemic. He thought reform was a vanity project. He said he never wanted to leave a legacy. He got his wish.
Niki Savva, Australia’s renowned political commentator, author, and columnist, was there for all of it. In The Road to Ruin, she revealed the ruinous behaviour of former prime minister Abbott and his chief of staff, Peta Credlin, that led to the ascension of Turnbull. In Plots and Prayers, she told the inside story of the coup that overthrew Turnbull and installed his conniving successor, Morrison.
Now she lays out the final unravelling of the Coalition at the hands of a resurgent Labor and the so-called teal independents that culminated in the historic 2022 election. With her typical access to key players, and her riveting accounts of what went on behind the scenes, Bulldozed is the unique final volume of an unputdownable and impeccably sourced political trilogy.
‘I don’t hold a hose, mate.’ Scott Morrison, 20 December 2019, on the Black Summer bushfires
‘It’s not a race.’ Scott Morrison, 11 March 2021, on the COVID-19 vaccine rollout
$37.99 AUD
Plots and Prayers
In an enthralling sequel to her bestselling The Road to Ruin, Niki Savva reveals the inside story of a bungled coup that overthrew the Liberal prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, and installed a surprise successor, Scott Morrison, who went on to take the party to a miraculous electoral victory.
On 21 August 2018, 35 Liberal MPs cast their vote against Malcolm Turnbull, effectively signalling the end of his leadership. Three days later, the deed was done, and Scott Morrison was anointed prime minister.
Tony Abbott’s relentless campaign of destabilisation, helped along by his acolytes in the parliament and by his powerful media mates, the betrayals of colleagues, and the rise of the religious right — climaxing in Peter Dutton's challenge — all played a part in Turnbull’s downfall.
But so did Turnbull’s own poor political judgement. He was a good prime minister and a terrible politician. The good bits of Malcolm were not enough to make up for the bad Malcolm.
Nevertheless, the sheer brutality of his removal left many Liberals aghast. MPs were traumatised or humiliated by eight days of madness. Men and women cried from sheer anguish. They went through hell, and feared when it was over that they would not make it back — and nor would the Liberal Party. As it turned out, redemption came with Morrison’s unexpected single-handed 2019 election victory.
Turnbull’s road ended in ruins, as it was always bound to and as he always knew it would, as he predicted to Niki Savva less than three years before it happened.
But when his end was imminent, he could not bear to let go. And when it was over, he was defiant, fragile — and, yes — vengeful.
This is the inside story of what happened — and what happened next.
$32.99 AUD
The Road to Ruin
‘There will be no wrecking, no undermining, and no sniping.’
–Tony Abbott, 15 September 2015
Abbott’s performances in the party-room debates on education and climate change had ranged between woeful and pathetic. He sounded desperate, he was inconsistent, and — his colleagues thought — slightly ridiculous. They knew he would never stop going after cheap headlines during soft interviews where he sucked up the oxygen, with revision and division as his calling cards. All they could hope was that people would soon grow tired of listening to him. Normal people might have, but the media grew more and more hysterical, as if a challenge were imminent.
In the original edition of The Road to Ruin, prominent political commentator, author, and columnist for The Australian Niki Savva revealed the ruinous behaviour of former prime minister Tony Abbott and his chief of staff, Peta Credlin. Based on her unrivalled access to their colleagues, and devastating first-person accounts of what went on behind the scenes, Savva painted an unforgettable picture of a unique duo who wielded power ruthlessly but not well.
That edition became a major bestseller, and went on to win an Australian book industry award for the best general non-fiction book of the year.
Now Savva continues where she left off. This updated edition contains a new, 13,500-word final chapter, in which Savva reveals the inner state of the Turnbull government — and the behind-the-scenes jockeying of friends and foes alike. From Christopher Pyne’s career-stalling own goal, to Peter Dutton’s post-Turnbull leadership ambitions, to Tony Abbott’s ramped-up destabilisation campaign, it is, as usual, an unputdownable and impeccably sourced account.
$35.00 AUD
So Greek
From one of the most senior correspondents in the Canberra Press Gallery comes a rare account of life as a political insider.
Born in a small village in Cyprus, Niki Savva spent her childhood in Melbourne’s working-class suburbs — frontiers where locals were suspicious of olive oil, and Greek kids spoke Gringlish to their parents.
Only a few decades later, despite all the challenges of being a migrant woman in Australia, Savva had risen through the ranks of political journalism at The Australian, and had gone on to head the Canberra bureaus of both the Melbourne Herald Sun and The Age.
Then in 1997, family tragedy struck, and she was forced to reassess her career. In spite of her own Labor convictions, she became Liberal treasurer Peter Costello’s press secretary, a role that she kept for six years before moving on to join John Howard’s staff.
This is one of the few books about Australian political life written by an insider with decades of exposure to its major players. Hilarious, moving, and endlessly fascinating, Savva’s is a story that moves between countries, cultures, careers and, ultimately, political convictions.
Niki Savva
Niki Savva is a highly acclaimed political writer. She was twice political correspondent for The Australian, and headed up the Canberra bureaus of both The Herald Sun and The Age. When family tragedy forced a career change, she became Peter Costello’s press secretary for six years and was then on John Howard’s staff for three. Her work has brought her into intimate contact with Australia’s major political players for more than 40 years. She is a regular columnist for The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald, and appears on ABC TV’s Insiders.