As Australia wends its way to another triennial election, and despite the Coalition now polling well ahead of Labor, political pundits insist that voters are ‘reluctant’ to oust a government after just one term. History lends some support to this bromide: not since 1931 has a first-term PM (Labor’s James Scullin) lost a federal election. But, as pointed out in a detailed analysis by the Australia Institute’s Bill Browne, what is true federally is not reflected in the lower tiers of government. Nor is it true in comparable overseas democracies.

Yet it remains the received wisdom, not only amongst commentators (including the encycloaedic psephologist, Antony Green), but also with practising politicians. Browne quotes Tony Abbott (‘It’s hard to beat a first-term government’), Chris Bowen (‘People think there’s a historical rule in Australia that first term governments aren’t defeated’) and Penny Wong (‘First-term government is very hard to defeat’). Browne postulates that, ‘New governments benefit from incumbency… and perhaps a reluctance among voters to change directions twice in a short period of time.’ Others attribute this phenomenon to the Australian sense of fair play, like the umpire in a social game who never gives a batsman ‘out’ on the first ball.

If this platitude has any basis, it rests on a political truism: oppositions do not win elections; governments lose them. The fact that the current opposition lost power just three years ago necessarily means they messed up so badly that the electorate decided to dispatch them. That is certainly true of Peter Dutton’s deeply unlamented predecessor, Scott Morrison. Although a week may be a long time in politics, three years is not quite long enough either to forget that the present opposition was once a woeful government, or to recognise that the new incumbents are equally (or more) hopeless.

Yet within living memory there is an instance when three years was more than sufficient. Gough Whitlam was catapulted into power in December 1972. He suffered a landslide defeat in December 1975. Strictly, this was not the defeat of a first-term PM, since Whitlam also won the 1974 double dissolution election. But it shows that three years can be sufficient for an opposition to convince the electorate that the government is even more awful than they were, or at least more awful than they have since become.

Much can be said about the extraordinary circumstances attending Whitlam’s 1975 defeat, just as circumstances almost as extraordinary attended Scullin’s 1931 defeat. Bizarrely, both occurred in the context of the rarest of all political phenomena: the vice-regal dismissal of a government still holding the confidence of parliament’s lower house. Sir John Kerr’s memorable dismissal of Whitlam, although unprecedented at the federal level, had an exemplar in the dismissal of Labor NSW Premier Jack Lang by Sir Philip Game in 1932. Although this dismissal post-dated Scullin’s electoral loss, Lang’s formidable talons – the ‘Lang Plan’, a strategy to combat the Great Depression, devised in opposition to the ‘Premiers’ Plan’ which had been negotiated by Scullin with all other state leaders, and ‘Lang Labor’, the powerful breakaway ALP faction based in Lang’s state and embracing his policies – left visible scars around Scullin’s throat.

Any comparison of Whitlam and Albanese calls to mind Samuel Johnson’s remark when asked why such a great poet as John Milton wrote such poor sonnets: ‘Milton, Madam, was a genius that could cut a Colossus from a rock; but could not carve heads upon cherry-stones’. Whitlam leapt into the fulfilment of his agenda at a pace, and with a devil-may-care enthusiasm, only recently emulated by Donald Trump. No PM in Australian history has set himself such an ambitious programme, nor fulfilled it with such reckless abandon.

Within hours after polling closed, Whitlam had himself and his deputy, Lance Barnard, sworn in as a two-man ministry to govern until the full electoral result was counted. The first item of business for this ‘duumvirate’ (think Trump and Musk) was suspending military conscription for the war in Vietnam; the next, to establish diplomatic relations with ‘Red China’, seven years before the USA followed suit. Other controversial initiatives included abolishing sales tax on contraceptives, major grants to the arts, suspending sporting ties with the apartheid regimes in South Africa and Rhodesia, and supporting UN sanctions against these former British dominions. All in two weeks.

Perhaps uniquely among Australia’s PMs, Whitlam not merely introduced changes of policy; he changed the way the nation thought about these issues.

Pre-Whitlam, it was acceptable to conscript 17-year-old boys to fight a foreign war in which Australia had no direct interest; to hang criminals convicted of federal offences; to award imperial rather than national honours; to maintain a colonial outpost in Papua New Guinea; to sing a national anthem imploring divine salvation for the monarch; to mandate adultery as the price which a married couple had to pay to secure a divorce. Just three years later, all of this had become unthinkable.

Compared with Whitlam’s colossal sculptures, Albanese’s cherry-pit statuary is viscerally underwhelming. Did he introduce universal free healthcare? Free tertiary education? Legal aid? Senate representation for Territory voters? An Aboriginal Land Fund or an Aboriginal Loans Commission? The Australian Film Commission, the Australia Council, or the Australian Heritage Commission? A National Sewerage Programme (at a time when a preponderance of Australian homes were equipped with thunderboxes, serviced by an army of night-cart men)? Did he reduce the voting age from 21 to 18? Did he appoint the first woman to an Australian federal court? Did he oversee the first legislation prohibiting racial discrimination, or such iconic statutes as the Trade Practices Act, the Family Law Act, and the Sea and Submerged Lands Act?

One does not need to like or agree with Whitlam to admire his achievements. In truth, the tendency in Australia is to vote for the leader you respect rather than the leader you like. There is no other explanation for the fact that Menzies won so many elections, nor for the fact that Kim Beazley was twice defeated by John Howard. This is good news for Dutton, whose polling figures as preferred PM are unlikely to be matched by his figures as ‘preferred barbecue guest’, and bad news for Albanese.

However, after three years, Whitlam’s government was judged to be a failure, principally for economic reasons, but also because the PM’s own rigorous ethical standards were not matched by his front bench.

Possibly the clearest contrast between Whitlam and Albanese is their track record on referendums. Whitlam proposed four constitutional amendments: two measures to enhance democratic elections, recognition of local governments, and changes to the system of constitutional amendment. All four were defeated, but they were honourable defeats: none of the proposals attracted less than 46 per cent of the national vote. Albanese proposed just one amendment, the failed Voice.

Miscalculating the electorate is understandable, even predictable, in the case of a visionary like Whitlam. It is much harder to understand – or to forgive – in the case of a populist like Albanese, whose breadth of vision is profoundly myopic.

Experts like Antony Green – not to mention political operatives like Abbott, Bowen and Wong – may well be correct that it is ‘hard’, perhaps even ‘very hard’, to defeat a first-term government. But Scullin, 96 years ago, and Whitlam, 50 years ago, prove that it is not impossible. Will 2025 be the ‘third time lucky’?