In becoming Premier as his government looks set for defeat, Rob Kerin joins a small but privileged group of Premiers almost completely forgotten by the electorate, but whose names are guaranteed to gain maximum points for participants at political trivia nights.

The state’s original colony has a long history of strong Premiers who kept their party in office for many terms before making way, usually under duress, for lesser known lights who promptly lost the next election.

Back in the 1930s, Bertram Stevens led a fractious United Australia Party government for seven years, maintained in office by the Labor Party clinging to its unelectable leader in Jack Lang. In 1939, Stevens’ backbench revolted and brought Stevens down on the floor of Parliament, Stevens replaced by the obscure Alexander Mair, who led the government to a comprehensive defeat in 1941.

A succession of grey Labor leaders then governed for 24 years. The last was Jack Renshaw, who had been in Parliament as the member for rural Castlereagh since 1941. His 18 months in office had little impact in reviving Labor’s fortunes, and he led the party out of office, defeated by Robin (later Sir Robert) Askin in 1965. For those with a memory, Renshaw stayed round to serve as Neville Wran’s Treasurer for two terms.

Askin won a further three elections before retiring in late 1974 to be succeeded by Tom Lewis. The greatest attribute of Lewis was breeding, being the son of legendary BHP boss Essington Lewis. It had been assumed Askin would be succeeded by his long-time deputy (and mentor to a young John Howard), Eric Willis. But by this stage, Labor was led by Neville Wran, and the Liberal Party hoped for someone with better media skills.

Unfortunately, Lewis proved not up to the job. He regularly had to be saved by Willis’s greater knowledge of parliamentary procedures, and his public speaking tended to fall victim to unfortunate malapropisms. For instance, in appointing Albury Mayor Cleaver Bunton to the Senate following Lionel Murphy’s move to the High Court, Lewis described Bunton as a political ‘neuter’ instead of neutral.

So in January 1976, a surprise coup saw Lewis replaced by Sir Eric Willis, having accepted a knighthood after missing the leadership, but still willing to take up the cudgel as Premier. Facing defeat in a by-election and warned of a horror federal budget, he called a snap poll and lost narrowly to Neville Wran. The campaign was highlighted by the unfortunate Liberal slogan “Willis Will” to which Labor responded “Willis Will What?”. He stayed on as opposition leader until shortly after a tasteless remark comparing the loss of life in the Granville train disaster with the Coalition’s record in office. He retired in 1978, Labor winning the Earlwood by-election, noticeable only for the Liberal candidate being future radio broadcaster Alan “The Parrot” Jones.

After ten years of adventure under Neville Wran, Labor reverted to type in 1986 by electing a 1950’s style union leader in Barrie Unsworth. He was blighted from the start with an image centred on his habit of wearing cardigans, and by Bill Hayden’s reference to “If you’re the sort of person who enjoys the simple things in life, like tearing the wings of butterflies, then Barrie Unsworth’s your man.”

After two years in office he led the Labor Party to its greatest defeat since the 1930s, heralding the Greiner era. Greiner himself met a sticky end in the wake of the Metherell affair. Given the long line of spivs and cads who have served as Premier of NSW (only the office of Police Commissioner has seen more shonks), Greiner somehow arranged to become the first one officially labelled “corrupt”, a decision thankfully reversed by the courts, but only after he had been replaced as Premier by John Fahey. Despite his leap for joy at the Olympics, and crash-tackling a man firing a cap gun at Prince Charles, his action man image failed to save the Coalition at the 1995 election. Defeated he moved to Federal politics, avoiding obscurity with the job of Finance Minister.

Victoria

Victoria offers one of the few examples of successful leadership transfer. After governing for 17 years, Sir Henry Bolte, a politician from the pre-TV era with a face like two oysters on a fine china plate, retired to be succeeded by the genteel Rupert “Dick” Hamer. The first conservative politician to embrace a ‘quality of life’ agenda, his retention of office rested on the unelectable state of the mad-left Victorian Labor Party of the time.

By the early 1980s, Hamer’s lugubrious style was proving less than exciting. He won the 1979 election by calling a three month campaign and boring the electorate into submission. In 1981, frontbencher Ian Smith, at the time still on his first wife, was unwise enough to suggest that MPs were “numb with fright” at the thought of Hamer leading them to the next election. With the state hit by electricity shortages, Hamer was unwise enough to be on a government trip in America. He quickly returned to the state to be met at the airport by his cabinet colleagues, who held a pillow over his face until he stopped moving. (Credit to Patrick Cook for that description.)

The new Premier Lindsay Thompson had little chance of success, with the state deep in recession and against a rampant Labor under John Cain, the first Labor leader with a chance of becoming Premier since his father left the job in 1955. Thompson lost, and Cain was to govern until 1990, when following financial disasters too long to catalogue, he was prised from office by Joan Kirner. In a move first tried in Western Australia, a women was drafted in to fix the mess after the boys. It failed to revive Labor.

Queensland

Even more than New South Wales, Queensland has a long tradition of political strongmen. In the modern era, Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen was the toughest of them all, leading the drive that saw the National Party supplant the Liberal Party in votes as well as seats as the dominant conservative party in the state.

From the early 1980s, the party’s organisation had wanted him to move aside for Mike Ahern, but Joh wouldn’t budge, deep in his psych bearing some grudge against Ahern for something his father once did, and also for being a Catholic and a university graduate. So even after winning in his own right in 1983, and again against the odds in 1986, Joh would not move aside.

Instead, he fell foul of hubris, with the mad ‘Joh for Canberra’ putsch. It was astonishingly unsuccessful, its one success being Joh’s absence from Queensland, resulting in the appointment of the Fitzgerald Royal Commission into Police Corruption by acting Premier Bill Gunn. Joh finally wore out his party who dumped him, but not before Joh created a nasty constitutional crisis that required an intervention by the governor, and also saw a bizarre discussion between Joh and Labor Party state secretary Peter Beattie about possible political deals.

Mike Ahern became the new Premier, but leading a party in terminal decay. With no chance of retaining seats in the south-east of the state, he remained in permanent damage control mode until things became so bad the party rolled him for Russell Cooper, little known but solid country stock able to appeal to the heartland.

With two months to go before facing the people, Cooper came unstuck on his first day in office. Interviewed by Quentin Dempster on the 7:30 Report, Dempster asked him the same question Joh had been unable to answer before the Fitzgerald Royal Commission. “Mr Cooper, what do you understand by the concept of the separation of powers under the Westminster system?” Cooper’s response, “Is this some sort of trick question Quentin” goes down as one of this country’s great political gaffs.

Western Australia

Old Sir Charles Court had a reputation for beating Labor, winning elections in 1974, 1977 and 1980. But as the economy went into nose-dive, his political popularity followed. Many good Liberal parts of the city were appalled as his government decided to shut the Perth to Fremantle commuter railway, and he resigned in 1982, leaving the way for Ray O’Connor to replace him, the first of a string of unsuccessful Liberal Leaders only ended by Sir Charles’s son Richard.

O’Connor promptly lost the 1983 election to Brian Burke, and in a touch of irony, both were later to fall foul of the WA Inc Royal Commission for morally and legally dodgy political and financial dealings.

After five years in office, as the first smell started to surround his government, Burke resigned as Premier, replaced by debonair lawyer Peter “Slick Pierre” Dowding. Leading an increasingly smelly government under attack for having payed a vast amount of money for a non-existent chemical plant, he somehow conjured another Labor victory in 1989. His good looks worked brilliantly in short sleeved shirts and tie, and Labor won an election they should have lost. In the late 1980s, Labor governments were good at that.

But a year later, he had so put his backbench off-side, they decided to get rid of him, prodded by the Hawke government, at the time concerned about losing seats in the West at the 1990 election. The Labor Party decided they needed something new, so passing over Graham Edwards as the first legless Premier (physically we mean), and Ernie Bridge as the first aboriginal Premier, they settled for the first female Premier in Dr Carmen Lawrence.

She proved highly popular, and in 1993 became the most popular Premier ever to lose an election.

South Australian

Who can forget Des Corcoran. After the best part of a decade in power, Don Dunstan called a remarkable press conference to resign on grounds of ill-health. Wearing a dressing gown even more fetching than John Howard’s silk pyjamas at APEC on the weekend, this left the bluff Corcoran in charge. But not for long. Calling an early election, apparently without having informed his party organisation, he was flattened in a landslide, a major bus strike and an astonishing anti-Labor campaign by local papers making the disaster even worse.

The Tonkin Liberal government became an interregnum in two decades of Labor rule, there long enough merely to fester the battle between Dean Brown and John Olsen that has carried through to this day. John Bannon led Labor back to office in 1982, winning two more elections, the second in 1989 only narrowly.

But the State Bank financial disaster was developing strength, and the announcement of its losses doomed Bannon. With eighteen months before another state election, he resigned, replaced by Lynn Arnold. Despite an intimate knowledge of the linguistic intricacies of regional Iberian languages, Arnold’s main political advantage was a passing resemblance to Clark Kent. Unfortunately, he had no superman outfit under his bland exterior, and the Labor Party was wiped out by Dean Brown and the Liberal Party in 1993.

Despite winning the greatest victory in the state’s history, Brown received little reward from backbenches elected on his coat tails. They deserted for John Olsen at the first whiff of danger. They received their reward in 1997 when they all lost their seats in Olsen’s inept 1997 campaign.

Now let’s see if Rob Kerin can do any better.

Tasmania

Who now remembers Harry Holgate. He was probably always doomed in Labor history when he chose an inauspicious date, 11 November 1981, to launch a partyroom coup against Premier Doug Lowe, who two years earlier had won the greatest victory in his party’s history.

The coup came about over the Franklin Dam dispute, Holgate backed by the HEC unions who insisted that the state had to dam every river in the state if it wanted a future. The coup saw Holgate elected Premier, but saw Lowe and one other Labor MP move to the cross-benches. To avoid a vote of no-confidence, Holgate prorogued parliament for several months, but lost office on the first day of sitting. The Liberals under Robin Gray swept to office at the subsequent election, bringing on many years of purgatory for the Labor Party in Tasmania.