The right of the NSW Liberal
Party has got its wish for a leadership change earlier than expected,
with its candidate, Barry O’Farrell, poised to take over from the
departed John Brogden. It will remain one of the great unknowables
whether Brogden would have been able to survive until the 2007 election
had he not stumbled so dramatically.

Here is how I assessed things in Crikey just after the 2003 NSW election:

“The result has left the [Liberal] leadership in
no-person’s-land. Brogden did not do well enough for his position to be
secure, but nor did he do badly enough for it to be untenable. He will
clearly remain leader for the immediate future, but the Liberal Party
should by now have realised that if a leadership change has to be made,
it should be in plenty of time before the election. If a challenger is
going to emerge, he or she had better do so soon.”

Brogden’s
predecessor, Kerry Chikarovski, spent three years as a dead leader
walking. Until yesterday, his predicament was not so bad, but it is
probably still a good thing for his party that he was put out of his
misery sooner rather than later.

Political observers were
spellbound in 1999 when Steve Bracks, who had been installed as
Victorian ALP leader only six months beforehand, won an election that
almost no-one gave him a chance at. That’s one success for the tactic
of a late change in the opposition leadership, but not everyone is
lucky enough to face a leader as out of touch as Jeff Kennett. Every
time the trick has been tried in New South Wales it has failed.

Mind
you, so has just about everything else tried by the NSW Liberal Party.
O’Farrell, assuming he gets the job, will be the 18th leader in its 60
years, and only two of them (Askin and Greiner) have ever won an
election. No other political party in Australia, and probably few in
the world, can boast such a history of failed experiments.