Pummelling the PM in Australia

All hail the holy grail of instant gratification.

Many among us live fast — we answer our cellphones immediately, even if we’re on the toilet, and read our texts in seconds, regardless of the fact we’re bringing the grocery line to a halt or traffic to a standstill.

We don’t wait for television shows — we binge watch whole blocks of shows, unable to even wait for the next day for the next plot twist.

We want what we want, and we want it now. Grocery stores? There’s almost always one open nearby, day or night or midnight. Liquor stores?

In many provinces, any hour of the day, and Sundays too.

We want for nothing and wait for nothing.

And now there are some who want to export that to our politics, too.

Monday, Australia’s prime minister, Tony Abbott, was ousted. Not by the electorate, but by his own party. Malcolm Turnbull is now Australia’s prime minister, after his parliamentary colleagues voted 54 to 44 to give him the job.

Turnbull is promising a return to a more traditional cabinet-style government and a new leadership style: he will be that country’s fifth prime minister in five years, a staggering number of people to fill that chair. (Members of Abbott’s party had voted to dump him in February, too, but he survived that vote 61 to 39. And don’t think the Australians don’t recognize the joke it’s becoming — the Taroona Fire Brigade tweeted, “A reminder that Australia getting a new prime minister is an ideal time to check the battery in your smoke alarm.”)

Australian law lets the governing party declare its leader’s job empty, meaning, at any time, a prime minister has to keep a majority of his caucus on his side.

Variations of the same theme have been suggested for this country: some lean towards recall legislation, allowing constituents to vote mid-way through a mandate to dump their elected representatives.

Others have suggested variations on the Australian model, tempering the power of prime ministers by giving regular caucus members the tools to remove unpopular or overly-controlling first ministers.

There are good things to be said about not having to wait for the next federal or provincial election in order to remove an unpopular premier or prime minister, but there’s also one ab- solutely staggering reason to not have such a safety valve. The reason? It’s a virtual guarantee that nothing that requires hard, unpopular work will ever be done by a government.

We already live in a country where we look to the government to solve everything: what would our government look like if, every time it did the least little unpopular thing, it could get the axe?

Whatever else elections do, they pick someone to lead the country for a period of time. We’re actually choosing representatives to make decisions on our behalf, even if those decisions are unpopular in the shortor even medium-term.

Sometimes, there has to be austerity. Sometimes, there have to be tax increases. Sometimes, we can’t afford the services that we’re using and those services have to be cut back.

Giving the electorate — or even individual caucus members — the immediate gratification of yanking someone out of office whenever we like would mean our leaders would never actually lead.

Instead, they would endlessly and slavishly follow the dictates of whatever the latest public opinion poll might show. (Some might argue political parties do that already, but it could get far, far worse.)

We can’t wait to pull the car into a parking lot before checking our text messages.

We can’t even wait a week to watch the next episode of our favourite television show.

If we could fire a prime minister any time we felt like it, we’d certainly be exercising that franchise so fast, we’d need a drivethru.