Jane Hume, Peter Dutton and the noble art of throwing a colleague under the bus

From time to time, a party leader has to reshuffle their senior leadership team, moving MPs into different portfolios to freshen up ideas and perspectives. And other times, a leader has to move MPs into the space between the road and the bus tyres.

Continuing a Tyrell Sparkman-like aptitude for policy backflips, Opposition Leader Peter Dutton has abandoned his Trumpy pitch to fire 41,000 public servants, to go with his already discarded threat to end work from home arrangements for the same workforce. Well, we say Dutton has. Initially, it was suggested by Liberal frontbencher Jane Hume, who, as Samantha Maiden writes, was then “wheeled out on Sunday night to dump the controversial policy”.

“Many professional men and women in the Commonwealth public service are benefiting from flexible working arrangements, including working from home, which allow them to make valuable contributions to serving Australians,” Hume told news.com.au.

“We need the best from our public servants, and that is why there will be no change to flexible working arrangements or working from home arrangements for the public service under a Coalition government.”

Dutton has since fronted up to agree that the party had got the policy “wrong”. Point being, sometimes you gotta take the bus-sized-bullet for your leader, whether you like it or not.

Tanya Plibersek

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has a problem that Dutton so far has not faced — a colleague who could conceivably take his place. Former deputy leader Tanya Plibersek has said she believes she would have beaten Albanese had she run for the leadership in 2019. When, after Labor’s return to office in 2022, she was handed the environment portfolio (being taken off her long time position as education spokesperson), she would have heard the buses already revving in the distance. The public and sudden abandonment of her flagship environmental laws (at the behest of Western Australian Premier/petro state czar Roger Cook) was the biggest indignity to follow.

Bridget McKenzie et al

Isn’t it… a bit weird that it’s always women? Anyway, after Scott Morrison’s government was caught engaging in some of the most blatant and egregious pork-barrelling in Australian political history (until, like, a few months later), there was a pervasive sense that no-one in leadership could be held responsible. Eventually, then sports minister Bridget McKenzie was forced to go. For the longest time, it seemed she would be the only member of the Morrison government to face any consequences.

Of course, Morrison’s colleagues and rivals frequently found themselves caught between a bus and a bulldozer during his rise to the top. A cast of characters as diverse as the Sgt. Pepper’s album cover, including Julia Banks, Brittany Higgins, Emmanuel Macron and Joe Biden, have all found the camera lens suddenly and subtly turned their way after criticising him.

So it’s sort of appropriate that in 2015, Morrison achieved an Inception-level meta-engagement with the concept, throwing recently ousted prime minister Tony Abbott under the bus by telling 2GB that, the day of Abbott’s overthrow, Abbott had offered Morrison Joe Hockey’s treasury portfolio in exchange for his support. Morrison was shocked, just shocked, to be offered the job “when he had showed such strong support for Joe Hockey — he was asking me to throw Joe Hockey under a bus”.

Fatima Payman

Christ alive there is a lot of women on this list. On May 15 last year, then Labor senator for Western Australia Fatima Payman gave a speech in which she broke ranks with her colleagues on the conflict in Gaza, calling Israel’s conduct a “genocide”. It’s hard to pinpoint exactly who initially threw Payman under the bus, because, bravely, no-one was willing to put their names to it.

In the aftermath, the treasurer and vice president of Labor’s multicultural branch in Western Australia both quit in protest, with one saying the party had “become a spineless jellyfish” that “throws its own under the bus at the drop of a hat”.

Gough Whitlam

It can go both ways, of course. Or at least that was the interpretation of then prime minister Gough Whitlam at the 1974 rugby league grand final. Walking to the centre of the pitch with senator (and then-president of the Queensland Rugby League) Ron McAuliffe the presentation ceremony, the pair were engulfed in a hail of boos and beer cans. “McAuliffe”, Whitlam is supposed to have said on the way back to the pavilion, “don’t you ever again invite me to a place where you’re so fucking unpopular”.

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