How, then, do the contemporary sub-national leaders compare? The first point is that, unlike the ‘boss’ era premiers, they do not constitute a ‘gerontocracy’. Since the 1980s there has been a general downward trend in the age at which premiers both obtained and left office. Whereas between the end of World War II and the 1970s the age of those elected as premier across the states averaged in their mid-fifties, that has since declined to the mid-forties. Correspondingly, the average age of exit from office has dropped even more sharply from around 62 to a little over 50.^[1] Allied with the trend of premiers becoming younger, the waiting time for office (as measured by the number of years between first entering Parliament and assuming the premiership) has decreased. Clune and Turner (2006: 5) note that during the twentieth century in New South Wales the waiting time for office peaked between 1941 and 1976 when it stretched out to over 23 years, while for the premiers from Neville Wran to Carr the period contracted to eight years. Similar patterns are evident in the other states with the waiting times in Victoria and Queensland, for example, almost halving since the 1980s.^[2]

The changing age profile of sub-national leadership conforms to a phenomenon identified some two decades ago by Patrick Weller and Sue Fraser (1987) as the ‘younging of Australian politics’. Not surprisingly, Weller and Fraser connected this trend to the changing career patterns of politicians, in particular that for a growing number of parliamentarians, politics was becoming a first rather than second career. Or, to put it another way, the ‘younging’ of politics (and leadership) can be linked to the growing prevalence of career politicians, those for whom ‘their first careers (if they existed at all) were nothing but overtures to the main event’ (Weller and Fraser 1987: 76).

Of the group of leaders analysed in Yes, Premier this is true at the very least of Beattie, Bracks, Carr and Rann. By the time they were 30 each of these future leaders had flagged an ambition to enter Parliament and/or was operating in a cognate occupation (for example, Beattie as state secretary of the Queensland Labor Party and Rann as press secretary to South Australian ALP leaders from Don Dunstan to John Bannon). Gallop was not far behind. He entered Parliament at age 34, following a brief academic career (Clune 2005; Costar and Hayward 2005; Manning 2005; Phillips and Black 2005; Wanna and Williams 2005a). The irony is that, as leaders, these career politicians were projected as ordinary men who happened to be political masters. Beattie even once likened himself to an ‘anti-politician’ (cited in Preston 2003: 406). Leaving that aside, the fact that their ‘first’ careers were in politics, coupled with the relative youth at which they assumed office, was undoubtedly a facilitating factor in their timely retirements.

These Premiers departed politics at an age when they still have the opportunity to construct a post-political career. Indeed, one might also speculate that the predisposition shown by ‘ordinary populist’ leaders for moving beyond politics is not only about a reversal of the traditional place occupied by politics in an individual’s occupational history, but reflects a transformation of politics from being a craft (with its connotations of slowly acquired, abiding skills peculiar to that trade) to a career.

The expectations and demands associated with contemporary leadership at the sub-national level of politics appear also to have played a part in the recent spate of retirements. The notion of premiers being central to the operation of their governments and to the politics of their respective states has long been remarked upon. In his majestic mid-twentieth century study of Australian state governments, S. R. Davis (1960: 3) identified leadership predominance of premiers as an important ingredient in the longevity of many sub-national governments. Yet, the nature of that dominance has changed. Back then, for instance, Henry Bolte was known as the ‘pepper and salt’ premier because of his reputation for having a hand ‘in everything’ (cited in Bennett 1992: 144). It was a time when it remained possible for a premier to exercise personal and informal control over the machinery of government, and an era when it was still the norm for premiers to simultaneously hold the Treasury portfolio.

Fifty years on, the exponential growth in the complexity of government (just one measure of which is the rise in the number of ministerial portfolios) has diminished the capacity for premiers to single-handedly dominate government. Premiers are now compelled to delegate to ministers, and are required to operate within intricate and formalised administrative and accountability processes. They are also surrounded by complex and large support structures — over the past quarter of century or so premier’s departments have expanded enormously in size as they have assumed greater co-ordinating functions, while the private offices of premiers have also grown dramatically (Clune and Turner 2006: 12-13; Halligan 1988). Shortly after Bracks’ resignation, it was revealed that he had had about 70 staff, including around 20 political/policy advisers and 20 media advisers (Austin 2007).

The extraordinary number of media advisers in the Bracks office is a clue to the nature of leadership centrality twenty-first century style. While premiers can no longer operate as a one man band and the scope for ad hoc, informal decision-making has shrunk, their centrality to the performance (and image) of government has arguably never been greater. The template for what Wanna and Williams (2005: 15) describe as the ‘the personalisation of leadership’ at the sub-national level of politics is usually regarded as having been forged by Neville Wran, premier of New South Wales from 1976 to 1986. Indeed, it is striking how many of the features of state-level leadership described in Yes, Premier were road-tested during the Wran era. Not least of these were the embrace of modern media management techniques (with the leader centre stage to the government’s media presentations); transcendence over the party’s traditional base; and cautious pragmatism. As Graham Freudenberg (2006: 422) notes, Wran, having learnt from the Whitlam experiment, had an influence over all subsequent Labor administrations through his government’s pragmatic balancing of both economic prudence and social progressivism; and anticipatory and receptive leadership. Wran, as well as being an adept ‘crisis manager’, took the previously rudimentary use of opinion polling by governments to new heights (Chaples, Nelson and Turner 1985: especially 247-50).

Yet, the Wran model was not without its hazards. Ernie Chaples, Helen Nelson and Ken Turner (1985: 250) argued:

Two decades on, those demands have only intensified in the context of the continuing expansion in the breadth and complexity of government. Coupled with this is the mutually reinforcing frenzied relationship that exists between governments engaged in permanent campaigning and constant news cycle management and a media of insatiable appetite. By contrast with the sedate political rhythms of earlier times, it is a climate in which high office is, as Peter Beattie has observed (2007), akin to ‘being in the trenches of war’, endlessly optimising the next advantage or warding off the next crisis. And, of course, it is leaders who are the chief gladiators in today’s remorseless media-focussed political combat.

Do we find here another explanation for the recent run of leadership resignations? In other words, has a leadership model evolved that is unsustainable over the long haul — a model that has an in-built obsolescence date? In the extract from his diary that heads this chapter, Carr confessed to the gnawing anxiety that ‘you can be wiped out by events, and within a 24 hours news cycle’. At the times of their resignations, Bracks and Beattie both alluded to the toll of the premiership. Bracks declared he had ‘given everything, you know, body and soul, to this job’, while his wife, Terry, reinforced the message, commenting: ‘It’s a relentless job. It’s day in, day out. I’ve seen it first hand’ (cited in Austin 2007a). Peter Beattie’s wife, Heather, had also worried about the debilitating effects on her husband, complaining on the eve of his resignation that he was a ‘tired, exhausted man’. Beattie himself ventured that the increasing demands of the job might mean the time had come to consider imposing a sunset on the tenure of state premiers (Austin 2007a; Parnell 2007). It is Geoff Gallop, however, who has most thoughtfully articulated the wear and tear, both physical and psychological, of contemporary leadership. Not only are the stresses unremitting but, according to the former West Australian premier, the ‘trick’ performances that accompany high executive office and necessity of reducing complex issues to simple (media friendly) truths, have introduced an aridity, almost soullessness, to the task of modern leadership (Taylor 2006; Gallop 2006; 2007).