Niki Savva: Earthquake: the election that shook Australia. (2025)
Sun, Dec 14, 2025./noise/books | LinkKindle. The first half compiles Savva's columns about the previous Parliament (2022-2025) for the Channel9Fairfax entertainment complex; I skipped it as I read enough of them at the time. The second is pitched as an analysis (a second take on history?) of the election campaign and aftermath.
This is one for the insiders, being mostly a review of the theatricals and settling scores for those she spoke with. There is very little coverage of policy, or discussion of the coherency of or tensions in the way we are governed; compare, for instance, with Laura Tingle's concerns about the public service and Hugh White's ways of thinking about geopolitical forces. At some point she says:
It was [Chris] Bowen who told me after the last election that the emergence of the teal independents was for the Liberals what the great split of the 1950s — which led to the creation of the Democratic Labour Party — was for Labor.
which struck me as unusually insightful; Peter Lewis recycled this observation at the Guardian (2025-04-15) without attribution.
I felt she was too generous toward Mark Dreyfus's (anti-)achievements as Attorney General and while I might concur and even enjoy her take on the many heels in parliament there are some that deserve more sober consideration, if only because they might be ruling over us some day soon. Her own values are there but are mostly pushed aside. More context would often have helped; I wish she had mechanically listed party, seat, geography and perhaps provided a capsule bio for each politician she mentioned. Another round of editing may have fixed the typos and missing punctuation. Overall all I got was an expression of the common view (nothing new?), the odd amusing anecdote and that she's better in the short (warm take) form.
Savva stuck with her advice to Albo that he should go this term (from December 2024). She thinks he should be satisfied with about five years on the throne but that assumes he has other things to do than politic and set records of increasing vacuity. The ALP becoming "the natural party of government" has meant that it has adopted a policy suite that would not have embarrassed John Howard. (Scott Morrison's greatest achievement and/or legacy may well have been Albo.) But Howard achieved far more (some good things even!) by this point in his reign. Perhaps someone can press Albo on what he means by "fighting Tories"; one has to wonder what's in it for the rusted-on Laborites.
With Tingle now covering foreign/global affairs it would seem that Savva is the last journo of any standing left in the Canberra press gallery (in my bubble at least). She's a fan of Tom Connell on Sky During Daylight (who is now President of the National Press Club).
The platformed commentariat of Australia appears to be engaging in a great silence about this book. Goodreads: excess #leadershit. Nothing said about how and why Australia is the most secretive democracy in the world. Lacked the connections to do what she's done in previous books (?) so there's a lot more on Libnat failure than ALP success/internecine warfare. Does not get to the heart of the matter, e.g. why Albo was so much hungrier this time around. Her earlier work is superior.
