There’s an old Jew­ish prophecy that, as end times ap­proach, his­tory will speed up. Sur­vey­ing the Aus­tralian po­lit­i­cal land­scape, it seems Ar­maged­don must be nigh. Events move in fast for­ward.

The chaotic frenzy of our age, in which lead­ers are culled the mo­ment a whiff of elec­toral de­feat is in the air, eco­nomic sta­bil­ity notwith­stand­ing, is un­prece­dented.

In the space of three years, three first-term heads of gov­ern­ment – a prime min­is­ter, a pre­mier and a chief min­is­ter – have been ejected by their own par­ties. For all the po­lit­i­cal mileage the fed­eral Coali­tion has ex­tracted from Kevin Rudd’s bru­tal re­moval, this is no par­ti­san phe­nom­e­non. Ted Bail­lieu’s res­ig­na­tion in Vic­to­ria last month only came be­cause the Lib­eral party room no longer sup­ported him. And nei­ther Rudd’s nor Bail­lieu’s demise seems as bloody-minded as Terry Mills’s axing in the North­ern Ter­ri­tory, ex­e­cuted as it was while he was in Japan on of­fi­cial busi­ness, only a week after he had stared down a chal­lenge from his Coun­try Lib­eral Party col­leagues.

In each case, we can iden­tify di­rect trig­gers. For Rudd it was his dump­ing of the emis­sions trad­ing scheme (ETS), which saw his ap­proval rat­ings, and Labor’s, nose­dive. For Bail­lieu it was a rogue MP’s res­ig­na­tion from the Lib­eral Party, and his chief of staff’s in­volve­ment in what at least looked like jobs-for-the-boys be­hav­iour, as well as a se­ries of poor polls. For Mills, it was the com­plete col­lapse of pub­lic sup­port for his gov­ern­ment – in­clud­ing a poll show­ing Mills had lost around 23% of the vote in his own seat – after large rises in elec­tric­ity and water prices.

To cite these as ex­pla­na­tions misses the point. Gov­ern­ments have faced crises be­fore. They have pur­sued un­pop­u­lar poli­cies, and dealt with stub­bornly bad polls. The fail­ures are not new, but the speed and sav­agery of the con­se­quences are. Rudd lasted just over two and a half years in of­fice. Bail­lieu, just under. Mills, an as­ton­ish­ing seven months.

At least three things flow from this. First, po­lit­i­cal crises come swiftly, far more swiftly than in any pre­vi­ous era. Sec­ond, po­lit­i­cal par­ties more quickly as­sume such crises can­not be reme­died, at least not in time for the next elec­tion. And third, they think the only way to sal­vage the sit­u­a­tion is to re­place the leader.

The new media land­scape clearly has much to an­swer for here. Cri­sis is swift be­cause news and com­men­tary are swift and judge­ment is in­stant. Then it’s shared, con­stantly, and mostly with those who agree. View­points be­come am­pli­fied rather than nu­anced. So we fore­stall cool, re­flec­tive de­bate, and wind up with a pub­lic con­ver­sa­tion that has al­most no abil­ity to per­suade. Every­one’s in a war, every­one has a gun, and we’d much rather go on fir­ing than sit through dull peace ne­go­ti­a­tions.

Po­lit­i­cal dis­cus­sion has be­come a mil­i­tarised zone. Per­haps that’s why par­ties are in­creas­ingly reach­ing for the nu­clear op­tion. As the de­bate gets faster and there­fore shal­lower, our pol­i­tics must be­come more pres­i­den­tial be­cause image and per­son­al­ity are the only ef­fec­tive weapons left. This is par­tic­u­larly true given the col­lapse of se­ri­ous ide­o­log­i­cal dif­fer­ence be­tween the major par­ties. Every po­lit­i­cal prob­lem there­fore be­comes a lead­er­ship prob­lem. When you’re con­fronted with po­lit­i­cal dis­as­ter, there’s only one thing to do: get new lead­er­ship.

As Gillard’s ex­pe­ri­ence shows, there’s no guar­an­tee that change will work. The prob­lems of con­tem­po­rary pol­i­tics are far big­ger than that. In this con­nec­tion, Bail­lieu and Rudd make an in­struc­tive com­par­a­tive study: de­spite shar­ing the same fate, they are pro­foundly con­trast­ing fig­ures. Rudd is widely de­spised within his own party; his lead­er­ship style was un­bear­able to many of his col­leagues and could be tol­er­ated only as long as he had Newspoll in his cor­ner. Bail­lieu re­mains liked as a man by col­leagues and jour­nal­ists alike. To fol­low the news cov­er­age of his res­ig­na­tion was to be re­minded every few mo­ments that he is a “de­cent” bloke. Rudd is ma­ni­a­cally am­bi­tious and hy­per­ac­tive; Bail­lieu is aloof, in­de­ci­sive and fre­quently pas­sion­less.

Rudd was every­where. As Op­po­si­tion leader he dis­man­tled John Howard be­cause his rav­en­ous ap­petite for media en­gage­ment was so suited to our me­dia-drenched age. In gov­ern­ment, this caught up with him. His was a gov­ern­ment of end­less “an­nounce­ables”. Ini­tia­tives poured from his of­fice, but with no fol­low-through. There was an apol­ogy, a stim­u­lus pack­age, then a dizzy­ing array of ideas – a dumped ETS, a ma­ligned min­ing tax, a failed health take-over – that con­fused more than they in­spired. Rudd gov­erned as though the po­lit­i­cal cycle was the same thing as the 24-hour media cycle. He just couldn’t keep up with his own an­nounce­ments.

Ted Bail­lieu didn’t even try. He be­longed to a com­pletely dif­fer­ent era. You can imag­ine him tak­ing three months out over sum­mer to read, per­haps aboard a ship bound for Eng­land. He and his min­is­ters fre­quently de­clined media re­quests. At first this seemed to be part of a strat­egy to lie low for the first year while his team – who were as sur­prised as any­one to find them­selves in gov­ern­ment in 2010 – fig­ured out what they were going to do. But the in­vis­i­bil­ity lin­gered for a sec­ond year. Bail­lieu opted out of the media frenzy, and wouldn’t opt in even as scan­dal en­gulfed his own of­fice.

This low-key ap­proach is more af­ford­able to the sec­ond tier of gov­ern­ment, but even so Bail­lieu over­did it. When he an­nounced the end of his pre­mier­ship, the re­sponse was very much “So long, Ted Bail­lieu; we hardly knew ye.”

The sto­ries of these two ut­terly con­trast­ing lead­ers, both brought un­done by the re­lent­less waves of dig­i­tal in­for­ma­tion that de­fine our world, raise a fright­en­ing ques­tion of con­tem­po­rary pol­i­tics: can any­one shine in the top job? If not Rudd with his un­ceas­ing media en­gage­ment, and not Bail­lieu with his ap­par­ently de­lib­er­ate dis­en­gage­ment, then who?

Cer­tainly each man had fail­ures of lead­er­ship. But is ours an age that will not be led? Is our po­lit­i­cal and media cycle so un­for­giv­ing, so in­stant and so damn loud that it pun­ishes those who play the game as much as those who don’t?

Colin Bar­nett might think not, after his serene vic­tory in West­ern Aus­tralia last month. In many ways he’s the mid­dle ground be­tween Rudd and Bail­lieu: the quiet achiever whose image is of get­ting things done with a min­i­mum of fuss. But then, his state has seen mas­sive eco­nomic growth in re­cent years. His op­po­si­tion is inept, and is of the same party as a prime min­is­ter so dis­liked in the west that she was asked not to cross the state line lest she con­t­a­m­i­nate the state Labor cam­paign.

This is hardly a replic­a­ble model for po­lit­i­cal suc­cess.

It’s early days, but it would seem the rapid, shal­low bru­tal­ity of our po­lit­i­cal con­ver­sa­tion re­flects a coars­en­ing and hol­low­ing out of our very pub­lic cul­ture: a cul­ture of more judge­ment and less re­straint, of sanc­ti­mony un­earnt through re­flec­tion, of in­stant rhetor­i­cal grat­i­fi­ca­tion. We need a new pact, but we have no bro­kers.

Waleed Aly