Australian politics is horrible and anybody looking at Alternative Vote as a better alternative to FPTP should consider it.
I wonder if this, along with the Canadian innovation of proroguing parliament every time a minority leader doesn't like how things are going (thanks Harper and McGuinty!), means the Westminster model is careening to obsolescence. Maybe it depends too much on landed gentry following unspoken laws of decorum and etiquette to function?
This has nothing to do with AV and could theoretically have happened here or in Britain during the Chretien/Martin or Blair/Brown "coups". It's just that most parties aren't so completely broken that they'd basically try to destroy each other publicly, because it's in no one's interests to do so... but the Rudd/Gillard thing has just been building for years now and finally exploded.
If you want to say that it's a condemnation of the Westminster system inasmuch as Republican Democracies only depose their Presidents at gunpoint, then sure - this is something that can't happen in the United States because even impeachment doesn't necessarily mean that the President has to leave office.
We just have this weird system where we elect MPs and not leaders, so if a party decides in midstream to change leaders (or in theory, if several MPs decide to change party and the government loses their majority), suddenly the PM is not the PM anymore and the "Queen" has to decide who is in charge of the country.
It's just so fascinating because it's so... well,
dumb for lack of a better word. It makes you wonder if anything similar is even happening behind the scenes in the CPC. We know that backbenchers are disgruntled and polls are down, but there's really no one on that side that can even come close to "deposing" Harper in an internal revolution. But imagine if the polls in 2014 went down so far that people wanted Harper to resign, but he refused to do so? We could have PM Baird or Flaherty or whoever is left alive in the CPC then. Amazing!
