The plotters wanted Jacinta Allan gone. Their failure reveals some hard truths about Labor

June 18, 2026 — 5:00am

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One of the great things about political journalism is we are never wrong for long.

A breathless headline about an impending move against Jacinta Allan’s leadership is soon followed by another declaring that a well-planned coup has collapsed, leaving her job safe until the November election.

The rather more dull alternative is that a leadership challenge bigger in the telling than reality amounted to bugger all.

That may be because the challenge, as far as it can be discerned, never entirely convinced the purported challenger.

Will the non-events of the past couple of weeks stop further speculation about Allan’s leadership? Almost certainly not. This week’s Resolve poll was not good for the government. There are still people within Labor, both inside and outside the parliament, who think a change of leader is needed to avoid electoral disaster.

There will be more polls and good news will be hard to come by for a third-term government battling its own natural life cycle and, with the rise of One Nation, a potent disruption within Australian politics.

But this episode has taught us a couple of things.

One is about the character of Deputy Premier Ben Carroll, the challenger who never quite was. In the eyes of his Labor colleagues who were pushing for a change of leader and saw him as the most viable contender, Carroll........

© The Age