In Australia, the Labor Party (ALP) has an unerring, near uncanny instinct for being triumphantly elected just as the world is about to plunge into a global recession, or worse. It is grimly funny how regularly they do this. In October 1929, after a decade locked out of power, the party won government on its most socialist program to date, led by editor-intellectual James Scullin. Mere days later, the Wall Street crash sent shockwaves round the world.

In the next three years, the party split four ways, with the right joining a “United Australia Party” that emphasized conventional austerity budgeting — and locked Labor out of power for another decade. In 1972, the ambitious, modernizing Gough Whitlam government, swept in a year before the 1973 global recession that decisively ended the Keynsian postwar era; Whitlam struggled through for barely three years. In 2007, a decade of John Howard’s mix of neoliberalism, corporatism, and culture war came to an end, and the keys were handed to Kevin Rudd just in time for the 2008 financial crisis.

Indeed, there are only two Labor prime ministers who have escaped this cycle. John Curtin, who came to power in 1941, didn’t face an economic crisis. Instead, he found himself with a total war on his hands. Bob Hawke also escaped in 1983 — the recession ended just as he came in because — well, because Hawke was the luckiest bastard who ever lived.