I have no problem with the modern international trend to have greater public, or party member, participation in the selection of party leaders. But I suggest that the bad experiences of the past decade should not be used to change legal or party rules to make sacking a bad leader – or for that matter a bad government – any more difficult. Nor is there the slightest evidence that longer terms in office allow governments to lift their view from today's headline and tomorrow's opinion poll.

Imagine, if you can, the people of the United States making a terrible misjudgment and putting into office a person morally or temperamentally unfit to be chief executive and virtual monarch. It's a mistake that cannot usually be undone for four years. During that time, constitutional checks and balances are hardly sufficient to restrain or prevent abuse of power. Impeachment is a possibility, but only two presidents – neither by any means the worst president of his generation – have been impeached, and neither lost office. Attempts to impeach a president are initiated by opposition parties, often in majority in congress. When Australian representatives lose their leader, they have been thrown out by their own (erstwhile) supporters.

Britain's opposition leader, Jeremy Corbyn, would never have won his party's leadership in 2015 had it depended on majority support from MPs in his own party. But the party changed its rules to let members of the party, members of unions affiliated with the party, and even a group of people registered as supporters of the party, to choose the leader. Corbyn was elected with 59 per cent of the turnout, including 49 per cent of full members and 58 per cent of affiliated members.

In parliament, the new leader exasperated the great and good on his own side. About two years ago, 23 of 31 members of Britain's shadow cabinet resigned, arguing Corbyn was mad, impossible and unelectable. Soon after, he lost a vote of confidence from his MPs by a vote of 172-40. The matter went back to the membership. Everyone expected he would lose, badly.

The Guardian quoted from a voting expert just before the poll: "There is evidently a section of the British public, to be found particularly among younger voters, for whom the Labour leader does have an appeal; it just does not look like a section that is big enough, on its own at least, to enable Labour to win a general election."

A poll for another paper suggested working-class voters were more likely to consider Corbyn "incompetent" than those from the middle class, and a higher proportion thought he was "out of touch". Martin Kettle, in the Guardian, said "many Labour MPs, even some who face defeat, want an early election" to prove decisively that Corbyn's Labour is unelectable as a government. "If there is hope for Labour it lies with the voters. Only they can change the party."

The received wisdom was badly out of touch, whether as to Corbyn's popularity within the wider party, and, as events turned out, with the electorate at large. With about 700,000 people eligible to vote on the party leadership, Corbyn was re-elected with 61 per cent of the turnout. He secured majorities of party members and affiliated members.

For him a triumph, for the party elders (and the commentators) a complete humiliation. The Tory prime minister, whose view of Corbyn's political abilities and judgment matched that of his Labour enemies, was emboldened to call an election, one at which the early polls suggested that Labour, under Corbyn's leadership, would be lucky to get 20 per cent. Labour won about 40 per cent, the biggest percentage at a general election since 1945.

It took three months to confirm Corbyn's leadership after the parliamentary party dumped him. Three months during which Labour opposition in parliament was in almost complete paralysis. The party rules would have been much the same had Corbyn been prime minister instead of opposition leader. The British Labour Party may have found a way to elect a leader who stands above factions and obligations to sectional interests. But it is yet to find a workable way of sacking one.

In Australia in 2010, Kevin Rudd had lost the caucus's support when he was deposed as prime minister. He felt, however, that he had somehow been cheated, because he had, in effect, been elected by the Australian people at the 2007 election. That is never strictly true of course. A party leader stands for a seat, like any other would-be member. It is not a presidential campaign. The party of government is the one that wins majority support in relation to supply. Rudd was often accused of disloyalty and treachery before he became leader, but was not much undermined by his own, either in opposition or government, until his failings were apparent to all, at least in Canberra. He had won leadership of the party by vote in caucus, not public acclamation, and lost it to Julia Gillard, because he lost the confidence of caucus. Perhaps she was ambitious for his office, but she had not undermined him.

In due course, Rudd's campaign of leaking, undermining and sniping, along with Tony Abbott's very effective demolition campaign, and some woefully inept political management by some of the Labor geniuses, led many caucus members to panic about their chances under Gillard's leadership. Some polling suggested only 30 or 40 (of a house of 150) Labor MPs would still be in parliament after the next election. None of these polls suggested Labor could win if they returned to Rudd. But it appeared that Rudd could do a better job of "saving the furniture” – which is to say, lose by less. He delivered.

One of Rudd's legacies was to insist on a new method of electing leaders, somewhat on the British model, if still (in Rudd's model) allowing the caucus 50 per cent of the say. This should, he argued, produce greater stability. Voters despised both sides for the non-stop leadership musical chairs. Leaders, it was said, were making short-term decisions focused on next week's opinion polls. Rudd was arguing this again this week, when the man elected to be prime minister by the Australian people, Malcolm Turnbull, was sacked by the Liberal survivors of the last election.

On the first test of the Rudd model with Labor, the man chosen by the party membership, Anthony Albanese, was far more popular than Bill Shorten. But Shorten (like Albanese, a factional chief) had countervailing numbers in the caucus, even the charm to seduce some members of the left to his side. His ambiguous position in his own party has helped undermine his legitimacy and authority.

But Shorten has not faced a challenge, and the party has been unusually united behind him, even as any number of members fret, privately, that he is hardly inspirational. The ubiquitous polls support this lack of enthusiasm; all things being equal, Labor looks set for a comfortable victory within eight months. But that is not because voters have embraced Shorten's Labor. Rather they have decided to throw the Coalition out, and are prepared to do so despite reservations about Shorten's character, visions and leadership.

Those polls, incidentally, confirm that some of the non-stop attacks on Shorten by Coalition ministers, particularly new Prime Minister Scott Morrison, may have inflicted some scars, but not so much as to slow down his support. Amplification of the current line of attacks on Shorten will probably not reduce his support. Morrison needs to persuade voters to vote for the Coalition; he cannot win merely by scare stories about Labor. For one thing, his credibility is insufficient.

The tumults in Liberal leadership over the last decade may have been more about personality than ideology or policy, but the demise of successive leaders has always followed the emergence of evidence that the current leader was failing to lead, inspire or offer a sporting hope of winning at the next election. Brendan Nelson might have been a nice person, as some claimed, but he was a hopeless leader, even in cleaning up after John Howard had led the party to defeat.

Nelson was torn down by Turnbull, a man some (not least himself) had thought destined to be a new Menzies. But Turnbull himself was failing in policy responses to the global financial crisis and over the Godwin Grech affair even before he collided with powerful conservative feeling against his climate change policy. This was, in part, because the party had, under Howard in the 1980s, purged much of the moderate and liberal ballast balancing conservative views under a once-broad Liberal umbrella. The Liberal caucus was pragmatic enough to vote for the person most likely to lead it to victory, but only a minority could stand him, personally or ideologically.

In his first coming, Turnbull responded with arrogance and aloofness, and failed to listen to advice. It's a paradox that his efforts to correct these problems handicapped him during his second coming. A new spirit of consultation and inclusiveness, and a willingness to give his conservative detractors an effective veto over policy, paralysed any chance to put his signature on events.

As his party detractors insisted his big problem was that he was not conservative enough, the public decided he was not moderate enough, too wishy-washy and indecisive, and – his most fatal of sins – inauthentic. What was the point of having a leader who would not, or could not, lead, or be the person that an electorate, which had wanted him to succeed, had wanted and expected? Over the past 50 years, only Billy McMahon and Abbott could be said to have achieved so little in office. Turnbull's real legacy is not same-sex marriage but a very substandard national broadband network and a terrible failure to lead on climate change and water policy.

Turnbull himself had been savagely taken down by Abbott, and, once it was clear in due course that Abbott himself was a hopeless failure as leader of a government, if not an opposition, Turnbull acted brutally to depose Abbott.

Abbott, like Rudd, complained that his mandate had come from the Australian people, not his caucus. Turnbull, like Gillard, was a usurper who deserved the sniping and undermining that he got. They encouraged the idea that each was snuffed out at just the moment when their projects were about to triumph, and at just the time when the sacrifices asked of voters, which had caused temporary unpopularity, were about to be rewarded. In both cases, that is nonsense. Abbott indeed was in full retreat from his initially brash (and ill-thought-out) ideas – many a repudiation of the "mandate” he had received. Leave aside the question of whether the problem he (or his predecessor, or his successor) represented could be resolved by a mere change of leadership, he has no reason to bemoan his fate, or his rejection by his own colleagues.

I am no mere nostalgic for suggesting that men such as Gough Whitlam, Malcom Fraser, Bob Hawke, Paul Keating and Howard were of higher calibre and had greater wisdom and political nous than any of the leaders of the present age. Each, in his own way, had a followership none of the present crop has managed.

Yet the women and men in the present parliament are generally better educated, with more experience in policy formation and program management. They have far greater access to public resources in doing their job, in being able to find out what voters need, want or think. It's much easier to communicate with voters. So what is wrong?

Some blame the way in which the numbers, democracy and influence of party members has dissolved and been replaced by top-end and unaccountable management by faceless apparatchiks, advertising men and lobbyists. Many blame the 24-hour news cycle, social media or the fact that an overwhelming proportion of parliamentarians are careerists and professional party operators, many never having worked elsewhere. And many blame the tyranny of opinion polls, and the preponderance of advocacy and agenda journalism, particularly from within News Corp.

All these may help explain why so many of the public are losing faith in politicians and are drawn to minority parties and anti-politicians, including Donald Trump-style populists with an edge of fascism, racism and nationalism.

But around the world are politicians with long-term vision, patient ones willing to confide in and secure the support of voters, even in hard times. It's not the times that are diluting the qualities, or the potential, of people who want to effect democratic change. Never indeed has there been such opportunity, and so many tools, to gather and mobilise support – the first business of the politician.

We won't get better government by entrenching the positions of second-rate leaders. Real leaders do not shy from challenges because they feel insecure about polls or support from their caucuses. Parties should not waste time making leaders immune from the consequences of their achievements, or lack of them. They should focus on the calibre, the character and the curriculums vitae of the leadership talent pools.

Jack Waterford is a former editor of The Canberra Times. jwaterfordcanberra@gmail.com