Scott Morrison is Australia's new Prime Minister and Josh Frydenberg is new Deputy PM.
Congratulations to them both, particularly Josh, who I've know for many years and has helped me out in the past.
I'm pretty sure he's Australia's first Jewish Deputy Leader of the Liberal Party.
It also looks like Dave Sharma, former Australian Ambassador to Israel, will take over Malcolm Turnbull's blue ribbon seat of Wentworth. Dave is a great guy who I've worked closely with on getting Direct Flights between Australia & Israel.
The political instability in Australia over the last ten years has been extraordinary and very bad for the country. With 6 PMs in 10 years, mostly from internal party room coups (on both sides of politics), not a single PM has served a full term in more than a decade. The previous 6 PMs span a period of 37 years (1971-2007).
I moved to Israel about the same time as the Howard era ended and the Bibi period began.
In that time there has been a complete role reversal between Australia and Israel regards to political stability.
Israel, which had traditionally been much more politically unstable than Australia, has been an island of stability, with Bibi coming up on 10 straight years in the top job and soon to overtake Ben Gurion as the longest serving PM.
I'm sad to see Malcolm Turnbull go. He is a great Australian who was so successful as a lawyer, banker and tech entrepreneur. It is an indictment on the Australian political system that he has not been able to achieve greatness as Prime Minister.
Many years before he entered politics he wrote a paper entitled Its the Birthrate Stupid that first alerted me to the demographic disaster facing Australia (and the whole developed world). As Prime Minister he had a chance to do something about this, but Australia's fertility has been flat at its lowest levels (1.77 TFR) over his tenure as PM. In contrast, under Bibi, Israel's fertility has risen from 2.7 to 3.13 (the only developed country that is not going backwards).
While I still love Australia, I definitely made the right choice to make Israel my home.