The death over the weekend of former Country/National Party leader and Deputy Prime Minister, Doug Anthony, breaks the last link but one with the federal Coalition’s first zenith. 

Anthony, aged 90, was with Ian Sinclair one of the last two survivors of Sir Robert Menzies’s last ministry. He was deputy to three Liberal PMs – Gorton, McMahon and Fraser, and served in Cabinet with a fourth, John Howard (and under whom his own son Larry was a minister warming his and his own father’s old seat of Richmond). 

It’s a cliché to say we will never see his like again, but it certainly is so.