The Australian-English phrase to put sport back on the front pages, and its variants, are used of a desirable state of political stability.

This phrase occurred, for example, in a radio interview of the Liberal MP Christopher Pyne (born 1967), Education Minister from September 2013 to September 2015, broadcast on ABC Radio Adelaide (South Australia) on Wednesday 6^th November 2013:

Pyne: We are moving calmly and methodically. Certainly, we don’t have the frantic, chaotic dysfunction of the previous government, and I think the public very much welcome that. I think they’re glad to have sport back on the front pages rather than politics and we’re just getting on with the job, which is why we were elected.

The phrase to put sport back on the front pages alludes to a remark made by Malcolm Fraser (1930-2015), Leader of the Liberal Party of Australia from March 1975 to March 1983, during the campaign for the 1975 Australian federal election, held on Saturday 13^th December 1975. Malcolm Fraser had been commissioned as caretaker Prime Minister following the dismissal of Gough Whitlam’s three-year-old Labor government by the Governor-General of Australia, Sir John Kerr, on Tuesday 11^th November 1975.

Malcolm Fraser’s remark was mentioned in the following two texts:

1-: In The decline and fall of El Presidente, by Gay Davidson, published in The Canberra Times (Canberra, Australian Capital Territory, Australia) of Monday 15^th December 1975:

The state of the economy, inflation and unemployment will be advanced as the important reasons for the massive vote against the Labor Government. However, I think the silent majority went on something more basic, the increasingly urgently felt need for security. That means the vote was not simply anti-Labor, it was positively conservative.
Mr Fraser understands that attitude. He told me a couple of months ago that he wanted to be the Prime Minister of an Australia in which people did not have to read political news every day on page one, where they could instead turn to the sports pages untrammelled by politics.
Mr Fraser can be expected to do very little to disturb. His political instinct—to ensure politics can be an unvisited backwater in most people’s minds—is exactly right for the Australian electorate at large now.

2-: In the transcript of the interview of Malcolm Fraser by the British journalist David Dimbleby (born 1938) on BBC television’s current-affair programme Panorama, broadcast on Monday 15^th December 1975—transcript published in The Sydney Morning Herald (Sydney, New South Wales, Australia) of Wednesday 17^th December 1975:

Dimbleby: During your campaign you said that you weren’t sure that perhaps Australians didn’t rather like dull Government because then they could turn to the sports pages and leave the people who ran the country to get on with it. Is that what you are promising them now?
Fraser: Well this is one of the remarks we made. I think people want the situation in which they don’t have to be concerned with what their politicians are doing in Canberra, being shocked day after day wondering what’s happening.
In other words they want security—they want a Government that can be exciting in some of its policies and initiatives, but exciting in a way that’s predictable and is not going to send people bankrupt.

The earliest occurrences of the phrase to put sport back on the front pages and variants that I have found are as follows, in chronological order:

1-: From Day of the pollsters, an editorial published in The Canberra Times (Canberra, Australian Capital Territory, Australia) of Monday 2^nd January 1978:

Presidential-style campaigns give rise to presidential-style governments at the expense of the Cabinet, the Ministry, the backbench and, ultimately, the Parliament itself. The wisdom of a process that helps elevate personalities above issues at a time when issues are becoming more complex and interest groups more diverse and voluble than ever seems questionable. The ultimate result of campaigns based on the lowest common denominator of electoral appeal must be a smudging of the sharp edges of difference between the platforms and the policies, and an electoral outcome based more on the electorate’s assessment of each party’s managerial skills rather than its ideologies. […]
It would be comfortable to be able to believe that these shifts in emphasis involving the parties, the Parliament and the electorate are insignificant in a national context, that the excitement that Mr Whitlam brought with him into Federal politics will subside and Mr Fraser will succeed in his desire to “put sport back on the front pages”. The evidence, however, is to the contrary. Australia is in a period of transition in both a domestic and an international context. In the absence of any conscious, deliberate attempt to refashion its constitutional and political institutions the intriguing question will be not whether they will survive—they will—but in what form and at what cost. Politics, while it remains a “blood” sport, will never be off the front pages.

2-: From Tracking the economy: The Treasury case for planning, by Warwick Bracken, economics writer, published in The Canberra Times (Canberra, Australian Capital Territory, Australia) of Sunday 4^th June 1978:

Soon after taking office the Prime Minister, Mr Fraser, was reported as saying that he wanted to see sport back on the front pages of Australian newspapers.
It has not happened unless, of course, some association or other has officially classified Australian Government and politics as a blood sport.
Events in Canberra and the performance of the economy are still regular front-page news.