Scott Morrison’s press club address did the opposite of what he intended, leaving open the question of whether he’s fit to lead Australia..
Scott Morrison may have surrendered the election this week. In a speech meant to re-set the government’s path to victory in May, he effectively permissioned Labor to claim that the election would be a referendum on pandemic management, particularly over the past few months.
He made it virtually certain that the focus of the campaign will be on the past, rather than the future, because he doesn’t have a future to describe. And he left open a more fundamental issue — his own character, his personal record, and his fitness for the task of leading Australia over the next three years.
Each of the consequences was the exact opposite of what his speech had intended. He had reviewed his government’s management of the pandemic, and awarded himself high marks with some allowances for mistakes. But he did it only to make the issue a general non-event. He created three mini-narratives to show himself as listening and forward thinking — bonuses for full-time aged-care workers working in an industry dominated by casuals, band-aids on the Great Barrier Reef, incentives for entrepreneurs trying to develop their high-technology ideas, and the hope, as he put it, of having unemployment numbers with a three in front of it. Once having raised such aspirations, he pretended they were, in effect, already achieved, just like his projected budget surplus for the year ahead just before the last election. Here, we were being invited to say, was a dynamic man with a plan.
But by the time his performance was over, he had failed to put the past into a comfy coffin, or to do anything much to paint a rosy picture of the future, or to turn the agenda on to both the shortcomings of Anthony Albanese, and the Labor Party, and his party’s sterling qualities, including his own leadership, and the calibre of his ministers. By default — or by his incapacity to close any of his sales — he made himself, his performance and his record — all matters of the past — as the glittering things voters were being asked to admire. None are strong selling points — least of all from a spruiker who can no longer seem to make luck or words work for him.
He could blame only himself by becoming bogged down by questions about apologising for his own actions or omissions, or simply regretting they occurred. Combative non-answers, at this point, are code words for “yes”. Likewise with his customary prevarication and evasions, and refusal to give ground, on other questions. And by setting the stage for blaming any failings of the campaign against Covid on the federal Health Department (he thinks he should have had the ADF involved from the start). In due course, depending on where he is and what is currently happening with virus variants that are hard to predict, we can confidently expect that he will also blame state health departments, premiers and chief ministers, and even some carefully chosen scapegoat federal ministers, in efforts to deflect blame from himself.
Only a complete makeover (Scott not being Scott) and a new frankness and directness with voters could make a difference now. I doubt he has it in him.
The mongrel question came at the end. Morrison was asked to comment on remarks attributed to former NSW premier Gladys Berejiklian in an email to a Liberal minister saying that Morrison was a horrible horrible man, given to seeing matters only in party partisan terms. An exchange, going back to the bushfire times (when Morrison had openly clashed with Berejiklian) to which the unnamed Liberal minister had responded by suggesting that Morrison was “psycho”. In politics, one hears worse, in strictly off-the-record observations, whoever the leader might be. But this was, or was said to be, an exchange evidenced in email, deliberately leaked at the worst possible moment so as to humiliate and embarrass a leader in trouble with his party and the electorate. It was a hit job, consciously timed, and an epic piece of bastardry, deliberately designed to shake and undermine confidence in his leadership. It was playing with his head. Morrison may have a tough hide, not to mention the capacity to shrug off bitter attacks. But he knows when his enemies are manoeuvring and that most of his enemies are behind him, not in the other party he is facing in the House of Representatives.
Morrison’s army consumed by internal feuds
The NSW Liberal Party is in a very embarrassing factional war, not only about which candidates should represent the party at the next federal election, (and even the state election that follows after). Morrison has always been an intense player in the party power struggles of his home state, not least from the time that he was the party’s state director, and his personal coup in snatching a pre-selection after the chosen candidate was anonymously defamed. The allegations, leaked to a newspaper which will always do the Liberal Party machine a favour, were false, but able to be refuted only after the party had taken fright, called a new contest excluding the previous winner, and selected the “safe” Morrison instead. It has been Morrison’s faction which has been making most of the trouble recently, or, at least, doing the most to disturb an uneasy peace between the moderate faction (from which Berejiklian came) and the hard right faction (from which her successor, Dominic Perrottet comes). Morrison belongs to a second right-wing grouping with close ties to the Pentecostal movement. Its chieftain, Alex Hawke, is a Morrison government minister.
This faction is accused of having been holding up party pre-selections for so long that it might be too late for them to have them carried out according to party rules before the federal election is upon us. In that case, the factional daleks can sort out by themselves — without the unpredictable inconvenience of branch plebiscites — who should get the nod. Not only would this resolve the unfortunate situation of three sitting members — one a minister, Sussan Ley, the minister for the environment — who might actually lose party endorsement if it were up to a vote of local members, but it would allow particular friends and relations of some of the factional chiefs to apportion the vacancies by agreement among each other. In most cases, those the factional chieftains — or Morrison himself — would like would be unlikely to have won their place by normal processes. Morrison has been threatening intervention by the federal branch of the party, but he also lacks the numbers there.
One can see the email leaks as a carefully chosen hand grenade thrown into this messy fight. Those who see it explode will always have theories — if only by the cui bono rule — about who leaked it. It was not necessarily the unnamed minister, or even on his or her behalf, given that such correspondence, in politics, is almost always seen by more than sender and receiver. Likewise, as carefully worded denials by players — including Berejiklian herself — demonstrate, many will have reasons for not wanting to be conscripted into the front-line of defence. Everyone suspects that the unknown mischief-maker has more ammunition, some for secondary targets.
It is not clear if the attack was on him personally — as Liberal leader and prime minister, soon to be involved in an election campaign — or as a warning to players, and a particular faction, in a bitter struggle for power in the NSW branch of the party. Given the way that some factional daleks play — that they would rather lose an election than surrender a piece of practical power in their own arena, or to allow a rival to be one-up — the idea of its being a power play, with Morrison only as a collateral casualty cannot be discounted. But it was certainly a major act of disloyalty. And it certainly had the effect of taking all the attention away from the goods and the inspiration on offer — such as it was — and on to issues of his personality, his character and the solidarity, loyalty and unity of purpose of his team.
John Waterford AM, better known as Jack Waterford, is an Australian journalist and commentator.
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