Money man Minister Scott Morrison

WITH the accession of Malcolm Turnbull to the prime ministership, “their” ABC and the Fairfax media highlighted congratulatory messages from two quite irrelevant groups, the homosexual lobby and the republican movement, whose combined support could not swing a federal election.

Their concerns just aren’t the concerns of the average Australian. That’s why Turnbull’s smartest move was to give Scott Morrison, a proven talent in the toughest ministries, the treasury portfolio. The appointment indicated that the Q & A co-host is not hostage to the views of Q & A’s kumbaya audience, to whom Morrison is the devil incarnate. It’s also a slap in the face for the Abbott haters, who had their anger towards the extraordinarily successful prime minister regularly topped by the ABC with commentary redolent with smear and innuendo. One ABC/Fairfax media consumer crowed that she was delighted with Abbott’s demise as it would “end the deaths of children in custody on Christmas Island, remove a man who hates women from the top job, and get rid of a racist xenophobe”. Not one of the disgraceful claims is true but each represented views encouraged by the Abbott haters in the media and their supporters in the Twittersphere. After Abbott himself, Morrison was the foremost target of the venomous commentariat, unchecked by Fairfax editors — one of whom had his malice remarked on from the bench — and encouraged at the taxpayer-funded ABC, which is still without a conservative voice in any senior commentary role. What has truly flummoxed the Leftist haters is that they used to think Morrison was in their camp, or at least on the fringes, as a member of the moderate wet wing of the Liberals. But the smarter ones are now realising he a pragmatist, not an ideologue. Where the ALP Left and the loopy Greens were quite prepared to let people-smugglers drown more than 1200 people en route to Christmas Island if they could claim some false moral superiority, Morrison, who has made no secret of his strong Christian faith, took action which saved both lives and money. He applied the same approach to his last portfolio, Social Services, focusing not on cuts to welfare but on getting people into work and off the taxpayers’ overstrained backs. Not ideology, pragmatism. The Left is happy to see people on welfare because that’s what the Left identifies with. Morrison wants people to be productive, an anathema to the ALP. With all the attention on Turnbull’s selection as leader over the past two weeks, certainly justifiable, the media has largely overlooked the devastating contrast with Labor. Turnbull has moved a number of stalwarts and injected some new blood, while Labor is stuck with a shadow ministry packed with proven losers. They may well support changing the traditional, age-old definition of marriage to embrace homosexuals and an alphabetical mishmash of the sexually confused and conflicted, and they may cheer the sight of a bandanna-wearing north shore buffoon, but they are dinosaurs, leftovers from the least successful governments in recent memory. That the ego-packed Senator Stephen Conroy, who claimed he could force telephone company chiefs to wear red underpants on their heads, remains, along with Senator Kim Carr, demonstrated Opposition Leader Bill Shorten’s impotence. However, his biggest failure is the retention of serial failure Chris Bowen as Morrison’s shadow. Bowen ran Fuelwatch, a $20 million waste that didn’t change the price of petrol by a single cent. He was to run GroceryChoice but that didn’t fly despite costing millions before it was dumped. And as immigration minister he burnt a $5.2 billion blowout as 24,886 people on 395 boats arrived on his watch. Matching a proven failure like Bowen with a serious winner such as Morrison serves to emphasise Shorten’s political ineptitude. Morrison’s pragmatic approach will challenge treasury bureaucrats most comfortable with ideological arguments on the merits of using various mechanisms and processes. In his interview with The Daily Telegraph on Wednesday, he made it clear that he intends to sell the benefits of work, saving and investing. Shorten and Bowen have only offered the dismal prospect of higher taxation and runaway spending, indicating they learnt absolutely nothing from their disastrous six years in government. Morrison has made it clear he intends to grow the economy and apply downward pressure on spending without slashing benefits. Getting the growth in expenditure under control will be the biggest task, bearing in mind Labor left a minefield of unfunded programs and is even now promising more spending without any plan to bring the budget under control beyond the introduction of new taxes. With expenditure now running at 26 per cent of GDP, Morrison sees it as the real problem. He is not obsessing with revenues. He wants to focus on what will work, not what plays best among treasury pundits or the legions of economic theorists regularly consulted by the ABC and Fairfax. They got it wrong on boats, they got it wrong on his approach to welfare dependency, and, given his track record, they will get it wrong on his ability to restore order in the Australian economy.