Liberal MPs say the public has lost confidence in Prime Minister Scott Morrison

After another horror week for Scott Morrison, veteran Liberal MPs believe the public ‘have turned off’ the PM — and they’re not sure he’ll be able to claw back favour.

It was meant to be a reset after Scott Morrison’s summer of hell. But the Prime Minister’s trip to the National Press Club in Canberra this week instead highlighted the government’s mounting problems.

Problems people in his own party are prepared to say are of his own making.

Scott Morrison addresses the National Press Club in Canberra this week. Picture: NCA/Gary Ramage

“I don’t think it’s pack up the Liberal Party stuff, but I think Morrison has lost a lot of confidence — the public have turned off him,” is the view of one senior NSW government minister.

“The ‘Scotty from marketing’ line has stuck … there have been too many times he’s been behind public opinion.”

In his address on Tuesday the Prime Minister said he understood and acknowledged Australians’ frustration with how the global pandemic had played out over the past three months.

It was “fair enough” he acknowledged “that this disappointment leads you to ask, ‘couldn’t you have done more, couldn’t this have been avoided, after all, aren’t you responsible?’.”

Being Prime Minister, he said, meant accepting this responsibility and challenging himself every single day with these questions.

“I haven’t got everything right and I’ll take my fair share of the criticism and the blame,” he said. “It goes with the job.”

But, he continued, “in these times we have experienced, there has been no guidebook and you have to make decisions in real time” though “with hindsight the view does change and lessons are learned”.

Anthony Albanese’s chances of winning the election are looking strong. Picture: NCA NewsWire/Damian Shaw

The PM would have been hoping his plea for understanding would dominate the media cycle.

Insiders say the government needs desperately to change the subject from its handling of the pandemic.

“Defence, China and the economy — if (the election is) fought on that Morrison is in with a shot, if it’s anything else forget about it,” is the blunt assessment of a senior NSW Liberal.

But instead of his mea culpa, radio and TV was dominated all week by Morrison’s failure to name the price of a loaf of bread, a litre of petrol and a rapid antigen test.

If that wasn’t bad enough, he was confronted with a text message exchange from a number of years ago in which Gladys Berejiklian described him as a “Horrible, horrible person” to which a current federal cabinet minister replied “a complete Psycho”.

As a veteran government MP said this week, it’s not whether Morrison is in trouble — he is — “the question is can he get out of it”.

In the week in which the government’s primary vote tanked in Newspoll and the Labor Party surged to a 56 per cent two-party preferred lead, the political world suddenly woke up to the reality that by the end of May, Anthony Albanese could be prime minister.

Unsurprisingly, lobbyists report a sudden and urgent desire among their clients to get to know Labor’s shadow cabinet.

Equally unsurprisingly, despite the dark place the government finds itself in, after 2019’s miracle win, no one is yet prepared to say Scott Morrison can’t come back and win.

That Labor chose this week to backflip on its opposition to the Kurri Kurri gas-fired power-station shows the party’s brains trust knows it still has problems in parts of NSW.

And if you talk to insiders on both sides, you get the same message: it’s NSW where the election will be won and lost.

“It will need a miracle for us to hold on to everything we have here,” one Coalition Queenslander said.

“And if we drop anything it will be down there that we have to make it up.”

The MP isn’t saying anything startling.

That NSW will be the key to this election has been commonplace view for months.

Which is why there is so much anger among interstaters over the failure of the Liberal Party to settle on candidates in the seats it needs to win.

“It beggars belief that we don’t have candidates in Dobell, Eden-Monaro, Warringah and Hughes,” a minister from Victoria said this week.

Alex Hawke is being blamed for preselection delays. Picture: Toby Zerna

There’s also widespread disbelief that less than four months out from an election there is still a live chance two cabinet ministers — Alex Hawke and Sussan Ley — could lose their preselections, along with backbencher Trent Zimmerman.

What has people scratching their heads is that until recently NSW’s factional system had been admired around the country for the stability it had brought to the party, certainly compared with Queensland and Victoria. But with less than four months to go until the election, there is still no resolution.

The finger of blame for the deadlock is being pointed at Hawke and by extension Morrison, because Hawke is the Prime Minister’s factional ally and delegate.

For months Hawke has refused to attend meetings that he needs to attend as the PM’s delegate to progress preselection matters.

Why Morrison hasn’t pulled him into line has been a talking point in Liberal world for months.

The pair are close, though opinions differ as to how close.

Hawke began his political life in the Right faction before splitting off in 2009 to form his own faction known as the Centre-Right.

His position in-between the Right and Moderates (as the Left prefer to be called) effectively gave Hawke and his group, which includes Scott Morrison, the deciding vote between the two.

This happy arrangement for the Centre-Right ended few years back, when the Right and Left decided it was easier to deal with each other directly.

Sussan Ley’s preselection is uncertain. Picture: Richard Dobbins

The antipathy to Hawke in the Right has never gone away — “untrustworthy” being one of the nicer things its factional operators have to say about him.

His challenger is backed by elements of the Right who would love to see the back of him.

The Left aren’t so personal.

In the words of one Left factional leader: “We’ve got no beef with Alex — he’s a c... but that’s par for the course in this line of work.”

Until a few years ago the factional impasse could have been fixed by the factional bosses.

But in 2017 the party voted for changes aimed at ensuring candidates are chosen by plebiscites of party members.

The change has made party management harder, and according to some the current problems can in part be explained by the failure of some factional leaders to adjust to the change.

According to one Right minister, the experience of Victoria, which has had plebiscites for years, shows that if local members do the work, they are almost impossible to dislodge.

“Instead people stuck their head in the sand and said ‘this will never happen’,” the minister said.

The view of factional figures who spoke to The Saturday Telegraph is that while Zimmerman and Hawke would probably survive a local vote, Ley would be in real strife.

Which is why Right and Left figures are keen to avoid a vote in her seat of Farrer.

“That’s not going to happen – that’s just bullshit,” a cabinet colleague of Ley’s said, because it would trigger a three-cornered contest with the National Party and “no one thinks that’s clever.”

Given the government’s well-advertised “women problem”, the idea of “taking out Sussan Ley” is dismissed as “a joke” by a senior Left figure.

Senator Concetta Fierravanti-Wells, who is battling to hold on to the third spot on the Coalition ticket is a different matter: “She’s going to get iced.”

Senior Right and Left figures were expressing hope late last week that the impasse would soon be fixed, preserving Hawke, Zimmerman, and Ley, and allowing open ballots elsewhere.

For a government running out of time, it’s a fight it can ill afford.

Because according to Labor pollster Kosmos Samaras, Anthony Albanese is looking increasingly like John Howard in 1996: “Looks funny, sounds funny, but he doesn’t scare them and they just don’t like the other bloke.”

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