James Morrow: Albanese has his own Trump moments

The fixation over the missteps of Scott Morrison may be a necessary evil for the Prime Minister but it merely serves as a distraction from more important matters

Scott Morrison makes an odd Donald Trump but, if you’re Anthony Albanese, you have to take what you can get.

Let’s get all the mandatory throat-clearing out of the way.

There is no good explanation for the former prime minister scooping up duplicate portfolios over the course of his term of office.

Even the excuses around the early co-opting of portfolios like health because, well, the pandemic had just kicked off and no one knew how bad things were going to get don’t really hold water under close scrutiny.

And the fact that the only time Morrison used any of the powers he held so close to his chest was to knock back an offshore drilling license makes this the sort of behaviour that could be best covered off by one of Albanese’s favourite parliamentary points of order: “On weirdness, Mr Speaker”.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese spoke to the media during a press conference in Parliament House Canberra. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Gary Ramage

None of this was, as the saying goes, consistent with responsible governance, cabinet protocol or any other nicety.

Even if it was all, as the solicitor-general made clear in his report, behaviour that fell technically on the right side of the law.

What is even more bizarre is that if Morrison had told parliament or the press gallery what he was up to he probably would have been cheered for bulldozing through the constitution, just as state and federal leaders were cheered for lockdowns, border closures and all sorts of other assaults on our way of life in the name of “keeping us safe”.

But that’s all in the past.

Except, of course, for the Albanese Labor government, in whose interest it is to keep this issue running for as long as possible.

Cribbing a page from the playbook of America’s Democrats — how’s that cultural cringe working out for you? — Albanese has decided that, in difficult times, the best way forward is to go backwards.

For US president Joe Biden, constant attacks on his predecessor are the only thing keeping him afloat politically, though he or his office may have gone too far in setting the FBI on to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago.

Former US President Donald Trump

And now Albanese is doing the same thing, turning his predecessor into his own Australian version of the Donald. It’s as if progressives have decided to turn the old conservative catchcry that things were better in the past on its head, instead not only telling voters how awful things were under the last mob but reminding them through the daily news cycle.

The temptation, in an era of rising inflation, global uncertainty and largely self-imposed energy crises is tempting.

But the problem is, it doesn’t work.

In the US, voters are not forgetting how bad things are and Joe Biden’s approval ratings show it.

One recent survey suggested that 74 per cent of Americans think their country is on the wrong track.

The worry is that Australia is heading in a similar direction.

While our energy supplies are not dependent on the whims of Vladimir Putin, Australia’s push for net zero contains some pretty heroic assumptions — not the least of which being Labor modelling that assumes power costs will come down by the end of the decade by more than their wholesale component.

US President Joe Biden

How that is supposed to happen when grid upgrades and storage are likely to dwarf for some time whatever momentary savings consumers will enjoy from renewables is anyone’s guess.

You can see why Albanese is so keen to put the focus back on his predecessor.

Lately he has been forced to reassure voters that inflation won’t hit UK levels here in Australia.

And on Monday the PM once again got testy when asked about the fate of his promise to bring down power prices by $275.

It was a classic exercise in “don’t blame me, it was like this when I got here”.

“What occurred was that, unbeknownst to the Australian public, again a lack of transparency, the government knew that wholesale prices were going to have considerable increases,” Albanese said.

“They deferred those increases until after the election campaign and then they went up.”

All that may be true but, as this column has noted before, Albanese came to power on the promise of a new sort of politics.

He might defend himself by saying that, well, shining a light on the bad behaviour of the past is all part of the purification process.

But the problem with being someone who spent literally decades climbing the ranks of the Labor party is that people might look at this with at least some degree of scepticism.