Miranda Devine: Scott Morrison must stand against woke forces to win election
There’s only one thing left to say to Aussies as they grumble towards the next federal election: you don’t know how good you have it, writes Miranda Devine.
Opinion
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There’s only one thing left to say to Australians as they grumble towards the next federal election: you don’t know how good you have it.
Watching from afar as the poll-challenged Prime Minister was beaten up at the National Press Club for not knowing the price of a loaf of bread or for not saying sorry for going to Hawaii during the bushfires three years ago, you realise just how spoiled Australians have become.
Maybe it’s the fact that being cooped up during the pandemic makes you resent your overlords.
Fair enough.
But it doesn’t seem fair that Scott Morrison is the one who was mortified and gazumped by unflattering text messages Ten’s Peter van Onselen read aloud to him at the press club. After all, he is the victim.
If the report is accurate, the people who should be hauled over the coals for disloyalty, indiscretion and pure bastardry are the PM’s colleagues who wrote the texts – former premier Gladys Berejiklian and an unnamed current Liberal Cabinet minister.
In one text Berejiklian calls the PM a “horrible, horrible person”, said she did not trust him and that he was “more concerned with politics than people.” The minister described him as a “fraud” and “a complete psycho,” according to van Onselen, who demanded a response from Morrison.
It was an exercise in ritual humiliation for the PM, who answered as best he could: “Obviously I don’t agree with it.”
The text exchange says far more about the two people running down the leader of their party than it does about the PM. What a pair of miserable turncoats. Whoever in the Liberal party is undermining and leaking against Morrison a few weeks before a crucial election deserves to be hunted down and exposed for the rat he is.
As for Berejiklian, her career is cooked anyway, but this is the nail in her reputational coffin.
The disgraced former premier issued a weak statement after the text bombshell, saying she has “no recollection of such messages”. Really?
As journalist Sam Maiden pointed out on Twitter: “This wouldn’t be hard to check. You just do a word search in your messages for ‘psycho’.”
Morrison looked weary, aggrieved, and humourless as he batted away hostile questions. He does not appear to be enjoying his job. That is understandable, but it won’t win him votes. Politics is not a pity party. Journalists are not your friends.
But he is right that his government is getting no credit for doing a lot better than a lot of other countries to weather the pandemic and balance the economic costs. Both in Covid deaths and on the economic front, Australia has done pretty well, despite excessive hypochondria and infighting. How would Albo and team have fared.
“Scotty from marketing” may not be your cup of tea, but thank your lucky stars you don’t have a national leader who flings open the border to two million illegal migrants a year.
You don’t have a leader who made his crack-addicted son the bagman for his family’s corrupt influence peddling operation which reaped tens of millions of dollars from China, Russia and Ukraine. Biden again.
You don’t have a leader who smears everyone who doesn’t agree with him as a white supremacist. You don’t have a leader who sics the FBI onto mums and dads who complain about their kids being masked all day or being propagandised with gender fluidity and critical race theory nonsense.
You don’t have a leader so callous and incompetent that he left behind billions of dollars in military equipment in Afghanistan, abandoned hundreds of your fellow citizens and then repeatedly glanced at his watch as he stood next to parents of young military personnel killed in Kabul during his botched withdrawal.
You don’t have a leader so feeble he can’t string a sentence together without a teleprompter. You don’t have a leader who spent half of last year denying inflation was a thing while he fanned the flames with trillions of dollars of unnecessary stimulus.
You don’t have a leader so obsessed with identity politics that he cannot make a single appointment without pandering to some boutique minority. That would be Joe Biden, who has just announced the next US Supreme Court justice will be a black woman. Choosing his vice president solely on the basis of gender and race has worked out so well.
It’s a pity a few caustic Australian journos couldn’t be teleported to the White House to ask Biden questions more onerous than what flavour ice cream he prefers.
In any case, if Morrison is looking for a blueprint to win the next election, he could follow the lead of Virginia’s new Republican governor Glenn Youngkin.
The mild mannered, cardigan-wearing multi-millionaire businessman and father of four notched up an upset landslide win in November on a platform of upholding parental rights, rejecting identity politics, and defending small business, freedom, and family.
Admittedly, he was propelled by Biden voter remorse, but his sensible, unabashed conservatism and willingness to stand up against woke forces won him the loyalty even of moderate, independent, Hispanic and black voters, even though he was falsely smeared as a racist by Democrats.
In other words, he is a populist like Donald Trump, but without the baggage. Instead of shying away from red blooded conservative values in favour of a pure economic pitch, Scott Morrison should wade right in there on behalf of mums and dads.
The media will hate it, but the voters will return.
Miranda Devine is in New York to cover current affairs for The Daily Telegraph
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