Piers Akerman: PM Scott Morrison doesn’t have to fail as a leader
There are now three failed “M” national leaders — Macron, Merkel, May. PM Scott Morrison doesn’t have to be the fourth, Piers Akerman writes.
There are now three failed “M” national leaders — Macron, Merkel, May. Morrison doesn’t have to be the fourth.
Treasurer Josh Frydenberg mentioned the disastrous policies of the three unsuccessful M’s during a breakfast meeting of the authoritative Menzies Research Centre in Sydney on Friday and outlined the achievements of the Morrison government.
There are a formidable number and the Coalition can take much credit for the degree of stability it has managed to maintain despite the determinedly aggressive attempts by former Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull to traduce his former colleagues and the government he once led.
Yesterday, in an interview with The Daily Telegraph, Prime Minister Scott Morrison outlined his middle-of-the-road strategy to hold onto government at the May election.
His government, he said, is a centre-right operation, adding that most of the country isn’t focused on gender identity issues or climate change. He said he wanted to fight for “the people who work the hardest” and “don’t often have time to raise their voice”.
“It goes through a lot of the identity issues and identity politics you see in Australia. I don’t think, frankly, most Australians are terribly focused on that. Even the great issues around climate,” Morrison said.
“I’m just standing here in the middle and that’s where I intend to stand.”
This is in contrast to Labor, where divisions between the left and right will be downplayed at the ALP national conference in Adelaide as the party struggles to present a unified image — particularly on national security and border controls.
Labor’s latest Green-left stalking horse is the GetUp! organisation’s go-to-girl Kerryn Phelps, who has used the fate of fewer than five remaining children living on Nauru to introduce a bill that would open the door for all of the illegal people-smuggler clients on the island to come to Australia and restart the lethal people-smuggling trade.
Under the Phelps’ plan, embraced by Labor and the Greens, two off-island doctors could diagnose via Skype an individual on Nauru and demand that person be brought to Australia for “treatment” though there are at least 10 doctors on the island capable of making such a call. Indeed, a woman who complained of a troubling stomach ache (subsequently discovered to be constipation) was expensively Medi-vacced recently.
No, it’s not a shortage of medical care in the island nation driving this agenda but the left’s calamitous open borders policy, which under the Rudd-Gillard governments saw more than 50,000 illegal entrants reach Australia, some 1200 die horrible deaths at sea and more than 100 children locked up.
That’s Labor for you, and those are the facts independent MP Dr Kerryn Phelps and her smug virtue-signalling eastern Sydney supporters studiously ignore, along with inner-urban Labor-Green voters, who take their cue from the fake news providers at “their” ABC, Nine-formerly-Fairfax, GetUp! and Crikey.
Two doctors? Just imagine Dr Phelps and Dr Richard Di Natale sitting in front of their computers and deciding to bring in planeloads of people who don’t want to go to the US because they want to go on welfare here.
Morrison and the Coalition are well advised to steer clear of social agenda debates because their commonsense arguments will be shamelessly twisted to discredit them.
Labor’s lying Mediscare campaign was just one example of the dirty tricks campaign that the ALP’s machine men are prepared to run in order to win the next election at any cost.
Already it is shaping up as a recycled Rudd 2007 campaign with Opposition Leader Bill Shorten purporting to be reasonable and not, as he has accurately been described, “union-bred, union-fed and union-led”.
Leave bitchy arguments about whether transsexuals should enjoy the same privileges at the homosexual mardi gras to Labor and Green voters, and concentrate on issues that matter to thinking Australians — the economy, safety and the opportunity to get ahead.
One suggestion for Morrison — which I offered to Frydenberg — is the government reverse its stupid 2016 decision to retrospectively tax returns on superannuation.
Frydenberg responded that people don’t like changes to super. Wrong answer.
The Coalition’s wrongheaded Treasury-driven idea was one of many factors that saw Turnbull lose most of predecessor Tony Abbott’s hard-won electoral gains.
It was bad policy then and remains bad policy now, leaving a bad taste in the mouths of traditional Liberal Party supporters and superannuants from other political parties. Announcing such a decision with a degree of contrition at the April Budget would boost the Coalition’s election prospects. Add fighting Labor’s plan to remove franking credit refunds and the Liberals would win the retiree vote.
Morrison is canny enough to understand this and bold enough to overrule the bureaucrats, as he demonstrated with his announcement yesterday to recognise Jerusalem as what it has been for millennia, capital of Israel (ancient and modern).
Appeasing extremist mullahs in Indonesia and Malaysia should not be on the agenda. Our sovereignty should be sacrosanct and our parliament should not go the way of weak Western nations like those led by Emmanuel Macron, Angela Merkel and Theresa May.
Those three “Ms” are battling a rearguard action, with Macron (pictured) trying to quell a surge in terrorist activity in France, Merkel’s calamitous encouragement of illegal entrants into Germany and appalling instances of Muslim gangs grooming teenage sex slaves in May’s UK. But Morrison has another “M” as an ally: Sir Robert Menzies.
Menzies laid out the course for the Liberal Party and picked up the banner for liberalism in Australia at a time when it was fashionable to be tilted to the left. Morrison must lay claim to that “M” heritage to win next year.
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