Prime Minister Scott Morrison has a week from hell like no other
Scott Morrison hasn’t had a good week. And the issues he’s faced have exposed what is his biggest strength and weakness.
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COMMENT
Scott Morrison might not be dead in the water but he’s definitely not just waving.
The PM has had a week from hell, and a level of hell no one previously knew existed.
After an idiotic uprising from the LNP right over vaccine mandates, he then faced a defection on his left from a moderate Liberal who was apparently sifting through the rubble and stumbled across her conscience.
As Lady Bracknell would put it, to lose one’s flank is a misfortune. To lose both looks like carelessness.
How much of this is actually Mr Morrison’s fault will no doubt be pored over in the post-election analysis to come. As the great media maestro Peter Meakin once said, losers have meetings, winners have parties.
But strong leaders have problems outside their parties. Weak leaders have problems within.
Let us not forget that it was internal discontent that deposed both of Morrison’s predecessors when they too were in the first flush of prime ministership. Not to mention the two Labor PMs before that.
The PM’s strength and weakness is that he is a tactical warrior, not a strategic statesman.
He can pull off miracle upsets — which is how he got the job in the first place and then kept it at the 2019 election — but doesn’t seem to have a solid hook to hang his cape on.
The average punter would struggle to name a single policy that the Coalition took to the last election but everybody remembers the franking credits and negative gearing policies that Labor threw up and which Morrison fashioned into a noose.
Likewise he crucified Labor on its own electric vehicle pledge with the bollocks but brilliant line that they would kill the weekend, kill tradies’ utes and probably kittens too.
Political ingenues might paint this as Morrison’s flagrant dishonesty but in fact it is a masterclass in ruthlessness and guile. The ALP simply got outplayed.
Morrison’s problem now, however, is that they won’t make that mistake again. Dead, buried and cremated are both the franking credits and negative gearing policies and these days it’s ScoMo who is the EV evangelist.
Gone too is the infantile class-war rhetoric Bill Shorten unconvincingly employed. Instead Anthony Albanese talks about aspiration and working with business. There are a lot more votes in making poor people rich than there are in making rich people poor.
This has been the talk of all the sensible voices within the ALP for some time and this week a poll of more than 4000 people by the Ergo Strategy group confirmed it. The research captured not just voting intention but how many voters were going to change their vote.
And it speaks volumes. Of those who voted for the ALP in 2019, three per cent said they would vote for the Greens next time while five per cent said they would vote for the Coalition.
Thus we can extrapolate that three per cent of ALP voters felt the party wasn’t left-wing enough while almost double that felt it was too left-wing — probably more when you add those going to One Nation and others.
And of course almost all of the Green votes end up coming back to Labor after preferences, while Coalition votes are gone for good.
When it came to LNP voters it was an even better story — also for Labor. More than one in 10 of those who voted for the LNP in 2019 were now planning to park their votes back with ALP, indicating that unlike in 2019 it is now seen as a safe pair of hands.
In short Labor haemorrhages votes when is shifts to the left but lands them like game fish when it shifts to the right.
Sadly for Morrison this is precisely what Labor is doing, which is very unlucky for a prime minister whose greatest weapon is luck.
He was lucky that Peter Dutton launched an ill-planned coup against Malcolm Turnbull and lucky that Bill Shorten’s hubris had the right-wing journeyman singing like a socialist.
But when Morrison faced his biggest national crisis as a newly elected PM during the Black Summer bushfires he went literally AWOL. The wily political warrior, so good at capitalising
on chaos, was literally nowhere to be seen.
The only thing that could save him now, I mused at the time, was an unimaginably enormous international crisis from which he could somehow deliver an impossible salvation for Australia.
I thought I was talking hypothetically but then Covid came along. No wonder the bloke believes in miracles.
Still smarting from the bushfires, Morrison this time got it right. He listened and learned and spent, defying all his instincts to produce an economic phoenix that was the envy of the world.
But yet again complacency set in. When it came to the final phase of the Covid fight — the vaccine rollout — the PM was caught sitting on both his laurels and his hands.
Australia’s extraordinary economic recovery from Covid is now the worst thing any government achievement can be: A thing of the past.
Voters next year will be looking to the future and the Coalition’s vision for that oscillates between blurry and non-existent. Judging by this week it can barely manage to handle the present.
Morrison has been lucky, a quality that all leaders need. But the only consistent quality of luck is that it always runs out.
Originally published as Prime Minister Scott Morrison has a week from hell like no other
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