Steve Price: Spin doctor Scott Morrison’s image is badly burnt

Our “marketing guy” PM, Scott Morrison, is increasingly seen as a fake. Sadly, our other option is Anthony Albanese, who hasn’t got much to say.

Steve Price

@StevePriceMedia

4 min read

December 17, 2021 - 2:30PM

ScoMo constantly telling Australians ‘she’ll be right mate’, won’t fix anything, and he’s increasingly being seen as something of a fake. Picture: Dan Peled

Opinion

Don't miss out on the headlines from Opinion. Followed categories will be added to My News.

Two years ago, Prime Minister Scott Morrison was forced to admit he was on a holiday in Hawaii during the deadly bushfires sweeping eastern Australia.

Years of drought had turned places like East Gippsland, the south coast of NSW, the Blue Mountains and Central Coast above Sydney into tinderboxes.

A combination of summer thunderstorms and lightning, combined with arson, killed 33 people, including nine firefighters. More than 3000 homes were lost and about 17 million hectares burnt.

One estimate of wildlife and stock losses on government websites put the figure at more than a billion.

How the Prime Minister of Australia could possibly slide into a chauffeur-driven Commonwealth BMW and head to Sydney Airport, to leave behind the smoke and obvious bushfire threats, is still impossible to believe.

The fact that five days later he realised his silly mistake and rushed back home, made the original decision even more difficult to comprehend.

Scott Morrison was forced to admit he was on a holiday in Hawaii during the deadly bushfires sweeping eastern Australia two years ago.

Scott Morrison’s image was in tatters after images of him relaxing in the tropical paradise emerged, as Australia burned.

Two years on — and somewhere between three and five months out from a federal election — the PM isn’t in Hawaii backslapping tourists but his image, if possible, is even more tarnished.

Vision of the PM having his hand ignored by bushfire victims and firefighters turning their backs on him is damaging enough, but in the two years since, he has been branded a liar by French leader Emmanuel Macron.

The “I don’t think I know” comment will surely be used by federal Labor against him come campaign time.

For a marketing guy, he’s not much good at the marketing stuff.

Add the “it’s not a race” comment around vaccinations and suddenly the miracle man will be looking for more divine intervention if he’s going to win the Coalition a fourth term.

Increasingly, I get the impression Australians have not fallen out of love with him – because they never did love him – but they now see him not as a leader or an inspiring PM, but as a bit of a fake.

That’s dangerous for any PM; just ask the last fake who led us, Kevin Rudd, who had us conned in 2007 until he got found out.

Morrison is a cut above Kevin ‘07 but the baggage growing around his habit of announcing, then not delivering, continues to damage him.

Our Prime Minister was recently branded a liar by French leader Emmanuel Macron. Picture: Adam Taylor

A quick radio poll I did this week on his speech to the Sydney Institute, where in quick order he promised to give Australians their “freedom back”, take big government out of their lives and pledged to keep the nation “stronger, safer, together” was met with derision.

Two days later, Victoria walked away from relaxing mask rules and initially two Virgin plane loads of passengers were thrust into 14 days of isolation.

For the PM to even dare to dream about Australians getting their freedom back is an insult, because as the past two years has shown, he can’t actually do anything about it.

PR spin and slogans seem to be his go-to position, but when Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews and Queensland’s Anastasia Palaszczuk are really determining our freedoms, it’s a call Australians realise he just can’t deliver on.

Don’t promise something you can’t deliver the electorate would be my advice.

Then, we had the “stronger, safer, together” stuff in the same speech, which when unpacked, is again, just words not action.

Let’s start with together. In my lifetime, Australia has never been more divided.

State premiers have run roughshod over Canberra, slammed borders shut and turned Australians against each other.

Victorians driving Victorian plated cars into Queensland — on the rare occasion that border was open — were derided as lepers and, in worst cases, refused service.

West Australian Premier Mark McGowan is Public Enemy No.1 for those of us in the east. The AFL – wrongly in my view – gave Perth the AFL grand final, and once played, McGowan put up the drawbridge.

That’s not what I’d call “together”, and the resentment from the rest of Australia will last a very long time, regardless of what Scott Morrison wishes.

If he visits WA during the election campaign it won’t be the odd punter not shaking his hand but a whole state.

Victorian resentment over the AFL grand final being played in Perth will last a long time. Picture: AAP

“Safer” is his other slogan. Well, given we are nearly two years into a pandemic made worse by slow vaccine roll outs and still don’t have a new, completed quarantine facility, I’d argue Australians don’t feel safer at all; anxious is more accurate.

As for “stronger”, tell that to the thousands of small and medium businesses that will never open again and the mental health experts who have seen an explosion in youth mental health issues and perhaps even suicide.

This is the problem with someone who believes marketing slogans translate to actual outcomes — they don’t. Morrison will argue that instilling confidence in people by remaining upbeat and telling whoever will listen that “she’ll be right, mate” will fix things, but it won’t.

The only thing the current PM has going for him is that the bloke trying to beat him — Anthony Albanese — is even more shallow. Albo reckons a few new suits, a haircut, some new glasses and dropping a few kilos in weight will get him over the line.

He’s got to be kidding himself.

So, what a choice for Australia: Someone we suspect is a fake marketing guy versus someone who doesn’t really want to tell us what he stands for in case he scares us.

Morrison can’t deliver “stronger safer together” and he knows it.

He’s just hoping we don’t notice.