Patience running out for those who pretend to solve the nation's problems

On Friday, the Prime Minister, campaigning ahead of the Eden-Monaro byelection, spoke to radio station 96.3 FM, Sounds of the Mountains. He had been struck, he said, on a trip to Batlow earlier this year, by the hard road ahead for orchardists. You can’t “plant a few trees and they pop up and you're producing apples in a few months”. Rebuilding after bushfires would take a decade or more. “I was quite moved by it, I’ve got to tell you, and that has massively informed our plans.”

One senses the Prime Minister fancies himself an orchardist - long timeframes are on his mind. There has been speculation an election will come next year, but in that same interview he said a general election would take place in two years and emphasised just how much would be done in that time. And he is thinking longer-term as well, because he has begun to talk out loud about the government’s five-year plan to rebuild the economy to the point it would have reached anyway had coronavirus not struck.

Scott Morrison seems to be gearing up for a five-year plan.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

That talking point tells you two things. First, the election might be two years away, but the government is thinking hard about it now. Second, the government is very, very concerned about where the economy will be by then. Morrison is preparing for a campaign arguing that while things are still pretty rough, he must be allowed to finish the job.

These lengthy timeframes should remind us of a crucial fact about that byelection. We are only in the fourth month of dealing with this virus. Some commentators are calling the next election; some have drawn conclusions based on Saturday’s vote. Even if we could say with confidence that the voters of Eden-Monaro are responding to the government’s performance – a dicey proposition in a byelection – they can only judge what the government has done so far, in the circumstances the government has so far faced. And voters know this, which I suspect explains the fact the Coalition’s vote has remained static in national polling even while Morrison’s approval has climbed. Voters like what he’s done in that brief stretch, and know it’s been a very brief stretch.

To me, the most interesting thing about the byelection is the fact that, since 2007, the share of the combined vote going to the Liberal and Labor parties has shrunk at every election. The statistic isn’t pure – the Nationals’ vote complicates things – but does, in the broad, mirror the national decline in the vote going to major parties, itself part of a broader shattering of faith in institutions.

Also last week, Morrison made national news by citing “anecdotal evidence” that businesses were struggling to hire because people were choosing to take JobSeeker rather than look for work. This was curious, because facts seemed against him: jobs have been getting more applicants than they were before the virus hit, and the “anecdotes” the government has cited relate to a tiny fraction of businesses. On one level this is just a return to that old Liberal bogeyman, the dole bludger. But it is also, I think, a symptom of what is to come.

Illustration: Jim PavlidisCredit:

When voters first began to turn against institutions, it seemed we might be at the beginning of a new phase of accountability, in which leaders tried to rebuild trust. Instead, leaders responded with deflections. They presented their own parties as enemies, themselves as insurgents: hence Donald Trump, hence Morrison talking about the Liberals’ “muppet show”. Or by positioning themselves against the supposedly evil, incompetent system they had been quite happy to take part in, while doing little about it.

At some point, that approach wears thin. As one fake enemy becomes implausible, another must be found to take its place – like, say, the lazy jobseeker. In other words, this is a delaying tactic, a way of displacing criticism, not responding to it. Which gives rise to the question: how long can this sleight of hand be maintained?

An interesting answer might just have been provided. Outside of major party politics, but inside two of our most important institutions, major news broke this last fortnight. A former High Court justice, Dyson Heydon, was accused of serial sexual harassment (he denies all accusations). After Indigenous reporters said they had been badly treated, the leadership of SBS was criticised for its overwhelming whiteness.

These are just two examples, but they point to an important fact: part of the reason we have so little trust in institutions is because those institutions are broken. Such conversations are coming faster, now. There is not much patience for those who pretend they are there to solve the nation’s problems, while sidestepping accountability themselves.

There are specific political parallels, in regards to major parties’ problems with diversity and sexual harassment. But I think there is another point as well, about our changing attitude to those in power, our intolerance of excuses, our unwillingness to wait for promised incremental change that never comes. It is the type of rapid cultural shift a prime minister planning on going to an election promising things will get better – trust me, I have a five-year plan – might want to very seriously consider.

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