Floundering PM stumbles over his own bag of tricks

Cartoon: Johannes Leak

There were a few things Scott Morrison got right with his mea culpa press conference on Tuesday. The first was that he had it. It was at least a sign that the Prime Minister finally realised just how much trouble he was in.

He has floundered for five weeks. Revelations by Peter van Onselen of yet another scandal close to home spurred him to front the media to talk about floods, then apres that deluge he tried to construct a shelter from the other deluge threatening to drown him.

He tried everything. He was repentant, he sought forgiveness, he admitted he made mistakes, he promised to make amends without saying exactly how, he allowed his emotions to overflow as he expressed his love for his family and his faith.

Morrison was tearful in front of the media, then choked up again as he walked into his party meeting, before he even spoke, although that might have had more to do with the way his press conference ended, with yet another disaster, than how it began.

Scott Morrison during Question Time on Wednesday. Picture: Getty Images

He had to take a moment to compose himself before urging his female MPs to be trailblazers like Dame Enid Lyons, the first woman elected to the House of Representatives.

Liberal women have suffered by allowing themselves to be chained to the talking points, to become the new Stepford Wives of politics, often forced to defend the indefensible. Now at least they are free to talk about quotas.

That is useful, although quality of the candidates as well as the capacity of the leader to consult, listen and act matters more. Also, hearing women of influence bemoan the toxic culture they helped perpetuate by bullying other women is sickening. But that’s a column for another day.

One of the many problems faced by Morrison during this rolling crisis is that the case against him and the failure of government to protect women has been prosecuted largely by women. The government’s senior women, compromised or timid or too ambitious to even think about breaking out, have held back.

The defence, such as it is, has been mounted largely by men, mainly the Prime Minister, although one of the best suggestions came from Russell Broadbent for a national gathering of women, which Morrison says is already in train, which came as a surprise to people.

Strong, articulate women, such as Grace Tame, followed by Brittany Higgins, began the essential difficult work of demolishing structures that have protected predators. Their cause was relentlessly, devastatingly pursued by Labor frontbenchers Tanya Plibersek, Kristina Keneally, Penny Wong and Catherine King, the Greens’ Sarah Hanson-Young, crossbenchers Zali Steggall and Helen Haines, and a slew of opposition backbenchers. It’s a bomb squad planting devices, detonating or defusing them.

And Morrison and his government have been spectacularly, conspicuously, inept in their responses. Unfortunately, the reset the Prime Minister had embarked on literally ended in tears.

In portent and content it was biblical, full of thunderbolts and lightning, following a sadly familiar pattern. So much about it was wrong. It was too late coming. Too much of it was about him. Too much of it didn’t stack up. There were too many deflections, too many straw men and women, and it climaxed with vengeful threats of retribution after he was challenged by a journalist.

Morrison was not criticised (Twitter aside), as he sought to imply, for discussing the rape allegations made by Higgins with his wife, Jenny, or for talking about his daughters. He was criticised because he had failed to grasp the gravity of the situation himself. His wife had to explain it to him, and even after that he lapsed again, like in his scripted speech effectively telling March 4 Justice protesters they were lucky they were “not met with bullets”. He sort of apologised for that by saying he hadn’t meant to offend.

Careful attention needs to be paid to every event and every word because of the slippery, tricky words or technicalities used by others and by him to extricate or protect him or change the conversation. They go like this: don’t ask, don’t tell; don’t show and don’t tell; if you don’t know, you can’t be blamed; even if you do know, it doesn’t mean you have to accept responsibility; keep denying, even if you have misled parliament, because eventually the story will move on.

It has been a wretched and shameful period for the government. So many important matters surfaced that the Prime Minister claimed not to know or hadn’t made it his business to find out, compounded by the other thing he purported to know that never happened.

Morrison’s accusation involving News Corp employees, thrown out because Sky News’ Andrew Clennell got under his skin, came only minutes after Morrison assured people he had listened and learned, after he teared up as he looked straight down the camera lenses to tell his daughters he would not let them down, after insisting he did not know of a rape in the office of one of his ministers until the story broke, but did apparently hear the night before his press conference about an alleged incident at News Corp that he then thought was OK to share with the world.

Except according to News Corp Australasia executive chairman Michael Miller, what the Prime Minister said was “simply untrue”. Oops. Morrison apologised for what he had done one hour before midnight. So many apologies, so little time.

The extraordinary discipline Morrison displayed during the 2019 election campaign that help­ed deliver victory, admittedly against a hopeless Bill Shorten, has deserted him. The image that has built up around Morrison that he has helped to create and he has come to believe himself — that he is something of a political genius, that he has sound judgment, that he is sure-footed, that he’s the daggy dad in touch with families in the burbs, that he is impregnable — is fraying.