At one stage during the three-part ABC television documentary Nemesis, George Brandis describes the battle between Tony Abbott and Malcolm Turnbull as Shakespearean. Give me a break.
If we are to mention Shakespeare in the same breath as this period of Liberal government, I’d use this quote to describe most of the people who took part in Nemesis: “I am sick when I do look on thee.”
As for listening to two of the former PMs who fronted cameras full of smiles and smirks for this series, I will steal this from the northern hemisphere-born Bard: “You have a February face, so full of frost, of storm and cloudiness.”
None of these former prime ministers deserves elevation to the level of a Shakespearean tragedy. It’s even more demented to include their supporters as players in some magnificently tragic battle – as Horatio was to Hamlet so was Wyatt Roy to Turnbull. Excuse me while I gag.
This was a grubby tale about ambitious men, and their hangers-on, and the top job.
Whatever one says about Abbott and Turnbull, and there is a lot to say for better or worse, depending on your politics, each had convictions. What’s most devastating about Scott Morrison is that his convictions are still unascertainable. He was in parliament for 17 years, including as a cabinet minister, and was PM for four years.
It’s a shame Morrison didn’t use his time in front of ABC cameras to reveal, finally, what values make him tick. It means we must accept, finally, that Morrison is a political animal. Nothing more. Nothing less.
Morrison must be applauded for winning the 2019 election after Abbott and Turnbull ripped the Liberal Party’s credibility to shreds. During his time, Australia signed up to a new security partnership with Britain and the US under AUKUS. What comes of it remains to be seen.
But there it more or less ends – depending on your view about his management of the pandemic. If you think it was political genius for a leader to shut the borders to an island nation, lock Australian citizens inside, prevent Australian citizens overseas from returning home, then Morrison is your man.
There is another view. Morrison set the template for Australia’s cruel, illiberal response. He didn’t have the nous to sensibly balance risk. Instead, he chose a sledgehammer to try to eliminate risk.
By closing the national border, and shutting out citizens, Morrison treated citizenship as disposable. Morrison emboldened state and territory leaders to lock up their people, close state and territory borders, and impose ever-constricting boundaries on our movements.
When Morrison backed West Australian premier Mark McGowan’s decision to shut down the state border again, in February 2022, it was cynical politics from Morrison in an election year. When Morrison demanded that the Queensland premier grant an exemption so a NSW woman could attend a funeral in Queensland, it reeked of hypocrisy given the Australians stranded overseas who couldn’t come home to bury their loved ones.
If you think Morrison and his treasurer, Josh Frydenberg, should be credited with the resilience of Australia’s $2.1 trillion economy – as it stood at the end of 2021 – it pays to remember that our economy rebounded after the pandemic for three simple reasons: soaring commodity prices, pent-up consumer demand and record government spending.
There was no Liberal genius to this outcome. Labor could so easily have done the same. Frydenberg can laud it all he likes, and draw John Howard in as supporter, but the fact remains that when voters took a second look at the Morrison government at the ballot box in 2022, they said no thanks to the government and to Frydenberg.
Nemesis went some way to explaining why. One was Morrison’s problem with women. Normally I’d give a wide berth to ABC types claiming that Liberal men have women problems. It’s usually biased bunkum.
But Morrison was dreadful on this front. He needed to speak to his wife to understand the gravity of an alleged rape in a minister’s office. Then came the cynical and superficial reshuffles, promoting a few more chicks to improve his electoral appeal, throwing the word women into a few more ministerial titles, promising a “fresh filter” in all matters to do with women, and announcing that Marise Payne was the prime minister for women.
Holy moly, I recall writing, it was about as meaningful to women as a degree in gender studies. All it did was highlight his cynical approach to politics, reinforce his lack of authenticity and remind us to ask what on earth Payne had done as minister for women in the Morrison government.
By the time the election rolled around, Morrison was so desperate that he started talking about the gender pay gap to appease inner-city seats women who presumably talk about this issue.
Simultaneously, he lobbed Katherine Deves into Warringah to address some kind of moral panic he imagined in outer suburban seats about the trans issue and protecting women’s sport from trans athletes.
Morrison’s commitment to both issues was non-existent. He didn’t actually do anything.
Perhaps the most cringe-worthy election moment was Morrison proving his close connection to female voters by shampooing a woman’s hair in a hairdressing salon.
If Morrison genuinely cared about women, he would not have allowed the men in his office to treat two Liberal women – Linda Reynolds and Fiona Brown – in the way they did. These two very decent women were attacked day in day out in parliament and in the media over the Higgins affair.
They were the only two women who encouraged Brittany Higgins to go to the police. They did everything they were told to do by parliament’s HR department. And they were hung out to dry by the prime minister and his office.
If the makers of Nemesis asked Morrison about his failure here, they didn’t air his response. Though one can guess from many of his responses across this series what his answer might have been: it wasn’t me, I didn’t know, I’m not to blame.
It’s a shame that Mark Willacy and the producers were not interested in exploring this dark chapter of Morrison’s leadership.
Nor did Nemesis explore Morrison’s dismal treatment of the rule of law. It’s one thing to forget to defend this foundational principle. It’s another thing to actively undermine it. It was a dark day for democracy when Morrison stood in the national parliament in February 2022 and apologised directly to Higgins for as yet untested claims and without knowing anything about the quality of evidence to support those claims. The prime minister effectively sided with forces gunning for Reynolds and Brown and worked against a fair trial for a defendant who is presumed innocent until found guilty by a court of law.
For lower-case liberals like me – meaning people who don’t join political parties but believe a healthy democracy depends on defending liberal values – Morrison was a shocker. It’s hard to imagine a single prime minister during my lifetime who would think that taking control of multiple ministries – and not telling your cabinet colleagues – was a good idea. Why the secrecy? The answer seems to be because he could.
I became a critic of Morrison because keeping Labor out of power made sense only when the Liberal Party was liberal and competent. Under Morrison, it was neither. Nemesis simply confirmed this and how hard it is to locate Morrison’s convictions, let alone authenticity.
Even Turnbull was preferable; when interviewed for Nemesis he didn’t try to hide his dreadful side. His self-delusional punchlines made me laugh at loud. “I owed it to Australia,” Turnbull explained when asked why he wanted to be prime minister.
While Abbott at least had the grace, decency and wisdom to not appear on Nemesis, these three Liberal leaders owe us. The least they can do for us is to go find a purpose to the rest of their lives rather than keep revealing their hatreds, their narcissism and their insecurities. Take a leaf from Julia Gillard’s book, gents.
What made me shiver on a very hot Sydney day was the sight of Morrison, along with a bunch of men – and it was mostly men – who obfuscated, laughed, smirked, lied and lobbed nasty insults when talking about this period of Australian politics.
In what other workplace would people take such clear delight in fronting a camera to lie and call their colleagues fat, shitheads, liars, turds, thugs, terrorists and traitors? Yet we wave it off as just politics.
Maybe that’s why we end up with the politicians we deserve, with obfuscators, liars, tricksters, schemers and some very nasty people as our elected representatives.
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