We ought to keep a sense of proportion. Morrison’s moves had little effect on his government. They don’t destroy his legacy, for good and ill. But they were extremely kooky.
In the one case where he exercised the power of his secret appointments, overruling his resources minister, Keith Pitt, it was just crackers that he went down this road. Any prime minister could have had the minister around for a cup of tea and a stern talking to and got his own way.
The whole thing is so weird that if the government had been the Jerry Seinfeld show, the only character you can imagine dreaming it up is Kramer.
One of Morrison’s greatest weaknesses was his overcentralisation of power.
Cabinet meetings became frustrating and meaningless. Every decision was taken by either the national security committee or the expenditure review committee. The members of those committees maintained group solidarity on their decisions, just as cabinet members maintain solidarity within the party rooms, and just as the Coalition maintains solidarity in parliament.
In other words, despite notional layers of scrutiny, real decision-making occurred among a tiny group of politicians. Morrison did not subvert democracy. Dictatorships have a lesson for democracies here. One-man dictatorships make enormous mistakes because no one gives the boss bad news and the boss does not have his views contested by powerful near-equals in cabinet. The Australian cabinet, at 23 members, is just way too big to be a deliberative, decision-making body.
Former cabinet ministers tell me it became a PowerPoint presentation bonanza. Nothing from NSC or ERC was ever seriously contested. Cabinet presentations became more common than cabinet submissions. The meetings became boring and tedious.
Successive prime ministers have enlarged cabinet as a way of buying off individuals and trying to bind their support, pretty ineffectively it must be said, in internal leadership contests. Morrison was particularly allergic to robust intellectual challenge. He either pushed or ushered out big figures such as Tony Abbott, Mathias Cormann, Julie Bishop and Christopher Pyne.
The last cabinet, which was all but anonymous, would have been much stronger with these four still there. And being a member of the outer ministry should not be a sign of contemptible political failure.
Really the cabinet should be no more than 12 to 16 strong, with the real business of government being determined there.
But Morrison’s own failures here – which, as I say, do not mean that he or his government were without substantial accomplishments and certainly didn’t threaten democracy – are part of a pattern across the West.
A failure to master good process, perhaps a contempt for good process, was a key element in Boris Johnson’s leadership failure in Britain. They say that politics is showbiz for ugly people. Johnson mastered the showbiz of politics better than anyone I’ve ever seen. He was that rarest of creatures, a politician who became a celebrity through his life as a politician. He was also a journalist but that didn’t make him unique. Many British politicians write newspaper columns.
At his best, Johnson used his celebrity to advance political causes he believed in, especially Brexit. But once he became prime minister he showed an astonishing lack of interest in, and mastery of, the boring nuts and bolts of government process. He was both lazy and a control freak. Famously, he missed many early COBRA (British government emergency committee) meetings in the early days of Covid. He rarely mastered policy briefings beyond their public marketing dimension. The contrast between Johnson and Margaret Thatcher, about whom there was never a hint of impropriety, and who relentlessly but conventionally drove cabinet and all government processes to achieve solid, reforming government, could not be stronger.
Political leaders who think it’s all about them often think the key problem is communication, because after all that’s the one thing they do well. There is a touch of Argentinian populist Juan Peron among many Western leaders these days. The worst line in Morrison’s train wreck of a press conference the other day was his claim that only he could understand the pressures he was under as PM. Gimme a break. It sounded altogether too much like Donald Trump’s “Only I can save America”.
Barack Obama was the first of the wave of celebrity candidates to win office in a big democracy in the past couple of decades. Obama famously had authored two books, the more famous of which was a self-indulgent and self-pitying memoir, and no legislation when, as a senator of almost zero experience, he ran for the presidency.
Old-fashioned ideas of process, such as advancing legislation or running an executive government, counted for nothing. Trump, though from the other side, was Obama’s logical successor and extension as the next celebrity candidate. Much of Trump’s inability to achieve solid policy outcomes from many of his ideas arose from his absolute failure to understand the processes of the American government.
John Howard ran an excellent cabinet government with, once it settled down, stable and authoritative ministers. Bob Hawke had done the same. Howard is a highly intelligent man but he didn’t market himself as an intellectual superstar, a la Kevin Rudd or Malcolm Turnbull. Nor did he try to go around cabinet, though he did begin the process of NSC dominating the larger cabinet. Good process doesn’t guarantee success but bad process guarantees failure.
Howard was consistently courteous, decent, unthreatening, a parliamentary lifer who knew how our system operates in all its multi-layered complexity, and generally was an incremental reformer.
If Anthony Albanese is to succeed as Prime Minister, he will succeed along similar lines. Mostly people like him, he’s a courteous and decent person, he moves in a particular political direction but generally he’s not threatening, so far he has aimed to do what he said he’d do, he’s possessed of common sense and generally does not conceive of himself as larger than life. These are big assets and Albanese should not lightly throw any of them away.
His program is not entirely to my taste, though so far he has been very good on national security. More than anything, after the continuous dysfunction from Rudd to Morrison, the nation needs a successful term of government.
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