Scott Morrison doesn’t need to cultivate an image – it’s him

’Scott Morrison has not had to cultivate the image of the bloke you would love to have as your neighbour. He just is, and that clearly comes across.’ Picture: Getty Images

The Labor Party has not been able to devise a strategy to bring Scott Morrison’s ratings down. If an election were to be held any time soon, he would romp in. He is just so hard to attack. He is obviously a nice bloke. He lives in Sydney’s Sutherland Shire and supports his local rugby league team, the Sharks. He goes to their games and wears the corny Sharks cap but somehow it doesn’t look corny.

Somehow it just seems right. He sits among the crowd and looks right at home. So does Anthony Albanese when he attends a South Sydney Rabbitohs game but the media don’t give him the same sympathetic coverage.

Fear not – I am not about to cry foul over an anti-Labor media conspiracy. Morrison has not had to cultivate the image of the bloke you would love to have as your neighbour. He just is, and that clearly comes across.

As long as the economy stays buoyant, it is hard to see how Labor can win an election. The problem for Labor is that it can’t be seen to be predicting doom and disaster when there are no signs that the world economy is about to collapse. Indeed, in the short to medium term the future looks pretty good.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison with Anthony Albanese during a service at the Australian War Memorial. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Gary Ramage

Perhaps manufacturing could be on a bigger upswing but given that things looks reasonably good anyway, it would be churlish to criticise the Prime Minister on that front as well. There is little point in standing back, or going quietly if you are in opposition, but you are likely to stay there in the wilderness if you are not much more than a member of the government’s cheer squad.

Josh Frydenberg is also a strong performer and a big plus for the government. Like his boss, he has earned the reputation of having a pair of hands capable of managing whatever is in front of him. Minor kerfuffles can be quickly buried – like the Angus Taylor drama that came and went.

If the Coalition were in a weaker state then Taylor’s travails would have been more intense and would have lasted longer. There is no way that an opposition can make mountains out of molehills when voters feel relaxed and comfortable about those who are in power.

John Howard and Bob Hawke knew that the punters are happiest with the government when they are not hearing about them. Remember that very few punters have any interest in politics at all. If voting wasn’t compulsory very few would turn up. Some years back the NSW government experimented with this idea and held a local government election without compulsory voting. A miserable 11 per cent of those eligible to vote turned out. The experiment was quickly dropped and the situation went back to normal.

Senate systems around the world notoriously protect the interests of the sparsely populated states against the heavily populated ones. This leads to a thinly populated Montana having the same number of senators as New York and California, and Tasmania having the same number as NSW.

While Paul Keating’s reference to senators as “unrepresentative swill” may have been a tad harsh, the basic sentiment about the size of the Senate and how it was made up, had some merit. It is yet another example of the Keating brilliance. He really is a terrific writer. Brutal, perhaps, but definitely brilliant. He once accused the Canadian publishing mogul, Conrad Black of “having swallowed a thesaurus”. If you got into a blue with PJK you certainly knew all about it.

Anthony Albanese with Prime Minister Scott Morrison during Question Time at Parliament House in Canberra. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Gary Ramage

Apart from being a faction leader in Canberra, I was also a de facto shop steward. Hawke and Keating knocked back a series of parliamentary salary increases naively believing that this would win public support. It had been tried many times before and never worked but Hawke and Keating thought it would work for them. It didn’t. The public knew that in the end the increase would be accepted and they were right. In the US the president is paid very little because of the assumption that only the wealthy could ever get that far. Sadly, they have proven correct.

Normally, when you hear of someone being reluctant to produce their tax returns it is because they do not want the extent of their wealth made public. In Donald Trump’s case he doesn’t want his tax returns to be made public because he is afraid that those returns will show he is not a billionaire, as he has always boasted.

American schoolchildren recite or sing their national anthem before school every morning. Here such a ritual would be considered too nationalistic or over the top. Maybe we are too laid back about such things or maybe our anthem is such a crappy one that we just can’t be bothered with it. When our troops are heading into harm’s way they would always sing Waltzing Matilda. It’s the de facto national anthem whether anyone likes it or not. “Jolly jumbucks” and “billabongs” are not part of our normal language but the troops sing them with gusto when they get the opportunity. Personally, I don’t give a damn about tradition and I couldn’t care less about the odd stares of other nations when we sing it.

This is the song that gets our hearts thumping and our blood pumping. If you want to rally a sporting team or lift the troops, this is your song of choice. The mob worked out that this is the song they want to sing to celebrate anything Australian. No amount of urging from politicians will change this. It is anti-establishment and rebellious. You imagine it is a song to which Ned Kelly would have given his approval. It may not be Shakespeare but he wasn’t an Aussie. Banjo Paterson most certainly was.