Scott Morrison monsters Australia Post boss Christine Holgate but indulges Daniel Andrews
When will the Liberal Party stop treating Victoria like a protected “progressive” species?
As monstrous as the Victorian Premier’s leadership has been, that is no excuse to ignore the Prime Minister’s crass political games. Not against Daniel Andrews, sadly. But against the boss of Australia Post. On reflection, Scott Morrison’s race to front the barricades, expressing faux outrage over four Cartier watches, is not as politically cunning as he imagined. It provided an awkward contrast to his timid treatment of Andrews. And worse, the political attack on Christine Holgate is bad for the country.
Last Thursday, within an hour of Senate estimates hearing that the Australia Post boss, on behalf of the board, handed out four watches to senior executives as rewards for a $66m deal with big banks over banking arrangements, Morrison bellowed in parliament that he was “shocked and appalled”. He demanded Holgate stand aside “and if she doesn’t wish to do that, she can go”.
If the Prime Minister wants to discard Labor’s cartoon sketch of him as Scotty from Marketing, he might start by showing more consistency when he employs outrage for political effect. Victorians, and others, might wonder why he didn’t muster up the same killer political instinct towards the Victorian Premier, whose lockdown cost the country $100m a day in lost GDP, 1200 jobs lost every single day, and $200m a day in support from taxpayers across the country.
Instead, for many weeks now, Josh Frydenberg and Greg Hunt have led a concerted pushback against Andrews. In Question Time yesterday, the Treasurer delivered the speech of his political life. He displayed passion, authenticity and truth when holding Andrews to account for his incompetence over hotel quarantine and for the tragic impact of a disproportionate and lengthy lockdown that has damaged Australians’ lives, disrupted education, inflicted loneliness, rising rates of mental anxiety, self-harm and depression.
Contrast the PM’s mostly supine approach to Andrews over many months. To be sure, few expected Morrison would criticise hefty restrictions on fundamental human rights in Victoria. He has admitted publicly that these matters are of little interest to him. Still, it has been bewildering that Morrison has not been at the frontline to hold Andrews to account for incompetence that has killed more than 700 Australians and a lockdown that has caused so much further damage.
Is Morrison afraid of Victoria’s Labor Premier, who has a reputation as a brute political animal? Perhaps the PM is wary of Victorians, worried that he may not get the kind of embrace down south that he gets on the hustings in Queensland, dressed in his “pov dog” hat, mingling with locals.
If that’s the case, Morrison should get to know Victorians better. They need a federal leader who will hold Andrews to account for damage done. Indeed, it’s high time the Liberal Party, state and federal, stopped treating Victoria like a protected “progressive” species that leans naturally left, to be handled with kid gloves.
What else explains Morrison’s weakness in the face a leadership failure in Victoria unparalleled in modern times? It cannot be about uniting the national cabinet anymore. The West Australian Premier has all but carved out his state from the rest of the country. And the Prime Minister has been publicly flaying Queensland Labor Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk.
Rather than picking off low-hanging fruit in his daily political skirmishes, the Prime Minister needs to focus on consequential leadership.
Australians might reasonably expect Morrison to test an issue of major national significance for its constitutional implications. Shutting state borders will become an unfortunate precedent for the future. And, as day follows night, the threshold for doing so again will get lower and lower. It won’t be a once-in-a-generation pandemic that leads to borders closing next time. In other words, a functioning federation is at stake.
There is another unfortunate consequence of Morrison’s laboured indignation over Holgate. When the Prime Minister of the day confects crass anger for his own political purposes, soon enough clever, experienced people will stop considering a role like running Australia Post.
Instead, these jobs will be filled by far less experienced people. It might become a new career path for former politicians who have never run a business in their lives.
Either that, or more experienced candidates will in future demand the equivalent of a “sacrificial lamb” clause in their employment contracts so that final payouts reflect the fact that they can be effectively terminated at will by politicians playing political games over minor infractions.
Sure, Holgate should not have handed out Cartier watches. But it was not even close to a hanging offence. If the Australia Post boss had paid cash bonuses to a handful of senior executives, few would have raised an eyebrow. Maybe she should have offered them season passes to Cronulla Sharks games.
It’s bad enough that politics is filled with too many political hacks with little experience of the real world. That paucity of experience is on show in many government responses to COVID-19. Most sensible, smart people with better options steer clear of politics. Feral factional fights, kowtowing to lightweights and enduring endless calls from political opponents to resign over minor infractions is not enticing.
A similar rot is spreading to the corporate world. Notice the pattern: the smallest of infractions is whipped into a media frenzy, leading smart people to pack their bags. Behind the scenes there is almost always a disgruntled leaker with an ulterior motive trying to edge out a competitor or sulking over their own lacklustre career. Inevitably, over time, corporate Australia will be run by less competent people.
Morrison’s over-reaction last week has made sure this toxic witch-hunt for scalps will infect government bodies too.
Cheap politics like this will dumb down the country’s biggest government organisations, because if you pay peanuts, and chase the good ones out for no good reason, we will be left with an even larger quotient of incompetents running important institutions.
Liberal MP Andrew Laming says that the Australia Post boss should not be paid more than a High Court judge. It is dreadful logic. Judges enjoy privileges that the rest of us do not. Judges can’t be removed from office — except for serious misconduct. They get an incredible pension: after 10 years of service, they get 60 per cent of their judicial salary each and every year for life, guaranteed, and CPI-indexed. The chief justice earns $592,220, so that’s a very handsome and very safe pension. And when a judge dies, the pension passes to their partner.
Consider the capital sum that an ordinary mortal would need to secure that level of annual pension. And unlike a judge’s pension, our superannuation is subject to the vagaries of the share market.
So, bleating about Holgate being paid more than a judge is political nonsense from people who should know better. But that’s the problem. Most MPs don’t know better.
The needless political lynching of Holgate last Thursday, without further evidence, came with a high price of excitably poor leadership from the Prime Minister. The next time Morrison wants to strengthen his common- man credentials, perhaps go to the footy, and preferably in Victoria.
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