Scott Morrison’s coronavirus confusion stands out in a crowd

Scott Morrison presides over the COAG meeting in Sydney on Friday. Picture: AAP

Say what you like about Australians stockpiling toilet paper; it makes about as much sense as the press conference Scott Morrison presided over on Friday, where he set something of a record for sending mixed messages to an anxious nation.

In a crazy two hours in Can­berra, the PM’s Keep Calm and Carry On message was spectacularly erased by the revelation poor old Peter Dutton has attended federal cabinet meetings while quietly harbouring the coronavirus.

The logic of Friday’s presser was as hard to fathom as the carry-on in the toiletries aisle at the local supermarket. From Monday, Australians are to avoid gathering in crowds of more than 500. But feel free to go your hardest for the next 48 hours, be it cheering on your beloved Cronulla Sharks, stage-diving at an outdoor rock festival, or seeing if you and 499 friends can break the world record for cramming into a telephone booth.

At the stroke of midnight on Sunday, all these endeavours will adopt a more serious hue. No crowds of more than 500 anywhere, thanks.

Unless, of course, it comes to the trifling business of sending your children to school. You can keep doing that, even though no one at Friday’s press conference could explain the virological difference between a high school of 1500 kids and staff being cooped up eight hours a day, five days a week, versus a couple of hours in the outer watching the NRL.

In his post-Hawaiian incarnation, after the blowback he suffered over his initial handling of the bushfires, Morrison has at times sounded indecisive and defensive. His determination to persist with attending the football this weekend looked like a politically driven desire to avoid losing face, having indicated earlier this week his intention to attend. Perhaps he was trying to adopt a business-as-usual approach to calm us down. But now that crowds have been effectively banned from Monday, his determination to attend the footy was just confusing. There is no logical difference between the danger of crowds on Sunday and on Monday. And surely the leader of the nation should be extra-vigilant to ensure he himself does not fall ill, unless of course Dutts has already infected him.

It is also hard to reassure a frazzled nation that things are chugging along according to plan while also confirming that you have convened what is effectively a war cabinet, one member of whom is about to self-isolate.

His eventual late-afternoon announcement that he would not be attending the football after all was a fitting postscript to the strangest of days. The strangest part of the Morrison press conference was his answer to whether the AFL season should continue as planned. That’s a matter for them, he said, suggesting that in our national chain of command the reporting line runs upwards from the Prime Minister’s office towards the all-powerful Gill McLachlan.

This type of indecision has been the weakest part of the government’s effort this week. It’s the same thing we heard from Treasurer Josh Frydenberg ahead of the utter shambles involving the Melbourne Grand Prix, where he said the continued staging of the race was a matter for “the authorities”. I suppose modesty can be a virtue, but it’s in serious overabundance when the nation’s chief financial officer can regard himself as but a humble bookkeeper compared with the greater powers at the Formula One Group.

I work on commercial breakfast radio in Adelaide and was almost certain last year that Morrison would win the election, which he did, deservedly, by pitching to the centre and adopting a sleeves-up approach prior to the election on big issues such as the drought. You get a sense of what normal, suburban voters think when you work in talkback, and none of our listeners hated the guy, not like all those feral lefties talking to each other on Twitter. There has been a shift in the suburban mood since Hawaii, though, especially in the bushfire states.

And in a state such as mine, which has the highest proportion of elderly residents in Australia, the greatest clamour amid this crisis is for simple, meaningful information. People are seriously confused and genuinely scared. For the past fortnight the job has fallen to our elderly radio listeners to try to wrap their heads around this new thing called Google to work out if they’re going to die or not. There has been no government advertising campaign explaining in plain language what the coronavirus is, which symptoms you should worry about, which symptoms you can ignore. Yet when the government found itself in strife over its bushfire response, the ads were rolled out in record time.

After scientists have found a cure for the virus, they should set their minds to creating a fountain of youth to turn John Howard back into a 60-year-old man. It has felt for more than a decade that this country has lacked clear leadership. Scott Morrison should look to his mentor, reflect on the clarity and decisiveness Howard showed after Port Arthur, on tax reform, on terror, and start acting again like he’s the person most Australians voted for last year — to be their boss.