PM’s standing firm on the middle ground

The PM pledges to restore stability not just to the Liberal Party but to the entire political system.

Scott Morrison at Kirribilli House this week. Picture: Hollie Adams

He is cheery, combative and policy savvy. Polls and the lived ­experience suggest Scott Morrison is a good performer on the hustings. But Morrison is making a bigger claim — he is putting his imprint on the Liberal Party and aspiring to be a long-run leader.

“I will continue as I have started,” he told The Weekend Australian this week in the lounge room at Kirribilli House. “I think the Liberal Party has never been more united now than for many years. I would only encourage you to speak to my colleagues who will support that.” Many would reject his claim as bravado.

Labor campaigns daily on Liberal chaos, divisions and sabotage that has resulted in three prime ministers. Independents assault senior Liberals in heartland seats. The party still frets over its identity in the wake of the Abbott-Turnbull civil war. Yet Morrison has given the Liberals more hope and coherence than many thought remotely possible in Aug­ust last year.

For two Newspolls the government has clawed back to a 51-49 per cent deficit. That is largely Morrison’s achievement. Many Liberals felt this bridge would be too far when Morrison became leader after last year’s political bloodletting. The first Newspoll under Morrison revealed a Liberal debacle, a 56-44 Labor lead with a fractured government contemplating a landslide against it.

That now constitutes a reduction in the ALP lead from 12 points to two points. If it translates into the election result Morrison will not be satisfied with his defeat but the scale of the turnaround would be immense. Just as Malcolm Turnbull was overrated when he became leader, Morrison has been underrated.

For Liberals, the obvious mes­sage of the campaign is the Morrison imprimatur and its break from Tony Abbott and Turnbull. The party, still plagued with cultural and structural issues, is emerging as a different beast.

Morrison, as he says, governs the party “from the middle”. The feature of the new leadership, Morrison and Josh Frydenberg, is their quest to re-establish the Liberals with their base. Last August this was a party in deep crisis. It is folly to think a new dawn has arrived. But if the Liberals can hold much of their base, that will constitute a major feat, even a platform for recovery.

For the Liberals this election involves two issues: can they survive in government, and have they found in Morrison a leader able to substitute stability for chaos? Both will be answered by the result. Morrison, of course, runs to become PM in his own right. The paradox, however, is that a competitive defeat may see him stay leader and guide the future Liberal direction. That path would be very different from Abbott or Turnbull.

Morrison is unafraid to put his stamp on the party policy and unafraid to campaign aggressively against Labor and the Greens — he targets their mutual dependency aware this is Labor’s ultimate political achilles heel.

“I know where we started on that day,” Morrison says of his ­arrival in office. “I know how far behind the line we were on that day. And I know where we are today.” Morrison’s pitch is to the forgotten Australians below the radar who fall outside the ­progressive bubble in which political debate is conducted.

Morrison, above all, is a community-based politician whose personal life revolves around family, footy club and church. He is an instinctive transactional politician. While of conservative disposition, he ranges across the spectrum and makes judgments dictated by results, not ideology.

“Australians need to know I am passionate about the NDIS and mental health,” he says. “And that is why I am passionate about the economy.” This is his perpetual theme — fail on the economy and you fail on health and education. He believes Labor and Bill Shorten are prisoners of their stakeholders and have misread the Australian character.

He says the “magic thing” people want is “to be able to plan for their future with confidence”. This is what John Howard delivered.

Morrison says: “I want people to have that, to look forward over 10 years, to know how much tax they’re not going to have to pay, to know there’s someone there who instinctively knows the right way to manage the economy, who is not beholden to this or that interest group and who will do the right thing. People want a government that has simple honest aspirations — not turning the tables, turning things on their head, engaging in a great class conflict and making grand unachievable promises about what they think they can do.

“Everything Labor is doing is dependent 100 per cent on charging Australians more for it.

“This is the thing Australians really baulk at, they’ll go, ‘yep, and when Labor tries this they’ll stuff it up’ and won’t deliver what they promised.”

His message is that people want concrete and specific results on hospitals, the NDIS, schools and roads — not the “big-scale changes” that excite the media. Alert to the false promises of politicians, Morrison says the public “is craving certainty of policy”. It wants trust and reliability. Morrison’s campaign is not short of ­vision by accident. He believes the public is not ­demanding a new direction for Australia. Morrison thinks the public is sceptical of the sweeping change agenda Shorten offers in nearly every area. The list is vast: new taxes and a tax-redistribution, a climate change crusade where the costs don’t matter, vast new spending, more power for ­unions, constitutional changes, intergenerational redistribution, topping up wages with taxpayer funds and a litany of government interventions in the cause of equity.

“Australians learned a long time ago what politicians can and can’t do,” Morrison says. “And they know what I’m putting on the table we can do.”

He pledges to restore stability not just to the Liberal Party but to the political system. He says this election is a watershed because it will purge the toxin. “I think it’s been a really bad decade in politics starting with the rolling of Kevin Rudd,” he says. “It all started then and it introduced a toxin to Australian politics, which, I believe, ends at this election.”

He says the rule change in both parties making political assassination more difficult means whoever wins this election — Morrison or Shorten — will govern the full term. “Our new rules are even tighter and stronger than those of the Labor Party,” he says.

“I welcome the fact that we’ve both changed. This election will be the first since John Howard was elected in 2004 that Australians will know that the prime minister they elect will be the prime minister for the next three years.”

Morrison’s strategy has been apparent for the past three years, originating when he was treasurer. It is designed to achieve three goals: return the budget to surplus; prioritise service delivery with ­significant funding increases for health, education and the NDIS; and offer tax cuts for individuals and business. His focus is to deliver on promises, and offer predictability and stability. Asked about his priorities if he wins Morrison has a simple answer — it is to legislate and implement the budget.

He dismisses the critique this is too static, that it is just about keeping the status quo. “I reject absolutely that we are offering just the same,” he says. “We are offering more — more on infrastructure, more on hospitals, more on schools, more on the NDIS, more on mental health, more on aged care, more on all these fronts, but in an affordable, responsible, achievable plan.

“No one can accuse us of not having a heart. If there’s one thing I’ve tried to get across as a new Liberal leader it’s that the economy is not an end in itself. That was the lesson of 2007. It was the lesson actually of 2016. It was the lesson of previous campaigns. That’s why each day I talk about the plan — more jobs, lower taxes, a budget surplus, paid down debt, investing in essential services.”

Implicit in these remarks is recognition of the political failures of the government in selling its agenda. Morrison says the government, if re-elected, will claim a mandate for its three-stage personal income tax package outlined in the budget worth $158 billion. It will be presented as a package and a plan for seven years.

Does Morrison believe Labor would accept the government’s mandate? He says: “Having gone through the past two elections and won them, that mandate has never been respected by Labor. The difference back in the Hawke-Keating years was that the good changes they made they were able to make because they had the ­support of the Liberal and National Party. That all ended in 1996.

“In 1996 Labor departed economic reform in this country. I did find it somewhat amusing when Bill Shorten was talking about mandates. I am yet to see Labor ­respect one in all my parliamentary experience. It is Labor who are making the case for mandates at this election and they are yet to ­respect one.”

Morrison knows that Coalition disunity and the fragmentation on the Centre-Right has given the Left a virtual free pass for five years. That has distorted the ­reality of our politics. His message as Liberal leader is that those days are over. Morrison will target the Labor-Greens preference and parliamentary partnership as the ­defining and flawed feature of progressive politics. Frankly, he has no choice given the virulent Labor assault on Morrison for his preference deal with Clive Palmer’s United Australia Party.

A feature of the Rudd-Gillard government, pivotal to its fall, was the fatal relationship between Labor and the Greens — fluctuating between alliance and antagonism. It is yet to be demonstrated whether Labor can govern successfully with the Greens as a potent presence on the progressive side, a feature that receives ­almost no media assessment. If Shorten wins, his victory will occasion the next test for whether the modern and permanently weakened Labor Party — with a section of its primary vote lost to the Greens on the Left — can govern Australia without having to make untenable concessions to the Greens.

“I think the Labor Party will be beholden to the Greens for any agenda they wish to pursue,” Morrison says. Asked if the Greens are a threat to Australia, he says: “Yes they are. They want to abolish the US alliance and remove every area of co-operation. Yes, they are a danger to the economy and they are a danger to national security. I think that is a fairly unremarkable statement.” Asked if the Greens pose a greater threat to Australia on the economy and national security than Pauline Hanson’s One ­Nation and Palmer’s United Australia Party, Morrison says: “I don’t believe they are a greater threat than Palmer, no. I don’t think he (Palmer) presents that threat when it comes to the economy and national security, absolutely not.”

Pressed whether One Nation poses a worse threat than the Greens, Morrison says: “They don’t. The Greens represent the greatest threat and the Labor Party has only moved closer and closer and closer to the Greens. It’s infesting their economic policy and it’s infesting their national ­security outlook.”

That last remark should be contested. The point, however, is Morrison has drawn the battle lines: the Greens are the most potent enemy to Australian life and standards. It is extraordinary that the Liberals, consumed with their own divisions for so long, have not put this branding on the Left and have allowed the Greens to gain social respectability. Morrison sees Labor as perpetually captive to its supporting interests — the trade unions and environmental activists. “I can be accused of many things,” he says. “But I don’t think anyone has challenged, as leader of the Liberal Party, my independence. When it comes to outside interests, I am immune.”

With energy policy a fiasco for the Coalition, Morrison navigates, in hostile waters, towards some sort of new position — he talks up renewables, talks up the reality of climate change, he accepts Australia’s responsibility for action as a global citizen but insists the government’s 26 per cent 2030 target will suffice as opposed to Labor’s 45 per cent that, he says, risks the economy.

What is the narrative here? It is Morrison’s rejection of the ideological demands of the conservatives when he became PM. On climate change, Morrison has been moving towards the centre.

Asked about Adani, Morrison says: “I have always supported mining, whether it is coal, iron ore, other resources projects or gas. The resources industry — whether it’s been coal or anything else — has played an enormous role in our country’s development.”

He criticises the assault on particular mines. He asks why Tanya Plibersek highlighted the Adani developer being an Indian company. He warns that activism will distort proper process. He attacks activists, saying: “They are seeking to remove an entire part of our economy for nothing more than a political argument and at some point you have to draw a line and say, hang on, there’s 55,000 jobs at stake here.”

Morrison warns of cultural ­degeneration. He says 40 per cent of schoolchildren think farmers hurt the environment; there has been a significant fall in the number of young people becoming mining engineers in Western Australia; he is horrified that “people are being told that mining is ­destroying the country”.

Morrison’s philosophy is to support all industry operating under proper approvals — mining, farming, fishing, manufacturing. Such logic sounds almost bizarre in the nation’s corrupted political debate over coal and resource projects.

He will run on the same consistent message to voting day. “That’s who I am,” Morrison says.

He carries the campaign on his shoulders, the legacy of five years of internal division.

The two ­pivotal questions are: can he win, and if not, can he salvage a competitive result?