Scott Morrison’s bushfires troubles all of his own making

He hasn’t performed well, but Morrison has time to show better leadership, more empathy.

Scott Morrison meets property owners Simon and Madelyn Kelly during his visit to a fire-damaged property on Kangaroo Island on Wednesday. Picture: AAP

Scott Morrison starts the year on the back foot. Very few people would have predicted that, even five weeks ago, but that is politics. Turns on a dime.

This past fortnight — maybe even the past month — has been a disaster for him. Not a disaster. Let’s reserve that for the fires, which are not as bad as Americans seem to think but still awful.

The Prime Minister hasn’t handled it well. Some people say: well, what’s he supposed to do? He can’t venture into the inferno with a fire hose. No, he can’t. But he can lead.

He hasn’t been doing that, at least not swiftly and convincingly, which is interesting. Morrison is supposed to be the constituent-whisperer. He won the election ­because he understood what the Australian people want from Canberra, which is to not hear so much from them, remember?

What happened to that guy? Maybe it was all a myth and voters really did just vote against Bill Shorten and his plan to end ­franking credits.

The Australian people may well feel hostile about Canberra most of the time and, honestly, who can blame them? But you do need leadership during a crisis.

What does that mean? Leadership is something you know when you see it and feel when it’s absent. The principles are clear: first, you have to turn up; second, show ­resolve and empathy; third, outline a clear path forward.

Morrison failed at every hurdle. Here is what he needed to do.

As soon as it became apparent that Australia had a crisis on its hands he should have announced his intention to address the nation. He should have gone immediately and commandingly to the lectern, in his darkest suit and tie, and said to the men and women of Australia: this is serious.

Because it is serious.

Children have lost fathers, wives their husbands, mothers their sons. That’s enough, without even the loss of fauna and habitat. There have been wrenching scenes: a little boy sucking hard on a dummy at his dad’s funeral; paddocks filled with charred sheep; on it goes. This is really hard. But we know hard, don’t we? We’ve always known hard.

This crisis began shortly before Christmas, which ­happens also to be the anniversary of Cyclone Tracy, which killed 71 people and destroyed 70 per cent of Darwin’s buildings. That was hard. Morrison could and should have drawn a parallel in his speech: we were tested then and we found courage.

We are resilient people. We will rebuild and we will recover.

Australians helped each other in 1974. We are helping each other still. Our firefighters are still out there. Because that is what we do here. We are mates.

To our firefighters, many of whom are volunteers, we say: we see you. We are in awe of your ­determination and your spirit. We thank you. It is because of you that we will be remembered not as the nation ravaged by fire but as a nation ­determined to rise.

Of course, words are not enough. The address to the nation, very early in the piece, would also have been the moment to commit the army and the navy, to put the shoulder of every federal government agency to the wheel.

Constitutionally, it may have been right for Morrison to leave things to the states. Politi­cally, it was a mistake. Now, to the future.

Australia faces hard questions. We know summer is starting earlier and lasting longer; that fire is catching hold more easily and burning hotter; that blazes are larger and harder to extinguish.

We know bushfires are sometimes the fault of arsonists; and lightning strikes; and sometimes controlled burns gone wrong; and some take hold with ferocity ­because of the dry heat; or else ­because of the drought; and the crisis has, of course, been exacerbated by climate change, which turbocharges conditions. This is not normal. It will likely get worse.

We aim to emerge from this crisis determined to make this country a safer one in which to live. What is needed is a nationwide strategy that protects our environment and our way of life. One thing we can immediately do is embrace the wisdom of those custodians of this land for thousands of years. We could announce the creation of an indigenous ranger program to supervise a new campaign of cultural burning.

We know it works and also that it may now be essential to our survival. Cultural burning involves knee-high burns, in cooler wea­ther, carefully supervised, to take out some of the fuel. Young indigenous people interested in their cultural heritage, and environmental management, should be encouraged to apply. Aboriginal cultural fire practitioners standing willing to assist the government in managing the problem.

There must also be a bushfire summit, of course, and it must ­refuse to take no questions, and it must consider all possible answers.

This kind of leadership, ­empathetic and solutions-driven, has precedent in Australia. Think John Howard leading against the interests of the Nat­ional Party following Port Arthur. Think Bob Hawke granting citizenship to Chinese students following Tiananmen Square (did you see them on the day of his ­funeral holding their smiling kids aloft, so pleased and proud to be here?).

Think also of Craig Foster in his campaign to rescue a young soccer player, Hakeem al-Araibi, from an unjust detention in a Thai prison. Do you know they had never even met? It was simply the right thing to do, so he did it.

Then, too, we saw the Thai cave divers who did not say: these are not our kids, not our country, not our problem. They strapped on the diving masks and brought them out. Now it’s Morrison’s turn.

Logically, it will be some time before he next takes a #smoko. Nobody ­begrudges the PM a break, especially not when he has children. He needs to take care of that side of his life. Yes, he’s the Prime ­Minister. But he is also a husband and father.

He is entitled to a holiday and, if there’s a disaster, he should come home. This was presumably the plan when Morrison went to Hawaii. But someone, and I think we can assume it was Morrison, decided the holiday should be kept secret. He wasn’t going to tell the ­nation he was gone. Nobody really knows why he decided to do that. It wasn’t like he was headed to Mar-a-Lago. Maybe he thought: “I don’t need to bother the Australian people with my holiday plans because who do I even think I am? They’ve got their own holidays to look forward to.”

But then came photographs of singed koalas and hazy skies, and where were Morrison’s famed ­instincts? His radar for the Australian people? Nowhere to be seen.

The hashtag #wherethebloodyhellareyou? was soon trending, helped along by Lara Worthington, nee Bingle. Morrison gave her a start, ­remember?

A pile-on ensued and looked for a moment like it was getting too nasty, which is often a good thing for a leader. People start to feel sorry for them.

A potential tipping point came when Morrison turned up at a ­relief centre with a bag of groceries. “One bag!” Twitter cried. “Cheap git!” What was he supposed to do? Wheel in a trolley?

People were just starting to say: oh, come on, he’s called in the army, he’s called in the navy, he’s cancelled a trip to India, even to the cricket, and, yes, he was slow but he’s here now. But then he went to Kangaroo Island and told the shattered ­locals: “At least there have been no lives lost.” That’s just unforgivable. Two lives, a pilot father and a doctor son, were lost on Kangaroo ­Island. How could Morrison not know this? He says he meant no firefighter lives lost. Some comfort. The moment was caught on video because the world, and politics, has changed.

Morrison is Prime Minister in the age of frantic social media. Forget moguls. Individual journalists have huge media followings: 100,000-plus people who retweet and comment, and it’s not just viral, it’s global.

Twitter was barely a thing on Black Saturday in Victoria 10 years ago. Those fires were worse, much worse, in terms of lives lost but there were no Golden Globes shout-outs back then, no celebrity comedians with 6.4 million fans on Instagram, ready to pony up. Morrison is not to blame for that, nor for the bushfires. He is to blame for the back foot upon which he finds himself. Australians have for months expressed concern about how summer was shaping up. Foreboding became reality, and Morrison should have ­responded with empathy and creative resolve.

He didn’t, and there may well be a hint there as to how his prime ministership will one day end ­(because they all end, eventually).

These bushfires are the first big crisis of his prime ministership, and he has not performed particularly well. What happens when the next one comes along?