By Mark Kenny
The metaphor was almost too literal.
As temperatures in North Queensland soared to bizarre highs and bushfires raged in its tropical hinterland, Sydney faced a one in 100 year deluge.
It disrupted everything, including shuttle flights to the rain-soaked capital where Parliament is sitting.
Prime Minister Scott Morrison in question time on Wednesday.Credit: Dominic Lorrimer
Chaos, dysfunction, disappointment and anger.
But on Capital Hill, the stormy weather outside was no match for the tumult within.
There, the Morrison government reeled from its self-inflicted triple whammy: insurrection, rejection, and finally, defection.
Hot on the red stiletto heels of the kick voters had given Liberals in Victoria, one of their own - the only Liberal to drag a Labor seat across the aisle in 2016 - quit in disgust.
Now a crossbencher, Julia Banks had railed at the political assassination of Malcolm Turnbull, and at what his brutal ouster said about the modern Liberal Party. She demanded to know why it had happened, why a moderate nation was beholden to a “reactionary and regressive right wing” rump.
Crickets.
Then Banks witnessed up close what voters (remember us?) thought of such back-door bastardry.
Former Liberal MP Julia Banks (centre) sits on the crossbench on Thursday with Kerryn Phelps (left) and Cathy McGowan (right). Credit: Dominic Lorrimer
With minimal fuss, Australians in the garden state turned their backs on law and order scare campaigns, feckless dog-whistling about Sudanese migrants, climate change indifference, and an overall presentation constructed in the negative.
Victorians knew the Andrews government was not perfect. There’d been mistakes, resignations, campaign and travel entitlement abuses, and the usual underperformance. But the alternative felt too much like Trump light. Too much like the angry, narrowing invective plaguing the nation’s talkback and subscription television. Too divisive and ultimately too lacking in hope.
And besides, there was Canberra where rancorous, anti-Turnbull Liberals had thumbed their nose at the centre-ground and heroically ignored the most enduring lessons of the Rudd-Gillard careen.
Leave the voters out, and they’ll leave you out. And if you do change, you better have a pretty comprehensive explanation at the ready.
Theirs would never come.
Forget Julia Gillard’s guileless “a good government had lost its way”; Scott Morrison would channel Trump to deny it even mattered. Indeed, the pursuit of such questions merely proved the existence of a “Canberra bubble”. His “drain-the-swamp” undertones were as obvious as they were troubling. Morrison would operate above such squalid intrigue of Canberra declaring ordinary Australians were not interested in history or politics and merely wanted their government to think of them, to get on with governing.
This week even these cumbersome redirects would collapse. First, Morrison grabbed the only good news from a disastrous Newspoll – his demonstrably pointless lead over Bill Shorten as preferred PM – to define the election as a personal fight with the Labor leader. So much for it being about voters. Then, his government unveiled a parliamentary calendar with potentially as few as 10 sitting days in the next 8 months, given the inevitable interruption of a May election.
It turns out this ‘getting on with governing’ business might be indistinguishable from getting on with politicking. Who knew?
Meanwhile, outside the Liberal bubble, Banks is gone. Her seat of Chisholm will fall at the May election.
Hilariously, the geniuses who orchestrated all of this still cast themselves as the true party loyalists. Tribunes of the people. Faithful conduits of “the base”.
Greater wreckers have rarely operated in Australian politics.
There can be storms and fires outside Canberra too, but pointedly, they tend not to occur among moderate harmonious Australians.
Ironically, these are the great majority of voters who actually do expect their governments to drop the ideological blinkers and “just get on with it”.