The prime minister has been in trouble for so long I’d almost forgotten the Scott Morrison that surfaced this week – the Morrison that barnstorms around the country with impeccable message discipline. But in true Easter spirit, Campaign Morrison rose from the dead, locked and loaded for his next big May miracle.
Anthony Albanese, not so much. After goading Morrison to call the election for a fortnight, the Labor leader fluffed his first pop quiz on day one – a damaging stumble for reasons that have been well ventilated throughout this week. The television news reports on the night of Albanese’s unemployment rate gaffe were beyond breathless – news anchors asked their travelling correspondents whether or not Albanese had just lost the campaign.
On day one.
It’s possible of course that a future Labor campaign review will conclude that Albanese lost the 2022 election on day one. But calling that eventuality on day one seemed brave given there’s a multitude of hours, days, nights and weeks between now and 21 May.
The return of Campaign Morrison prompted me into a thought experiment. I’ve wondered at various points this week whether this Liberal leader, at his best, is the most effective political campaigner I’ve covered in my reporting lifetime.
Morrison is better than John Howard, who was diabolically clever, but with an overhang of social awkwardness. Better than Julia Gillard, who struggled to be seen or heard in a misogynistic melange. Better than Malcolm Turnbull, who, in his exciting times, lacked a visage of non-threatening ordinariness. So better than them.
That left me with the other two devastatingly effective campaigners I’ve studied at close range – Tony Abbott and Kevin Rudd. Abbott and Rudd, like Morrison, were ruthless and relentless. They were also intuitive. Morrison is more researched and rehearsed and mimetic than intuitive. But when it comes to campaign competence, this might be a distinction without a difference.
I want to reassure you at this point my purpose here isn’t theatre criticism. There’s a substantive point coming.
Morrison, Abbott and Rudd are an interesting professional trio, if we stop to think about it. All knew how to win elections. And all struggled with the critical bit that follows the campaigning: the governing – the bit that actually matters.
Abbott, who only knew how to wreck, had no visible talent for the prime ministership at all. Given how atrocious he was, it was astonishing he lasted as long as he did. The progressive technocrat Rudd had a mind that never stopped racing. He went at everything like he was shot out of a cannon. This was the crux of his problem. It led to his removal from the top job, effectively on a backroom impulse.
Morrison is a brusque managerialist of variable competence who lives to dominate. His organising principle is power. There’s no substantive agenda beyond it. As I said in a Quarterly Essay back in 2020, borrowing from Gertrude Stein – with Morrison, there is no there there. The first 12 months of the pandemic was a fruitful time for Morrison’s managerialism. That was the best of him. But as I said a week ago, the worst of Morrison is up there with the worst I’ve ever seen.
The moral of these musings is simple.
Some of our best political campaigners have been either deficient (Abbott), unmanageably chaotic (Rudd) or both obdurate and oddly directionless (Morrison). Yet voters learn this once the campaign ends.
As these deficiencies are consequential, this feels like a trend we should have a close look at.
But there are barriers to doing that. The first is, if we did that, seriously and systemically, we’d be pushing against the campaign lionisation complex, which has become an industry for both in politics and the media. We need to be honest about this. Campaigns are king. The whole ecosystem has become addicted to the sugar hits of engagement the political cycle serves up in orderly three-year cycles.
To see the whole and not the part, we’d also have to better engage a voting public that only tunes in for election campaigns, and even then, only out the corner of one eye.
This is tough because voters are disengaged because they lack the privilege (and that’s exactly what it is) of time to reflect. People also feel they have better things to do than think about the quality (or otherwise) of a political class from whom they feel alienated. Understanding these realities, and seeking to prosper inside them, Morrison spends a lot of time encouraging people to look away from the routine processes of deliberative democracy – activity he’s branded “bubble stuff” – a deeply insidious bit of marketing if ever there was one.
So let’s agree that significantly disrupting the status quo would require a level of sustained engagement and good faith currently lacking in our democracy. Given that’s our present reality, let’s observe the following in good faith and good heart: here we find ourselves again, pounding along in the human horse race that stops the nation once every three years.
We’ve entered a six-week campaign that someone wins and someone else loses. That’s the matrix we are in. So assessed within the reductionist and not entirely enlightening terms of that matrix, Campaign Morrison dominated the message war of the first six days through a combination of his own significant mental discipline and adulatory media amplification.
Albanese contributed by failing to stick the dismount from the parliamentary theatre to the hellscape of the hustings. This week will have reminded the Labor leader that the hustings are no place for extemporising humans, and campaigns are no country for the messy ebbs and flows, concentration lapses or confidence dips that humans tend to exhibit.
Given I strive to keep things meaningful, the times being so very serious, and democracy being so very precious, let’s also be attentive to what matters. Let’s be very clear that Campaign Morrison isn’t getting things all his own way. The Liberal party leader is being shadowed, as he should be, by the substantive deficiencies of his prime ministership; by his tendency to just slide on through and talk over people inclined to linger around the deficiencies.
This story of Alan Tudge, a minister both in and out of the cabinet, and the mystery of the $500,000-plus payout from taxpayers to the former Liberal staffer Rachelle Miller, is absolutely extraordinary. Want details about any of that? Think anyone in the government might believe themselves accountable? Are you mad? Talk to the hand. Next question.
Astonishing, too, that Morrison stood up this week in broad daylight and tanked the integrity commission he told Australian voters he’d constitute three years ago.
I normally consider comparisons between Morrison and Donald Trump to be hyperbolic given Morrison still orienteers along a reality plane. But to ditch an important integrity pledge in plain sight, and blame everybody else, is Trumpian-level chutzpah.
Perhaps the blast he’s copping as a consequence of this atrocity will prompt a campaign reset.
But let’s be clear: Morrison declared this week that when it came to pressing ahead with the federal integrity commission, it would be his heavily criticised proposal, or nothing, which meant it will be nothing unless the coming election either consigns Morrison to history or forces him to bargain for the government’s political life. Then it might be something.
But if Morrison has his way, it will be nothing.
This is obviously very bad. But it actually got worse. In his quest to inoculate himself against a clear broken promise, Morrison also continued to run down the state body established in 1988 to investigate and expose corrupt conduct, and actively prevent it – the New South Wales Independent Commission Against Corruption. This was a “kangaroo court”.
What Morrison told voters this week, in very clear terms, was that he believes in the clash of rights between the political class and the public, the political class should win. Politicians have more of a right to safeguard their reputations than the public has to a strong anti-corruption cop on the beat keeping close watch on the most powerful people in the country.
Given the Morrison government is excoriated semi-regularly by the Australian National Audit Office, that position is deeply troubling. We can thank Morrison’s precision communications skills for laying this choice out so clearly.
I’d encourage voters to reflect on that very carefully.
