Scott Morrison doesn’t have to imagine the things that could cost him government in a few months’ time. Chaos and animus closed in this week.
New South Wales – the division supposed to deliver the Coalition its fourth federal term – made a big show of resisting Morrison’s urgent electoral imperatives, and the brinkmanship of his proxies intent on shoring up their own preselections. Morrison needed tranquility, and the state division of the Liberal party obliged him by roiling.
The bushfire in the Coalition’s base also burned through to Canberra. Protesters opposed to vaccine mandates – Australians who feel economically and culturally dispossessed by the creep of government during pandemic – spilled up the forecourt of Parliament House. There were sovereign citizens, anti-vaxxers, doomsday preppers, Trumpers and enraged owner-drivers, yes; but also grey nomads with packed lunches, Thermos flasks and sunsmart hats. A woman from a property just out of town told me she was there because it was impossible to know what, or who, to believe any more. Nothing made much sense. Most people, she thought, just needed simple solutions.
When the freedom lovers learned Morrison wasn’t in his office, the convoy rolled out their swags in the parliamentary triangle, and then converged on the National Press Club on Tuesday. Morrison had gone there to change the conversation about the election. The prime minister knows voters want to give him a kicking because they are exhausted and frustrated by a government that seems to repeat its past failures of anticipation in an endless loop.
But some of the backlash isn’t yet baked in. Tuesday was about giving Australians permission to forgive him. The self-interest here is obvious: if voters hold a grudge, Morrison is all out of miracles.
Morrison on Tuesday was sorry, not sorry – sorry enough to soften the edges of prime ministerial arrogance, but not sorry enough to accept any serious liability. He was sorry he was too optimistic before the summer. He had got people’s hopes up, and Omicron had dashed them. He was sorry he hadn’t sent in the army sooner to correct the infamous vaccine “strollout”.
But self-initiated show trials have limits. Morrison submitted his plea bargain. Dealing with Omicron was like dealing with a whole new virus. So the undertone of Tuesday’s reboot was: shit happens, guys, it’s not really fair to blame me.
Given this was courtship, the prime minister praised the good sense of the Australian people. Australians were too smart to “have an each way bet on Australia’s economic future and our national security” by voting Labor. People would “make careful judgments about what’s important, and they know that the times we face are very challenging”.
Out of sync
With Morrison there is always a line, a crescendo that he builds to, and we got there eventually. The prime minister declared the coming election was not a referendum on the government’s performance. Elections were sober risk-management exercises, not expressions of transient pique.
It was the frustration flip. It’s what leaders under political pressure do. John Howard pulled this same pea-and-thimble trick in more than one election – I know you are sick of this, I know you don’t entirely trust me, but trust me – you trust that other bloke a whole lot less. If you can land the flip, you win. If you can’t, you bleed out. You become a memory, a jumble of anecdotes, a portrait on the wall of the Liberal party room.
Morrison is fighting for his political life, but he kept his presentation workmanlike, perhaps even dour.
Tuesday’s tamped-down performance felt deliberate. Telling people an election is not a referendum on the performance of a government – when it very obviously is – is an act of hypnotism. The hypnotist’s trick is monotone, no sudden movements. Or possibly he was just exhausted. There could be no covert mini-break in Hawaii during the dispiriting summer of Omicron. Morrison had to plough through his miscalculations in the arid company of the premiers.
Rhetorically, the press club reboot was textbook. But Morrison’s problem was that everything was out of sync. All the visual cues said siege and encirclement. As the prime minister spoke, sporadic bursts of fury were audible from outside. “Remove ScoMo.” “No vaccine mandates.”
If the protesters had been climate activists in koala suits, nothing would have seemed amiss. But this was a convoy of rightwing grievance. This crowd would have given “ScoMo” version 2019™ the thumbs up before the pandemic. The persistent ruckus outside put the twitch in Morrison’s security detail, who stood sentry at the perimeter of the room.
The ill-temper also flared inside. Sky News Australia’s political editor, Andrew Clennell, wondered if the prime minister was sufficiently in touch to know how much a loaf of bread cost? (He wasn’t).
Peter van Onselen of Network Ten, at the microphone, with mobile phone in hand, wondered whether Morrison agreed with the assessment of an unnamed colleague that he was a complete psycho. “I’ve been provided with a text message exchange between the former New South Wales premier and a current Liberal cabinet minister.” The room inhaled, and held its breath. “I’ve got them right here.”
As Morrison absorbed the ambush, as colleagues watching on remotely wondered what he’d done to invite the wrath of the parliamentary press gallery, it was clear the combined might of Ray Hadley and Paul Murray would be required to sweep up the debris. Liberal prime ministers on the sticky paper are rarely bereft of media friends.
Some fear the election is lost
This week was a cyclone. It shook the government.
In the past, Morrison’s faith in himself has been absolute. He knows he can win. He’s done it before.
He also knows his opponent lacks that certainty. Elections are battles of strategy and psychology. Anthony Albanese has a taller mountain to climb because he has to imagine winning. He hasn’t yet been on the podium.
But Morrison’s frustration flip didn’t quite stick. So the confidence player, the relentless bulldozer, looked a bit battered and bruised. Behind the prime minister’s eyes was a flicker of self-pity.
Right now, Morrison’s belief has been downgraded to hope. Hope the cosmos hasn’t shifted. Hope that Albanese isn’t about to inherit the earth.
Assuming they are accurate, opinion polls tell the story. If you can’t read a poll, you can ring any number of government MPs who will tell you the Coalition would lose any election held today.
People say voters are mulish; sick of the pandemic and its uncertainty, sick of the governments they rewarded for most of the first two years of this crisis, and sick most of all of Morrison.
Metropolitan Liberals are also worried professional women are waiting for Morrison with baseball bats after the prime minister’s very obvious failure to rise to the occasion during federal parliament’s #MeToo reckoning. That visceral anger, Liberals say, has not dissipated. Some fear the coming election is already lost.
Others are more optimistic. They point to the government’s key structural advantage after the Labor rout in 2019 – seats held with significant margins. Some MPs say they are more confident of hanging on now than they were during the last election. Basic electoral mathematics suggest that in the absence of a decisive anti-government swing in all the right seats in the right parts of the country, Albanese is going to struggle to get a majority. Most elections are tight. The routs are rare.
This could all change in a heartbeat, but right at the moment, it looks as though there are enough Liberals who are inclined to hope to keep Morrison in his job. When you ask key people whether the government plans to dish up its habitual pre-match unhinging – change the leader, deliver a budget and speed up Dunrossil Drive to see the governor general – the response is there’s not enough time, and not enough internal consensus, to change the frontman. Not at the moment. As one Liberal puts it: “We didn’t win in 2019 because we changed the leader, we won despite that.”
One of the avowed optimists is veteran MP Warren Entsch, who holds the north Queensland electorate of Leichhardt – one of three seats Labor is targeting in that state. Enstch wanted to retire, but was persuaded to hold on to maximise the chance of retaining the seat. He extracted a significant price. Morrison agreed to a reinsurance scheme for north Queensland in last year’s budget, and more funding for the Great Barrier Reef.
Entsch says when Morrison ventured north over the summer, he braced himself for trouble from disaffected locals, but the opposite happened. The prime minister was “well received”. He says businesses in the electorate are starting to fret that Morrison will lose. He thinks when the time comes to cast a ballot, his constituents will be more inclined to forgiveness than retribution.
“There’s no scripted plan for how you deal with a pandemic,” Entsch says. There has certainly been a local backlash about the slow pace of vaccinations, and one about mandates. “I still get people screaming at me that vaccines are experimental drugs,” Entsch says.
“Look you are damned if you do and damned if you don’t. But generally, people think he’s done a good job.”
‘There’s a trust gap’
If in doubt, generate new television pictures. Breaking. Morrison finally held a hose. The prime minister was out in Melbourne on Friday, hamming it up at a hairdresser, washing the various derangements and disappointments of the week out of the hair of a voter.
Back in the capital, police were attempting to move protesters out of their new Canberra campsite. Resolutely off-camera, an attempt was also under way to secure a truce in the civil war inside the NSW division of the Liberal party – to agree on a path for the remaining preselections before any more explosive texts emerged.
The vicious factional warfare in Morrison’s home state appeared to be the backdrop for the exchange revealed on Tuesday by Van Onselen – a Liberal minister allegedly calling Morrison a “complete psycho” and Berejiklian allegedly branding him a “horrible, horrible” man. Van Onselen says the anonymous minister is one of Morrison’s colleagues.
Morrison isn’t loved beyond his circle of intimates, and it is entirely plausible frustration could have boiled over during a tense moment. But a number of senior government players are privately sceptical. The theory goes that a conversation like the one depicted in the reporter’s account of the texts could only have happened between Berejiklian and one of the former premier’s two long-term friends in Canberra – Paul Fletcher or Marise Payne. Both have denied it was them, and no one believes either would be loose enough to flame the prime minister in a discoverable exchange, and then leak it afterwards to blow up the government in sight of an election. People smell bullshit. But the purveyors of truthiness also know any scepticism is academic. When things unravel in politics, facts can become technicalities rather than fixed points.
As the government limped towards the weekend, a truce in NSW looked more possible because of electoral necessity. No one wants to be blamed for sinking Morrison’s re-election chances. Although you have to wonder how long a Band-Aid adheres to an open wound.
And there was more trouble on Friday night when a fresh text exchange critical of Morrison surfaced. In a private message last March to the former Liberal staffer Brittany Higgins, passed on to her by a third party, Barnaby Joyce – then a backbencher – supplied another excoriation. Joyce, candid as ever, said he did not get along with Morrison. He found the prime minister “a hypocrite and a liar” – a person he had “never trusted”. This bracing character assessment surfaced as a controlled detonation – with both Morrison and Joyce issuing separate statements lauding their current relationship.
Adding to the sense of a government fraying in plain sight, Morrison’s base leakage problem also persists. Activists in yellow United Australia party T-shirts weaved through the crowd at the Canberra protests this week. Clive Palmer helped Morrison defeat Bill Shorten in 2019. Morrison’s miracle was secured in part by Palmer’s stonking advertising buy. But things could be different this time – if Craig Kelly’s testimony can be taken as gospel.
Kelly, the former Liberal, now parliamentary leader of the UAP, says Palmer wants to win the balance of power in both Houses of Parliament, not re-elect Morrison. When I tell him I cannot see a former Liberal, like him, and Palmer, acting against the political interests of the Coalition, he points me to the current field evidence.
“This time, there’s been millions of dollars spent attacking the prime minister,” he says. “We did a YouTube ad featuring the prime minister saying there would be no vaccine mandates in the country. That spend was over $1m. We did that on television as well. So this time, you can’t accuse us of putting all the advertising money into attacking the Labor party, in fact if you look at a lot of the advertising, it’s attacking the government.”
The goal is balance of power, then a burst of frenzied horse-trading. “We would have a shopping list of demands and we would horse trade between the two parties. We’d do a reverse auction.” Kelly wraps with never a truer word. “We are equal opportunists.”
As well as the rusting-off on the right flank, the government is also battling disaffection in the centre. Liberals are facing competition from the teal independents in a number of heartland city seats. Some Liberals in these contests think community interest in the Climate 200-backed independents may have peaked too early in the political cycle.
The former ABC journalist Zoe Daniel is running against Liberal Tim Wilson in the seat of Goldstein. When I put this view from Liberals to her, she is surprised. “I don’t get any sense of anything going off the boil. The only thing I’d say is it was Christmas and new year. Everyone was engaged in their holidays then getting kids back to school. I’ve detected in the last week a real resetting – people saying ‘let’s go, we are going sprint from here to the election’.”
I ask whether locals are negative about Morrison. “Yeah, I think so. There’s a trust gap and the trust gap continues to widen,” Daniel says. “There is definitely an anti-Scott Morrison sentiment among a lot of the people I talk to.
“My husband and I went up the street and had a glass of wine with some of the residents up the hill and there were about 15 people there and they were all older, long-term residents of Goldstein, lifelong Liberal voters. I think of the 15 of them, only one had decided not to vote for me. That person had a personal relationship with the incumbent.
“That, to me, was really interesting, that those people of a particular older conservative demographic who have voted a particular way forever, had decided to vote differently because of their frustration on the integrity issue and the trust issue.”
She thinks the coming election will be a referendum on the government, and on politics as usual. “People are really over it. They feel like the status quo is not good enough and they want something different. They are looking for sincerity and honesty and accountability.
“The main thing you get from people when you talk to them in the street is that shake of the head, of ‘Oh God, we’ve got to change something … we want someone who will get in there and speak for us sincerely’. That comes across incredibly strongly, even when I talk to people who have voted Liberal all their lives, which is a lot of people in this electorate.”
