From a government that normally stands for nothing, this week’s disasters are atypical in combining the incompetence we’ve come to expect with ideological pursuits.
The religious discrimination bill you know about. Designed to wedge Labor, Morrison instead wedged his own backbench, being defeated on legislation on the floor of the House and forced to withdraw his package because he was going to be defeated in the Senate as well.
The only, feeble defence was the claim of vague and unspecified unforeseen consequences of protecting trans kids, allegedly conjured up by the Australian Government Solicitor, but just as likely to have been devised by a junior staffer in the office of Michaelia Cash, whose normal pathological laughter was seldom heard as her week went from bad to worse.
Still, it’s of a piece with the general incompetence of Morrison’s PMO that some genius there thought it was a brilliant idea to beat up on trans kids for the purposes of dividing Labor.
Religious discrimination is as much a personal obsession of Morrison as it was an election commitment. It is one of the few core beliefs in Scott Morrison’s incoherent personal ideology, that his treasured religion is under attack, particularly from LGBTIQA+ people. That it would, ostensibly, make for a good wedge against Labor doubled its appeal.
That’s why he was willing to cave in and agree to a stronger federal anti-corruption body in order to get it through — something we know because at least one of Morrison’s cabinet ministers is working to destabilise the prime minister by leaking information.
A similar combination of ideology, personal obsession and pragmatism drove Josh Frydenberg to his own humiliation, with his too-smart-by-half plan to destroy the proxy advice industry at the behest of his business mates and donors getting disallowed in the Senate. As Joe Aston pointed out in one of many brilliant savagings of Frydenberg on the issue, Frydenberg was also doing the work of his own personal law firm.
Plus, the regulations would target proxy advice firms used by big industry super funds, and Frydenberg, as much as any other Liberal MP, is obsessed with the destruction of industry super and what they fear is the growing power of giant super funds to dictate policy to even the biggest companies.
We’ve been here before, but maybe Frydenberg, who back then was a parliamentary secretary in charge of Tony Abbott’s bonfires of old lighthouse laws (aka the war on red tape), doesn’t remember. He should have put in a call to Paris and had a word with Mathias Cormann about the wisdom of trying to sneak through attacks on industry super via regulation. Cormann tried to repeal Labor’s Future of Financial Advice laws that way and thought he’d gotten away with it until Sam Dastyari cobbled together a crossbench coalition to disallow the regulations. Because that’s the beauty of disallowances of regulation — you get more than one go at stopping them if you lose the first (or even second) time.
Rex Patrick only needed one go to knock off Frydenberg’s proxy regulations, which lasted three days. Those regs now go on the long list of Liberal efforts to do over industry super that instead ended up damaging the government, long enough you could make a Road Runner/Wile E. Coyote cartoon out of it, complete with Frydenberg, as he was yesterday, looking to camera as he realises he’s run right off a cliff before plummeting earthward.
Desperate for a distraction, the government, from Morrison down, launched bitter personal attacks on Anthony Albanese, who according to the press gallery has gone from “can’t win” to “won’t win” to “could win but will bugger it up” to “hasn’t won yet”, all while ignoring the advice of chin-stroking commentators and the Twitterati alike to lead with his chin.
Peter Dutton went as far as to imply China was backing Albanese. In doing that, Dutton was demonstrating exactly the kind of prime minister he’d be — uncompromising and aggressive, ready to take the fight to Labor.
Dutton isn’t the safe choice to replace Morrison. That would be Frydenberg, that assiduous self-promoter and media worker. Frydenberg would be the “save the furniture” leadership candidate, designed to ensure an election loss was kept to manageable margins and be competitive in 2025.
Dutton would be the swing-for-the-fences option — high-risk but potentially high reward, who wouldn’t be about saving the furniture but about pulling off a miracle win by dint of sheer aggression. It would be ugly, but it might work — or it might blow up.
But what you can definitely say about Dutton after this week (which began with Dutton outsmarting Morrison on the ADF being deployed into aged care) is that his political judgment remains intact. For Morrison and Frydenberg, their judgment looks about as shabby as their legislative record.
