If a succession of disastrous polls, ministerial resignations and constant evidence from on the ground in Perth wasn’t sufficient to show that Scott Morrison knows he’s in deep trouble in Western Australia, he confirmed it yesterday.
After all his senior ministers — Peter Dutton, Barnaby Joyce, Josh Frydenberg — had lined up to savage Mark McGowan for keeping WA’s borders closed, the prime minister was asked on Perth radio to reflect on McGowan’s breach of his commitment to start reopening the borders in February.
Would the man who cheered on Christian Porter when the then-attorney-general backed Clive Palmer’s challenge to McGowan speak up? Would the man who has urged the rest of the country to live with COVID and get on with reopening, despite the gruesome cost of hundreds of deaths, rebuke a premier for wanting to retain his hermit kingdom status?
In fact it was the man who denied he had ever backed Palmer’s case who showed up. “Yeah, I think he did,” Morrison replied when Gareth Parker asked him if he thought McGowan had done the right thing.
Where Joyce had attacked McGowan for failing to manage his health system properly (a rare valid point from the deputy prime minister), Morrison preferred to take credit for giving WA more money that put “Western Australia in a very good position to be investing in their hospital system and get it ready”.
See the difference? Morrison’s point, far more subtle than that of Joyce — allegedly the best retail politician in the country — was that he’d given McGowan what he needed to make his health system cope, with the implication that if the system wasn’t prepared, that was on McGowan. But he made that point without attacking the premier.
It was a rare deft play by Morrison, who has blundered from one disaster to another for months.
McGowan’s remarkable popularity can’t last forever. All politicians eventually come back down to earth. Bob Hawke did. Kevin Rudd did. Malcolm Turnbull did. And the decision to delay reopening could have been the moment McGowan began sinking, offering the federal Coalition a chance to begin clawing its way back from the loss of at least two seats in the west. But it has done little to dent the premier’s standing beyond those immediately affected by the border closure — which is the bulk of the electorate.
Morrison understands that McGowan is still too strong to attack. He is also aware that, now he is associated with “letting it rip” in the minds of the electorate, if McGowan did open up and the WA health system collapsed, he’s unlikely to escape some of the blame as well.
It’s a strange union of political interests across the Nullarbor and the political divide. Both Morrison and McGowan have little to gain from the WA health system falling apart under a wave of Omicron. Hermit kingdom for some time to come.
