Scott Morrison was not merely Australia’s worst prime minister, he’s the worst prime minister for his own party on either side of politics.
No leader has presided over the gutting of his own party in the way Morrison has. Some have lost their own seats. Some have suffered landslide defeats. But none has ever neatly cut the heart out of their own party base and sacrificed it to their own egos, factional interests and ideological obsessions.
The election result has destroyed the myth, endlessly peddled by the press gallery, that Morrison is some sort of political genius. It turns out he got lucky in 2019 against an opponent in Bill Shorten who served him up a bain-marie of possible scare campaigns. Faced with an opponent less inclined to spend an election campaign with a bright-red target on his back, Morrison struggled. Only his opponent’s stumbles kept him in the game.
Throughout the campaign, Morrison stuck doggedly to the playbook crafted across multiple elections in Australia, the US and the UK by right-wing apparatchiks: relentless demonisation of your opponent (whether Labor or independent), micro-targeted pork-barrelling, culture wars and intense coordination with News Corp and tame journalists. In doing so, he sealed the fate of more moderate MPs based in seats that have been the party’s heartland since the formation of the Liberal Party.
His strategy of deliberately running a divisive transphobe in Warringah (having effectively prevented far more suitable competitive candidates from seeking preselection) was central to the culture war campaign he hoped would deliver him the votes of social conservatives in outer metropolitan seats.
It failed miserably — what’s remarkable about the campaign is that the Coalition vote did not shift in the polls at all. Morrison was able to drag Labor’s vote down, maybe enough to cost it majority government — but he couldn’t budge the dial on the overall level of Coalition support.
In the end, all it did was undermine the chances of sitting MPs like Dave Sharma, Trent Zimmerman and Jason Falinski.
Those MPs, along with Josh Frydenberg in Kooyong and Tim Wilson in Goldstein, were already starting at a profound disadvantage against independents due to Morrison’s climate denialism and obsession with backing fossil fuels, as well as his stolid refusal to accept a federal anti-corruption body. Indeed Morrison made those totemic issues in his campaign: any actual climate action was a “sneaky carbon tax”; a federal ICAC would be a “kangaroo court”.
In doing so, he simply made a tough campaign even tougher for those MPs.
There’s a pattern here, of course. Morrison looks to have gone out of his way to damage the chances of MPs more moderate than himself, leaving them to be overwhelmed by the oncoming teal wave while Morrison smirked his way through outer suburban and regional seats, moving from one glib non-announcement to another.
The result is a political party that has moved dramatically to the right, with an array of more moderate MPs no longer in politics and the party left in the hands of Peter Dutton. The Nationals, who have yet to lose a seat despite a small overall swing against them, must be unable to believe their luck: the Liberals have moved closer to them.
So Morrison leaves with a key goal of his centre-right NSW faction achieved: the smashing of NSW Liberal moderates. That will be even more the case when Marise Payne announces — probably sooner rather than later — that she’s retiring.
In politics, your real enemies are always behind you, not across the chamber from you, but Morrison has been happy to inflict a dramatic defeat on his own party as the price for pushing the Liberals to the right and inflicting a savage strike on his factional enemies.
It’s a rare achievement, to be that bad a prime minister, that bad a campaigner — and that bad a leader of your own troops.
