In case you missed the signs, Prime Minister has flipped the switch to election mode
Scott Morrison’s ever-changing, and ever-more-cautious approach to opening up Australia’s borders has him scrambling to stay ahead of his day of reckoning. We should expect that day to arrive before Christmas, writes Dennis Atkins
Where Scott Morrison headed this past weekend and what dominated his conversations tells us all we need to know about the looming federal election.
Morrison came to Queensland, which is no surprise. However, he didn’t swing into any of the notionally marginal seats – such as Longman on 3.3per cent, Leichhardt on 4.2, Dickson on 4.6 or Ryan on 4.9.
The prime minister jetted into the Gladstone based seat of Flynn which has a relatively safe buffer of just under 9 per cent – which is the LNP’s 10th most marginal Queensland electorate.
Sure, it blew out from just one point in 2019 and incumbent Ken O’Dowd is retiring, adding a dollop of doubt, but if the LNP is in trouble in Flynn they are history and Scott Morrison’s miracle making days are over.
Outside of Anthony Albanese – and his candidate Matt Burnett, who’s a wildly popular local mayor – it’s hard to find someone in Labor ranks who holds much confidence in the ALP’s ability to pick up the seat.
A full day in the electorate – visiting heavy engineering and small business, working the room in a microbrewery – is a serious time commitment, especially as the LNP is probably four to six weeks away from settling on a candidate.
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Looking at the underwhelming – but maybe expected – tepid response in the first polls to the almost too-good-to-be-true Budget, it’s not hard to see why the government is a bit anxious about Queensland, where notoriously wild swings are often seen and heard.
So that might explain why Morrison was in Queensland. His conversation is another thing. The topic that took up most of his time wasn’t selling the Budget, although he sought to do so when he could, but rather defending and prosecuting his new-found enthusiasm for shutting our borders longer than many anticipated and beyond the patience of business and some states.
Morrison’s swerve from the cheer-leader of opening up the economy the minute after “snap back” to the keeper of the keys, relishing locking us in our gilded cage into 2022, is audacious and opportunistic.
As Australia emerged from its short and sharp COVID lockdown (just before the second wave started crashing on the streets of metropolitan Melbourne), Morrison was as enthusiastic about opening up as anyone.
“The best protection against the virus is to live with the virus, to live alongside the virus and open your economy up,” said Morrison on July 16 last year.
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This attitude persisted on the other side of the Victorian troubles with particular spite saved for his bête noire, Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk, who just happened to be facing what Morrison believed wrongly was a tough electoral fight.
Then he wanted everyone to set their sights on a “normal” existence living alongside the virus by the middle of 2021 and he pledged he’d get “as many (Australians stranded overseas) home, if not all of them, by Christmas”.
At that time, last November, there were 36,000 nationals registered with the authorities. It is now still at least 35,000 with almost 10,000 of those in virus-ravaged India.
Now Morrison is every bit as politically opportunistic on borders as any state premier has been in the last 15 months.
His closed-border evangelism coincides with state governments, education administrators and a growing chorus of business leaders contrasting our intensely cautious approach to opening our international frontiers with the more liberal, open economy attitude in nations with more to fear than anything seen here.
In Central Queensland, the born-again border-shutter resorted to his practiced blather on justifying the current, often hard-to-pin-down approach to borders. It was too many words to transcribe verbatim, but essentially, Morrison argues the virus and its variants are raging and we don’t know where it’s all headed – which is virology 101.
He says we can’t let people in except in the most safeguarded fashion – itself a shift from what has been occurring over the last year when people were allowed back without being screened for positive tests before heading to our shores.
As we’ve seen in India, now the rule is that anyone testing positive will not be allowed on a plane – and that process is in doubt because the screening is dodgy. We haven’t been told if this is a new, universal policy.
Finally, Morrison says because not everyone is going to be vaccinated in Australia (he cites the fact children and the hesitant or reluctant won’t get immunised) there is too great an element of risk in opening our international borders. This from the guy who said in February we needed a whole new approach to risk management.
While three in four Australians support shutting international borders and give general (although a somewhat cognitively dissonant) backing to keeping sick people out of the country, Morrison is not going to shift his new found populist opportunism.
The problem he faces is that this style of politics has a use by date. He’s outrunning the day of reckoning at the moment but it’s gaining on him. This is another reason we’ll be off to the polls well before Christmas.
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