With friends like Barnaby, PM scarcely has time to worry about his political enemies
The Barnaby Joyce text message bombshell has made life even more difficult for Scott Morrison but Dennis Atkins thinks the worst might be yet to come – with a distinctly local cost for the LNP.
It was, according to Scott Morrison’s office, a long planned engagement, to attend a now annual I4Give day led by Danny and Leila Abdallah, a Sydney couple who lost three of their children to a drunk driver in an horrific accident outside Oatlands Golf Club in Sydney’s northwest two years ago.
Morrison and his wife Jenny had been to last year’s first I4Give day with former New South Wales Premier Gladys Berejiklian at the King’s College Chapel in Parramatta, but this year there was a wider importance.
This wasn’t going to be just another item on the prime ministerial to-do list. It was a serious message-heavy moment, perfectly placed as an opportunity to draw a line on a political week-from-hell-and-back.
Whether the line holds might matter less than the attempt to draw it.
Whatever else people might say about Morrison – “psycho”, “horrible, horrible” and “hypocrite” from all-to-see text messages or “stands for his family” “man of faith” and (Cronulla) Sharks fan we heard about on Four Corners – no-one is going to deny his ability to spot a chance.
Morrison is more than just a regular opportunist.
To see what he is, dig deep and plumb the wisdom from the 18th century political philosopher Jeremy Bentham, who identified the “consequentialist” – a calculating opportunist who measures everything in advantage and cost with a single minded focus on achievement and winning.
Everything we’ve seen in the aestas horribilis for Morrison (his second in three years which is very bad fortune) makes this richly apt.
You might like
His management of the Omicron wave has been all about consequences. First, he foolishly believed he could take the country on a smooth ride to freedom. It was an error born in the conceit of over-weaned self-belief and a reading of just one side of opinion polls results.
Morrison believed the country would not just embrace the idea of “freedom” but will it to be true because that is what his suburban sensibility told him he had to think.
It was not just a step too far in terms of public opinion, it misjudged the fashionable guide of the modern era, “the science”.
He is now crawling out of that particular hole – today’s Essential Poll in The Guardian shows a small shift in his favour when people were asked about his handling of the pandemic – but he is in the danger zone of having three strikes against him.
The slow vaccine “stroll out”, the lack of coordination between the heroic opening up and booster shots and the infuriating failure to make adequate testing available just when it was needed (whether it was rapid antigen ones or the top shelf PCR variety) will all leave a mark.
Morrison’s flight back grew from necessity. He needed the most sympathetic light possible – cloaking the appearance of contrition in values.
After his own Deputy Prime Minister was revealed as having the deepest distrust of him – branding him a hypocrite and serial liar in a text message from a year ago – the I4Give event was manna from the political skies.
He pushed back by reminding people of human frailty, saying everyone does things they might later regret but the ones who are true in their hearts can forgive. “If you can’t accept and understand each other’s frailties and be forgiving in those circumstances, then frankly, that says a lot more about you than it does about others,” he said.
Stay informed, daily
It was precisely and perfectly framed. As such it instantly became a shield.
On Monday, at his first Canberra news conference of a hard week, he surrounded himself with a phalanx of ministers to fill the digital word cloud and reduce the opportunity for questions.
The first – and only one – about “working with Barnaby Joyce” was met with a brusque response: “Well, I addressed that matter yesterday,” he said.
He hadn’t, but the absence of doing something has never stopped Morrison from claiming it happened.
This might be a device to minimise the avenues of attack but he can’t escape the real consequences of the Barnaby Backwash between now and the election.
It was always going to be difficult to have Morrison and Joyce as the team heading the government. Anyone who’s been around during the 15 years they’ve been in Canberra together knows they’ve never really liked each other, extraordinary given the often overly generous forgiveness and understanding the Prime Minister offers other (mainly Liberal) colleagues.
This said, the Morrison/Joyce team was an opportunity to bridge some of the emerging issues playing differently in regional Australia and inner city metropolitan seats. In a tortured way, it worked on climate change but the management was inelegant and lacked strategic thought.
Now, however, the Morrison/Joyce combination is a deadly threat to the government’s survival.
The unpopularity of Joyce in those inner city seats and among women everywhere (including in the usually Coalition-voting regions) might bring a heavy cost at the looming election.
The greatest impact could well be in seats with informed, more engaged voters who care about climate, integrity, honesty and the treatment of women – electorates most often in Coalition hands.
Here in Queensland the two seats most at risk for Morrison and the LNP are Brisbane and Ryan. The former has been in Labor’s column almost as many times as it was held by the conservatives while the other, western suburban electorate has been a federation Liberal stronghold with the exception of eight months in 2001.
Now both are in Labor’s sights with Brisbane in more danger. Recent polling by both major parties puts the swing to Labor in Brisbane at between 4 and 6 percent which is around what’s needed for a Coalition loss.
No wonder nerves are frayed. People are looking at change and seats previously not on the radar are zooming into view.
