New Politics: Australian Politics, News, Analysis & Commentary

The parliamentary year commenced with the revelations of a rape at Parliament House; it ended with a report into sexual harassment at parliamentary workplaces… and a federal minister stepping aside after he was accused of physically abusing a staffer he was having an affair with. When will parliamentarians learn their lessons?

And with so many government MPs and Ministers resigning, is it a sign of panic? No, it’s quite normal for MPs to retire and they can’t stay in politics forever. But it certainly doesn’t help the cause of the Liberal–National Coalition. And Anthony Albanese has announced a 43% reduction in greenhouse emissions by 2030, and the sky hasn’t fallen in. Not yet, but Scott Morrison is certain to find a way of misrepresenting the policy, because that’s what he does best. Actually governing can wait for another day.

And a Labor–Greens coalition? The Liberal Party and National Party have one, so why not? It’s a little bit more complicated but it comes down to two factors: the Liberal and National parties need each other to form government, while the Labor Party can form government by itself. And the other reason? The need has never arisen (except for 2010). And it won’t arise until we get a repeat of 2010: a hung parliament.

It’s the final week of Parliament for 2021 and it’s much the same as all the other ones in recent weeks: chaos and dysfunction, and a peculiar interest in all of the issues that don’t really matter too much.

This week’s interest? The anti-troll social media legislation which no one has ever asked for, would be ineffective (in the unlikely event that it was ever actually made into law) – but at least it took up two full days of national debate.

Anything to avoid working on the issues that really matter: climate change, an anti-corruption commission, health, education… who knows, maybe even the economy? These are all critical issues, but what does the Morrison government want to focus on? Picking a fight with Mark Zuckerberg. Another act from a lazy government, which seems to always be on holidays, even when Parliament is sitting.

And there are a number of community grassroots campaigns in the seat of Deakin, with the main aim of removing the sitting member, Michael Sukkar. We speak to Kieran Simpson from the Shady Sukkar campaign, and they are totally unimpressed with Sukkar and want to see him go. And as Kieran suggests, if Michael Sukkar puts himself first, it’s up the electorate to put him and the Liberal Party last. And that might end up being the result at the next federal election, and not just in the seat of Deakin.

This term of Parliament is descending into chaos, and it’s almost as though the anarchist society has taken over the Senate and House of Representatives. But it’s not the anarchist society: it’s the Liberal–National Coalition which is now resembling a thoroughly disorganised rabble. The Voter ID and Religious Discrimination Bills are in tatters – legislation that is not needed and no-one has asked for – and the national integrity commission is no closer to formation. A new Speaker was installed in the House, and it was almost like a day with the relief teacher – or the work experience kid in charge.

Chaos, division, floor-crossing and a Prime Minister who manages to speak many words in Parliament, without offering very much meaning. There’s another week – the final week – of Parliament to round off 2021, but it’s unlikely to get any better. This government is in disarray and it’s a familiar stench of incompetence and corruption that surrounds the Morrison government, that same stench that surrounded the Abbott and Turnbull governments.

Is this the end of the Liberal–National Coalition? No, not by a long shot. ‘Rabble’ is more than an adequate term to describe this government but it has to be remembered that this disorganised and disastrous troupe of under-performers won the 2016 and 2019 federal elections. All it needs is to spruce itself up for the final three months of this term and it should be in with a chance, but there are strong doubts about whether it even has this low-level ability, or the stamina, to do this. This is one very lazy government.

It’s not very often Australia hears politicians openly calling for ‘civil disobedience’ or throwing around the names of Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot and Mao to boost their arguments. But that’s exactly what the LNP member for Dawson, George Christensen, did during the week. It’s usually in the domain of right-wing or left-wing extremists or those unsophisticated countries which resort to violence to resolve their political differences.

And that’s where we are heading: a dark place which had the same feeling as the months before the Capitol Hill insurrection in the United States, earlier this year. This is a very disturbing development: if only Australia had the political leadership to avert this impending disaster.

It’s increasingly obvious the Prime Minister is using the final stages of this Parliament to roadtest a number of different election slogans. Last week it was ‘Australians taking back their lives’, followed by ‘Australians have had a gutful of being told what to do’, interspersed with ‘cost of living’ and ‘can-do capitalism’. This week it was ‘moving forward’. But where are we moving forward to? What’s the destination? What happens at this destination? Who’s going to be there when we get there?

All of this is real-life mass focus group testing, to feed back into Liberal Party qualitative research, almost as blasé as the Colgate-Palmolive marketing division testing slogans for soap powder advertisements. That’s what politics has become for Scott Morrison: a marketing exercise and Parliament reduced to a forum to create political slogans and campaign marketing.

It might not be politics as we know it, but it looks more like a Prime Minister at the last chance saloon: rolling two dice to try and reach 18, when we all know the maximum is 12. Also known as desperation. Of course, this may end up in an election victory for the Liberal–National Coalition, but it’s becoming increasingly unlikely.

And in the psychological battle between the two leaders, Anthony Albanese laid a super-size bear trap for Scott Morrison, and he fell right into it. A normal leader would avoid a return to the scene of their biggest humiliation – in Morrison’s case, the holiday trip to Hawaii during the peak of the bushfire catastrophe in 2019 – but Morrison is no normal leader, and he has to win every single battle, even the ones not worth winning. He lied about providing the destination of his holiday to Albanese – easily refuted – when he should have just apologised (again), said that he will never do that again and he learned his lesson. And we all would have moved on.

But it became the news of the day and magnified the issue Labor wanted to focus on: Morrison is a pathological liar and untrustworthy.

Independents are likely to have a big influence in the 2022 election, and we speak with Hayden O’Connor from the Voices of Kooyong, a campaign which wants to unseat the Treasurer and current member for Kooyong, Josh Frydenberg. It’s a tough ask, but they have the determination to consign Frydenberg to the dustbin of history.

And wouldn’t that be a sweet victory.

Once again, the Liberal–National Coalition is attacking the ABC, and doing the bidding of News Corporation in its quest to remove the ABC from government ownership and sell if off to the highest bidder. And several state divisions of the Liberal Party – and all the Young Liberal branches – have already passed resolutions to privatise the ABC and it’s also one of the key objectives of the Institute of Public Affairs.

Yes, the ABC needs to be reformed and it shouldn’t just try to replicate what the commercial media outlets are producing, but it’s a key cultural, educational and essential services media broadcast, and one of the best in the world. But the ABC has no political friends left – the Coalition wants to privatise it and Labor, which turns up to every election promising more funds for the ABC – only for the ABC to propagandise against the Labor Party – might decide that it always campaigns for the ABC, but never receives any electoral benefit from its efforts. So it might decide it’s just not worth it. Whoever wins the next election, the future is not looking bright for the ABC.

It took five days for Scott Morrison to make his response to the Melbourne protests, and when it came, it seemed half-hearted and expressed sympathy for the protestors. Morrison just cannot find it within himself to castigate his key supporters, even when they’re calling for the assassination of the Premier of Victoria. And it’s unclear why Morrison would want to claim this right-wing rabble as his own – these extremists are hardly going to vote for left-of-centre parties and expressing a clear condemnation of these protestors and their actions would have been the right thing for a political leader to do.

But Morrison is purely focused on votes. After all, that’s what wins elections for a politician: votes. But some votes are not worth chasing, and it would have better to let those voters float away, which surely would have boosted support from other areas in the electoral. Sometimes, Morrison cannot help himself, and this was one of those occasions. Australia needs leadership from the federal govenment, but that might need to be delivered by another government, and a different prime minister, at some point in the future.

Australia is seeking national leadership at this point of time to ward off the threat of extremist behaviour in Melbourne but instead of trying to dampen the enthusiasm of QAnon, neo-Nazis, fascists, sovereign citizens and assorted fringe dwellers, Scott Morrison is hoping to hang onto their votes at the next federal election and he decided the best course of action is to just keep quiet, lest he upset his supporter base.

The weekend protests in Melbourne attracted 5,000 people, primarily to voice their disapproval of the vaccine mandates – even though most of them won’t be affected by a mandate – but that wasn’t enough to stop them demanding the resignation of Victoria Premier Daniel Andrews, some actually calling for his assassination.

And this wasn’t enough for Morrison to castigate their actions – these are his people, and it’s not up to him to say anything about it, or even lift a finger indirectly. For example, alerting the Australian Federal Police, or the Fixated Persons Unit. It’s not too much to ask, but Morrison is more interested in keeping votes, rather than acting in the interests of the community.

And the latest round of polling is still pointing to an electoral demolition for the Liberal–National Coalition at the next federal election. That’s not to say Morrison can’t turn it around – after all, he was in exactly the same position in November 2018 and, six months later, he was on the victor’s podium on election night – but two elections in a row, while not impossible, is incredibly difficult.

But one issue that won’t help is Morrison has decided to channel the 2004 election strategy used by John Howard – who do you trust?… But in typical Morrison fashion, he’s overpromised in areas that is almost impossible to keep a promise – the trifecta of low interest rates, low cost of living, and low petrol prices. We think it might be three lies too far and he’s foolish to make this promises.

A one-off 0.25 interest rate hike, a CPI increase of 1%, or petrol prices going up by 5 cents per litre – any of these events will finish Scott Morrison off, especially if whatever he says isn’t matched by people’s lived experiences.

He might be finished anyway, and we believe the only way Australia can move away from the current events in Melbourne is a change of government. It’s becoming more and more evident by the day.

Paul Keating was a hit at the National Press Club address during the week, but members of the federal government were not so happy about this. Because he spoke positively and realistically about China and Australia’s place in the world: which rubs against the grain of the government’s narrative of depicting China as a massive threat to Australia. And the media is happy to jump in and offer their support, using every negative cliché about China in their reportage – falling short of using the “Yellow Peril” rhetoric from the 1900s, but coming close. Good things do come out of China, but you wouldn’t think so if you only listened to Scott Morrison, Peter Dutton, and their friends in the mainstream media.

And we’re finding out more about the Coalition’s re-election strategy: lie about the past, lie about the future, lie about the lies. There can be no end to this. And there are two new election slogans to add to Scott Morrison’s reductive lexicon. “Labor wants to tell you what to do”, which, at eight words, is a massive improvement on the three-word version – and supporters of the shorter version slogan will not be disappointed. “Can-do capitalism” is the latest revelation, and it’s as empty as all of the previous slogans. But that’s not the point: this is a government that governs for the politically disengaged.

Or, if we want to be more sophisticated, it’s what Mark Twain would call a paralysis of intellect, a label he placed upon Australia when he visited in 1895, a country which, to him, seemed quite incurious. And, 126 years later, an incurious Prime Minister who is afflicted with a paralysis of intellect is gradually being exposed as a marketing trickster.

Anthony Albanese is becoming more assertive in his attacks on Scott Morrison, and in his attacks on journalists. And these actions suggest Labor’s internal research is giving them a greater level of confidence that they can win the next federal election.

There won’t be a federal election in the short term, but that doesn’t mean campaigning can’t start early. It feels like the election campaign has already commenced, with Scott Morrison wanting to ‘move on’ from all the errors from the past and present his best face to the public.

But this depends on the fine art of the political lie, of which Morrison is happy to contribute to. In 2004, John Howard opened his campaign with “who do you trust on the economy?”, flushing out memories of continuous ‘mean and tricky’ lies, and helping him to roll Mark Latham and the Labor Party on election day. Morrison will use this same strategy but he’s not as clever as Howard, and he’s not up against Latham. Will it work? He’ll certainly try it out.

Two and half years after Anthony Albanese decreed ‘no Labor MP will use “liar” to describe their opponents’, the term has become very fashionable and Labor is now calling Morrison a liar at every opportunity. Which means its focus group testing is suggesting Morrison’s propensity to lie and misrepresent everything in sight is become a serious problem for him.

Branch stacking occurs in all political parties but it seems that there are different media rules when it comes to reporting Liberal Party malfeasance. The Assistant Treasurer, Michael Sukkar has been accused of implementing a tax-payer funded system, where political staffers had the task of signing up Opus Dei, neo-Nazis and fascists as members of the Liberal Party, so Sukkar could hold control of the Victoria branch of the Liberal Party.

The media has been reporting about these issues but, essentially, it’s just providing the facts without the running commentary which they always provide when the Labor Party is involved in branch stacking – ‘The MP needs to be expelled! Daniel Andrews needs to resign! Albanese too!’

But they’ve been strangely quiet in creating a link with Scott Morrison, and when Josh Frydenberg suggested there was nothing to see here, they shrugged their shoulders and ‘moved on’. Which is just the way the Liberal Party would like it.

And in keeping with the Liberal Party’s form in terrorising women of all persuasions, two Liberal Party MPs – Christian Porter and Andrew Laming – have threatened defamation action against the academic, Gemma Carey, who posted offensive Twitter messages about these men, who then removed those messages and publicly apologised for these messages.

For most people, this would be enough, but these Liberal Party MPs are glass-jawed and their action is all about shutting up the people who criticise the government and members of this government. And we’re seeing why the Liberal Party encourages illiberal people such as right-wing religious fanatics, neo-Nazis and fascists to become a part of their membership.

They’re very happy to dish out the abuse, but will ensure that when members of the public try to return serve, they’ll use laws inappropriately to crush dissent.

The Prime Minister was reluctant to go to the COP26 climate change conference and it’s obvious to see why. To say it was a diplomatic disaster is an understatement and the more Scott Morrison makes politics all about him, the more he is exposed as an ineffective prime minister who appears to be severely out of his depth.

It’s one thing to create a diplomatic problem with a long-term European ally, but it’s another issue entirely to start leaking private text messages received from the French President. And as if to outdo his own stupidity, Morrison decided it would be a good idea to leak a confidential 15-page communications document to embarrass the US President. It’s hard to know who’s advising Morrison – he might be following his own advice – but it was an incredibly foolish action, and it may take years for the relationships with France to be repaired.

An impassioned speech at COP26 by the Prime Minister of Barbados, Mia Mottley, was received favourably by the world community – Morrison was in the audience but it’s hard to know if he actually listened: he ruled out supporting a 30% reduction of methane gases by 2030, and refused to join the 40 countries wanted to phase out coal production. Best to go off to the Australian pavilion at COP26 under the banner of “Positive Energy: The Australian Way” and view the Santos carbon capture to see how well they’re spending the $220 million credit they’ve received from the federal government’s $4.5 billion fund to pollute the environment.

The former Premier of NSW – who we now believe is deserving of the moniker of “disgraced former Premier” – has provided all the evidence she needs to present to the NSW ICAC, and their findings will be presented in the early part of 2022. With Parliament no longer a forum for accountability and the media deciding to never hold conservative governments to account, the role of the NSW ICAC is becoming increasingly more important, and it’s a model which should be implemented at the federal level.

And the release of these findings – which could be incredibly adverse for the NSW Liberal Party – could severely derail the next federal election. And there’s also a SA General Election to be held in March 2022, as well as five byelections for the NSW Parliament in the early part of the year. For the Morrison government to be re-elected at the next federal election, everything needs to start going right for them and everything is going in the opposite direction.

It’s going to be a tough election to win.

What is Scott Morrison? A brand name? A theme, a hologram, a Prime Minister, an advertisement, a football coach?… or just a person? It’s hard to know, because Morrison reveals so little of who he actually is. But does it really matter? We reveal all in a conversation with Sean Kelly, discussing his brand new book, “The Game: A Portrait of Scott Morrison”, published by Black Inc. Books.

We try to pin Morrison down, but it’s so difficult. So, we start off with the “Where the Bloody Hell Are You?” campaign: was this the beginning of Morrison’s pitch to become Prime Minister? This advertisement was a segue from one disconnected idea to the next and, in hindsight, this is Morrison’s prime ministership in a nutshell: disconnected ideas, clichés, the good times, spin and marketing… and presenting the face of Australia that masks the unpalatable reality of life.

Politics seems to be a game for Morrison but decisions made in Canberra have real-life consequences in the real world and affect millions of people, not just in Australia, but all around the world. There are many serious issues facing Australia and during a time of pandemic and climate change, the electorate is looking to government to ameliorate these issues. It’s not a game. But will Morrison change his strategy (or his marketing plan)?

The ‘selling of a prime minister’ got Morrison to the 2019 election and it may well get him through to the next election. But people have begun to ask questions about who Morrison is. And many in the electorate have begun to ask, ‘what else is there? Where is the real guy?’

That will be one of the interesting points in the lead up to the next election campaign.