Economy

Back in 1997, when Crown casino opened its massive Southbank ‘entertainment centre’, I was possibly its best-known public critic. It was a time for compulsory cheering after Crown’s lavish opening, but I was disturbed. I said it is too big and too powerful, with so much money flowing that politicians and media will not even know when they have been bought. This memory was triggered as I read the findings of the Finkelstein Royal Commission into the Casino Operator and Licence.

It’s taken a long time but the concept of the ‘greater good’ – the sense of a shared destiny, of shared interests, collective purpose, a common future – is finally returning to our politics. Largely this is the result of the need to build community support for lockdowns, various other restrictions on our lifestyle and for vaccinations in response to the Delta strain of Covid-19.

The fictional Stone Age family of largely unremembered animated children’s film The Croods is the prime minister’s latest inspiration for a nation exhausted by lockdowns and living in fear of the Delta strain of Covid-19.

It is difficult to understand how the government justifies setting the level of JobSeeker below the poverty line. It appears much of the government’s decision was based on the prime minister’s personal prejudice.

Scott Morrison has an answer for everything and a solution for nothing. Like the neoliberalism of which his party was once so proud, he is all promise and no delivery. His press conferences have long been a masterclass in dictating the terms of debates, dodging accountability and delivering attacks on his rivals.

Last week we learnt that regardless of which major party wins the federal election, tax cuts of $180 a week are locked in for the top 5 per cent of taxpayers. Following that revelation, it was rumoured that Labor would pay for the tax cuts by reducing services for cancer patients and older people with sore teeth, although it denied the former. For the government’s part, it plans to slowly starve our essential services and the safety net.

There is an increasing likelihood that the Delta strain of the Covid-19 virus has dealt a fatal blow to the prospects of the Morrison government retaining office at the next election, whenever it is held. The prime minister has spent the week holed up in isolation back at The Lodge in Canberra ahead of the scheduled parliamentary sitting in two weeks’ time. His colleagues have no doubt he is ruminating on the findings of a string of opinion polls this week showing a fall in support for the government and his own declining approval ratings – none more disturbingly than the Newspoll.

Australia is in the middle of a 30-year property bubble. It is a bubble inflated by government policy, and every time it looks as if it might burst, governments rush to blow it up further. All bubbles pop eventually, but few are maintained as carefully as this one.

If a picture is worth a thousand words, nothing was more eloquent than the joint news conference of Scott Morrison and Gladys Berejiklian at the prime minister’s Sydney accommodation, Kirribilli House, this week. The Lodge in Canberra has been relegated to temporary digs status, giving reinforcement to accusations from Victoria that Morrison sees himself as ‘prime minister for New South Wales’. Like John Howard, he’s turned Sydney into the capital of Australia.

The Morrison government was brought to the brink of collapse this week in a confrontation between the prime minister and reinstalled Nationals leader Barnaby Joyce. And while Scott Morrison emerged the undisputed winner after bruising negotiations over the shape of the ministry and direction of the government, the damage is far from repaired.