Politics

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.

Morrison said if others wanted to undermine the government’s job looking after the health of the nation, ‘it’s up to them’. But, he said, ‘We do not support misinformation in any way, shape or form.’ What he does support is Christensen remaining on the government benches.

Before the past couple of years, most Australians were either unaware of Sky News or considered it a bit of a joke. The consensus was that nobody watched it, and the people who did were out on the fringe. Anyone who maintains this today is simply not living in the present.

The setting for the government parties room meeting back in Canberra after the winter break was depressing. It wasn’t hard to see it as a metaphor for the deep hole in which the Morrison government finds itself. Having spent the first four months of the year assuring Australians the vaccine rollout was not a race, Scott Morrison is now in the race of his political life.

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.

Morrison’s decision to call in the military to sort out the vaccine rollout hasn’t provided him with the cover it was designed to. It’s one thing to send a general into war; it’s another not to give him any ammunition.

When Prime Minister Scott Morrison fronted up to the press conference to announce the outcome of Operation Ironside last month, he seemed even more pleased with himself than usual. Hundreds of alleged offenders had been charged and millions of dollars’ worth of drugs had been seized. It was almost as though it was an election year, and Morrison knew that fear mongering and surveillance powers play well with certain voters.