Politics

Scott Morrison could have picked up the phone to two members of his much-vaunted national cabinet this week, to sort out what was truly a bizarre situation. But he didn’t, and his decision not to says a lot about his approach to the pandemic. Morrison’s reluctance to get involved in the six-day border standoff between New South Wales and the Australian Capital Territory betrays a style of governance that oscillates between the passive and the reactive, always with an eye to quarantining himself from culpability.

Scott Morrison keeps misreading the mood of a nation gripped by fear. Nowhere is this more obvious than his now-abandoned legal case against state border closures – or, to be more precise, against the lockouts in the Labor-governed states of Western Australia and Queensland. The Liberal-governed states of Tasmania and South Australia escaped his censure.

There are two striking aspects of Australia’s response to coronavirus: the first is that it’s being increasingly led as a police issue, and the second is that this is happening while the rest of the world works to reform and curtail police powers. As other democracies talk about abolition, we’re sending armed officers into housing blocks and calling it public health.

Scott Morrison went into disaster management mode this week as the coronavirus pandemic came awfully close to home, both personally and politically. The ‘catastrophe’, as his political opponents described it, was the Covid-19 outbreak spreading through some private Victorian aged-care facilities – something that happens to be the direct responsibility of Canberra. No longer does the prime minister have the luxury of being a helpful but innocent bystander in the crisis.

Amid a once-in-a-century pandemic that has closed borders and deflated economies, two of Australia’s most senior cabinet ministers flew to Washington this week for talks with their American counterparts. The day they arrived, Washington, DC, recorded 11,858 Covid-19 infections and 582 deaths from the virus; both ministers will undergo two weeks of quarantine when they return to Australia. In an era when G20 meetings and leaders’ summits have taken place by video link, what is so compelling about these talks that justifies chewing up three weeks of two senior ministers’ time?

Treasurer Josh Frydenberg’s hands were blue as he stood behind his lectern, physically distanced from Scott Morrison in the prime minister’s courtyard on Tuesday. The pair were holding an outdoor news conference on an icy Canberra morning, and nothing the country’s two most senior politicians had to announce could thaw the wintry malaise that’s set in across much of Australia. The chilling realisation is that they, like the rest of the nation, are at the mercy of a virus that is threatening to get out of control.

The first flush of success has faded into a pandemic pallor with Covid-19 hotspots breaking out in Melbourne and Sydney. And the worst, no doubt, is yet to come. As a second wave of infections takes hold, Scott Morrison’s performance in the top job is being questioned in a way it hasn’t been since the summer bushfires. The prime minister went out of his way to be seen watching his NRL team, Cronulla, get thrashed by the Penrith Panthers last Saturday at Kogarah Oval, surrounded by assorted fans and hangers-on. At a time when community transmission is ramping up, there was the predictable and immediate censure on social media.

Four days after the voters of Eden-Monaro kept the marginal seat in opposition hands, the Reserve Bank governor summed up the nation’s predicament: we are all flying by the seat of our pants. Scott Morrison, too, put it succinctly: ‘This is a global pandemic. There are no guarantees in a global pandemic. You have to deal with the situations that are in front of you.’ It is how you deal with these situations, or rather how lucky you are in dealing with them, that can mark a leader up or down.

While taking my young son on yet another visit to Canberra’s Questacon last year, I decided to walk him past a pair of statues of John Curtin and Ben Chifley. Watching the winter sun warm Chifley’s bronze face, I wondered, momentarily, what my son would have thought of me representing the seat named after Joseph Benedict Chifley. After all, I am the son of migrants from the former Yugoslavia, the same migrants who had been fair game politically in the late 1920s when Chifley first entered politics.

Unfailingly, since World War II, the voters in the New South Wales seat of Eden-Monaro have picked the mood of the nation at every federal election. Well, almost every election – 2016 and 2019 were the exceptions. Today those of the seat’s 114,000 registered electors who haven’t voted pre-poll will play the part of political weathervane, if not their more traditional role of bellwether.