Politics

Scott Morrison hates the pejorative nickname that has taken hold on social media. “Scotty from Marketing” was conferred on him by the satirical magazine The Betoota Advocate. The moniker has gained currency because it captures the growing gap between the prime minister’s performance and his salesmanship of it.

One of the questions I return to again and again in my work is how we value unpaid gifts of time and skills that meet social, communal and national needs. The Arndt affair’s blokey stab at gender equity offers an opportunity to question the criteria used to decide the value assigned to honours for which women are nominated.

Not once, before this latest foray, as far as I can tell, had Morrison been pulled into line by an interviewer on his claims about hazard reduction. This comes after an election campaign in which he managed to make the cost of Labor’s climate change policies an issue. The cost of not doing anything – which has now, tragically, been the focus of two months of wall-to-wall coverage – was largely ignored.

In recent months the federal government’s position on climate change has shifted. Not in policy terms: the change has been restricted to its rhetoric. It has a new strategy to avoid responsibility. Prime Minister Scott Morrison has become adept at evading questions on climate change and its links to bushfires and judging by his satisfied expression as he fronted up for ABC’s 7.30 recently, he remains confident he has a form of words that, like armour, journalists will be unable to penetrate.

Scott Morrison’s year of living miraculously ended with our elected leader disappearing from view and his whereabouts being treated like a state secret. The attitude that the prime minister’s location is nobody’s business is a strong indication of the arrogance – indeed the contempt – he and his government have demonstrated since their May election triumph.

On a day when thick, acrid smoke made Australia’s largest city virtually uninhabitable, the prime minister claimed climate policy success. Scott Morrison told a news conference – which had been called not to respond to the crisis but to discuss the freedom of religions to discriminate – that ‘our actions on climate change are getting the results they’re intended to get’. No one could miss the irony.

Next week, the first United Nations Global Refugee Forum will take place, where member states will try to co-ordinate a response to the largest global refugee crisis since World War II. It is the first step towards a necessary international processing and resettlement agreement. Marise Payne, Australia’s foreign minister, has not committed to attending. Nor has the Morrison government made any public statement about what role Australia might play in the UN talks.

Gone in a cloud of bluff and bravado is the compassionate medevac law that gave doctors the major role in transferring sick refugees to Australia for treatment. The senate and the people of Australia were told by the Tasmanian independent Jacqui Lambie that she had put to the government a proposal ‘to work with me to secure my support’ for the medevac repeal. And then it got very strange.

Scott Morrison’s handling of the police investigation into Energy Minister Angus Taylor this week brazenly flouted conventions of propriety and integrity. The prime minister actually phoned the New South Wales police commissioner, Mick Fuller, and then told parliament based on that call he was not required to stand the minister aside.

Medevac works, medevac is saving lives, limbs and hope. It is a clinical process, led by doctors – robust, orderly – wherein 86 per cent of all successful applications are in fact approved by Peter Dutton himself. Before medevac was enacted, 12 people died in Australia’s care in offshore processing. Since medevac, there have been no deaths.