Politics

What a week for the Morrison minority government. It started with the prime minister promising to keep Australians safe and secure. It ended with him and his government looking less assured they will be around long enough to deliver. Tuesday’s historic defeat on the floor of the parliament was a direct legacy of the same turmoil that led to the demolition of Malcolm Turnbull’s leadership. In its wake, the prospect of the government’s recovery is looking more remote by the day.

Morrison’s hyperbolic warning – that any show of compassion to the 1000 or so refugees still holed up on Manus and Nauru will destroy the border protection regime and lead to a new influx of boats – is of the same genre as his repeated warnings against a banking royal commission. And while he can chalk up ‘stopping the boats’ as an achievement, the government’s handling of the banks is an entirely different matter.

I am 74 and acutely aware that our planet is hotter than when I was a boy, due to the burning of fossil fuels. Storms, droughts and bushfires are all the worse, as predicted 30 years ago. Yet the rate of burning of fossil fuels is still growing in 2019, as is the consequent heating. Now is not the time to give in to despair. Now is the time to take action.

The speech in Brisbane on Tuesday was billed as a “major” announcement, the first for the year from the prime minister. Absent from this manifesto, though, was any mention of climate change, energy policy or stagnating wages – all issues critical to the performance of the economy that are, not surprisingly, weighing strongly on the minds of voters as well. If nothing else, their absence points to the extreme sensitivity these policy areas hold for Morrison.

It seems particularly galling that so much taxpayer money has been spent on a system that cannot improve health unless it is a data source, only to have it fundamentally fail at accurately collecting data in a comprehensive and usable way. For clinicians, it is of little use, as the technologically literate may heavily edit their record while those among us who struggle with technology will likely find it difficult to generate the personal health summaries that are central to the system.

Callers to the prime minister’s Radio 4CA interview weren’t distracted by quibbles about who did what centuries ago, they were more exercised over what’s happening now – to them and their businesses. A businesswoman named Linda rang in to complain about the cost of insurance in extreme-weather-prone Far North Queensland. ‘The flow-on effect,’ she said, is that ‘our economy is going nowhere. It’s been going nowhere since the GFC, which is a decade now.’ The prime minister had nothing much to offer except sympathy.

The Prime Minister’s Office insists Morrison only learnt about Broad’s use of a website for ‘sugar daddy’ arrangements on the day New Idea broke the story. It is simply an incredible and grave dereliction of duty on McCormack’s part. He lamely claims he doesn’t ‘tell the prime minister everything about every member of parliament’ because he ‘has enough on his mind’.

Change the date, don’t change the date – I am agnostic. I think a national day could be a valuable tool in the binding of a nation, but only if it finds ways of including the three narratives, as Pearson has described them. I can imagine a three-stage national day of the future, one that stretches from our long First Nations history, through the narrative of the British arrival, to the waves of immigrant arrivals and life here now. Past, present and future.

Australia needs government. Unless there is urgent action, we will be entering the third decade of the 21st century more directionless and unfocused than we have ever been, at a time when global politics is in chaos. This is not the time to be drifting, hanging on to hope that our (economic) luck will continue to hold. If it is the case that these feckless and mostly fear-based politics have really taken hold only within the past two federal election cycles, they should not be so difficult to dispense with. Especially as voters now seem able – and willing – to apply the bullshit detector more liberally than they were inclined to in the past.

The day the Morrison government sank deeper into minority with the desertion of backbencher Julia Banks, the Opposition leader went for the jugular. Bill Shorten asked, ‘Given that his minority government is consumed by division, dysfunction and chaos, was it a mistake for the current prime minister to replace Malcolm Turnbull?’ Scott Morrison denied the premise by asserting his government was getting on with the job followed by a long, detailed list of achievements. One member of the visibly forlorn Liberal backbench later said: ‘The trouble is the voters have stopped listening.’