Comment

Scott Morrison loves to keep a secret. It has become a trademark of his government and famously manifested itself long before he snatched the keys to The Lodge. It is serving him and the workings of our democracy poorly.

After the September 11 attacks, America was a nation bent on revenge. What is less understandable is why, in its planning for a war that lasted two decades, there was no reflection on anything but that. Now the same absence of reflection looks like prevailing again.

One argument is a slippery slope. If the government asked business to pay back $13 billion in undeserved pandemic subsidies, it would look a lot like accountability. And if they were to ask for that of business, then what accountability might they have to ask of themselves?

One of the most compelling public policy initiatives globally over the past several decades, but unfortunately one of the most poorly implemented, has been privatisation. That is the concept of transferring business, industry or services from public to private ownership and management control.

Scott Morrison is flailing about as he struggles to get back on the ‘narrow path’ he keeps talking about to deliver him another election victory. Nowhere is this more obvious than the desperate damage control he embarked on earlier this week, when it was obvious he had misread the mood of the nation. Most particularly, what had escaped him was the deeper concerns of people in states free of Covid-19.

In late May, Prime Minister Scott Morrison and Foreign Minister Marise Payne issued a joint press release announcing the imminent closure of the Australian embassy in Afghanistan due to the ‘increasingly uncertain security environment’.

John Howard’s wife once complained to a cartoonist that he was drawing her husband too small. She insisted Howard was the same height as Bob Hawke. In the cartoons, he seemed much shorter: head and shoulders below him. The cartoonist paused and then explained that what he was depicting was moral stature.

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 was a Saturday when I found out Kate was gone. I was about to pick up the phone to call her, because I had not heard from her during the week … I knew something was wrong, but my mind tried to minimise the weight of any worry. Kate was and will always be the strongest woman I know.