Comment

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.

Fifteen years ago, Warren Entsch pushed three black-and-white photographs of a woman in lingerie across his desk. “There’s my missus. Look at that,” he told the journalist sitting opposite. “Good-looking bird and I love her to bits.”

We in Australia love gold more than a Saudi prince’s interior decorator. We’re the gold standard in botched vaccine rollouts and the gold standard in failing to suppress the Delta variant. Fortunately, we’re also the gold standard in women’s swimming at the Olympics, and the gold standard in enthusiastic coaches humping barrier walls. 

The timing of Labor’s announcement – ditching a significant tax policy it had taken to the previous two elections – may have been curious. Its significance, however, should not be missed.

The pandemic has tested Morrison’s capacity for leadership, and he has been found seriously wanting. He simply hasn’t been able to rise above base politics, nor beyond what he considers to be clever marketing.

As you read through the latest intergenerational report, the section on climate change stands out for the simple reason that it contains no projections. The numbers exist, just as they do for population growth and productivity, but they are not included. The Saturday Paper understands Treasury was pressured by the Morrison government to leave them out.

There is a moment in Alan Moore’s seminal comic book series, Watchmen, when the genius mastermind controlling the world from the shadows reveals that the only thing that can bring humanity together is fear of something new. We are bound most tightly when we are bound by a hatred of the unknown. To that end, he engineers the conclusion of the Cold War by manufacturing evidence of an alien invasion, persuading the proverbial superpowers to unite against a new foe, which doesn’t actually exist.

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.