A tale of two tempos as Morrison and Shorten hear election clock tick

Extract from The Guardian

Katharine Murphy on politics

Australian politics 

Katharine Murphy

The PM is in motion, this week on an integrity commission, but Shorten’s staying safe

@murpharoo

Sat 15 Dec 2018 08.00 AEDT Last modified on Sat 15 Dec 2018 08.02 AEDT

‘Bill Shorten and Scott Morrison are each carrying their own stresses.’ Photograph: Mick Tsikas/AAP

Have you noticed, as we limp towards the end of the political year, that Scott Morrison is speeding up and Bill Shorten is slowing his tempo right down?
A tale of two tempos is a tale of two imperatives. Both leaders are carrying their own stresses. Morrison is obsessed with ploughing through the busy work he hopes will keep the Coalition in the game, and Shorten, who can see the finish line, is hoping fortune won’t turn, and hoping that he won’t screw up.
Part of the Morrison busy work this week was unveiling a new integrity commission. It’s fair to say the said unveiling was entirely through gritted teeth.

The integrity commission proposed by the government was to be a “sensible” one, the prime minister submitted on Thursday, learning from “many of the failed experiments we’ve seen at a state jurisdiction level”.
“I have no interest in establishing kangaroo courts that frankly have been used – sadly too often – for the pursuit of political, commercial or bureaucratic agendas in the public space,” Morrison said.
“I think those exercises have sought to undermine public confidence, not improve it. They have not added to the integrity of public administration and they’ve become playthings of the usual actors. That’s not what we’re about”.

Morrison was also keen to note the government wasn’t jumping on any bandwagon “or anything like that” (perish the thought) but had in fact been quietly mulling this prospect since January (which is true: the question had not been whether the mulling was happening but whether anything would ever emerge from it, given only three weeks ago Morrison had derided an integrity commission as a “fringe issue”).

There are substantive issues with the government’s model, which experts were quick to identify. Top of the list of criticisms (and there are a number) is the lack of public hearings for matters involving politicians and public servants, which might be warranted to assist the efficient functioning of an investigative body (which this proposal is), but also fuels an unpalatable sense of secrecy.
Given it’s already pretty obvious the model Morrison is floating won’t be legislated in the form he suggests, because other actors in the political system will look to beef it up, I want to focus on this week’s framing.
I don’t want to invoke the concept I loathe more than any other – the cursed “optics” – but with this particular issue, the way you present it does actually matter. It speaks to your bonafides.

Two observations.
The idea was dropped in the spirit of barnacle removal – bowled up without warning, in the same press conference where Morrison unveiled his response to the Ruddock review. In fairness, time was a bit tight. Saturday was already reserved for cleaning up the mess the prime minister made when he floated moving Australia’s embassy in Jerusalem. But let’s not be gratuitous. Back to Thursday, and the integrity commission.
The second observation that can be made is Morrison wasn’t actually pitching to the voters. He was conducting an inhouse conversation, and that was obvious from every bit of commentary that came out of his mouth.
The message was, don’t worry guys (Tony Abbott, Barnaby Joyce and others who have made it clear they don’t, underlined, support an Icac) – this isn’t some crazy self-harming proposal like some others currently doing the rounds. It’s a “sensible” one. No kangaroo courts. The attorney general, Christian Porter, standing alongside Morrison, promised “no show trials”.
Presentationally speaking, it was flashes of passive aggression, interspersed with soothing and lulling. There, there. There, there. This version of things will be fine.
Apart from a glancing reference from Morrison that it was “always important to raise the bar and maintain the bar to ensure the public can have confidence in the integrity of commonwealth public administration” – the poor old voters were completely absent from the picture.
If you can step off Morrison’s perpetual motion machine for five minutes, and think about it for a second, that’s pretty odd.
Let’s be clear. The only reason politicians in the federal arena are contemplating an anti-corruption body is because of the disaffection of voters. They are talking about this because they know voters are angry enough right now to contemplate punching them all in the face.

Just as the Adani coalmine in Queensland has become a proxy for climate change, an integrity commission is a proxy for whether the political class comprehends that people are angry about a system they increasingly believe serves someone’s needs, but not theirs.
If you are going to go down this path, if you are going to make integrity and accountability a virtue, it really is best to understand that the gesture in the current political climate has some potency.
If you fumble it, you risk making things worse. You risk irritating people further.
I’m sorry to be blunt, but the only thing on display with the presentation this week was a tin ear, similar to the tin ear that prevented the Coalition from signing on to the banking royal commission until such a point as they would get no political credit for doing so.
It’s really not hard, this stuff, it just requires a little bit of thought and a modest serve of empathy. Yet this government has a unique talent for making things hard.
Speaking of making things hard, Shorten will, over the coming days, catch up with the comrades at the party’s national conference in Adelaide, and behind the scenes there is a palpable desire not to create unmanageable problems for the leader.
This week, Shorten permitted himself, at Andrew Bolt’s invitation, to muse out loud about what the opening few weeks of his prime ministership might look like.
But there’s still a slog ahead. Some in the Coalition think its relentlessly negative campaign against Labor’s negative gearing and dividend imputation policies are starting to make some inroads with undecided voters.
Published polls don’t provide any evidence for this, but government people insist Labor’s bold policy offering is fertile territory if they can only overcome the hard wired habits of self-harm.
A noteworthy theme of the coming conference will be how Shorten manages his trade union constituency. Unions have a big wishlist on industrial relations reform.
It was interesting Shorten took the opportunity of his conversation with Bolt to send a signal to business that he would look to remake labour relations through a Hawke-style consensus summit in the event he wins next year; a note of reassurance, if you will, as unions marshal with full force to change the rules.

Shorten’s great strength as Labor leader is his capacity to navigate the institutional fighting force sitting behind him, but business groups will be asking the same question between now and polling day: when it comes to the Labor leader and the unions, who runs who?