Morrison says he's in command of the show, but there's a far bigger force at play

Extract from The Guardian

Australian election 2019 

Katharine Murphy

PM has done better than Turnbull or Abbott in the left-right balancing act but one area poses big problems – climate change

@murpharoo

Sat 11 May 2019 06.00 AEST Last modified on Sat 11 May 2019 06.16 AEST

Scott Morrison had a couple of formulations this week about how he has led and would lead his fractious political organisation. Photograph: Mike Bowers/The Guardian

Scott Morrison has been highly successful during this campaign at keeping the focus on Bill Shorten and Labor policies. He has presented the Coalition as the “nothing to see here” status quo option. In contrast, his opponents have been cast as the purveyors of radical change Australia doesn’t need.
The Liberal leader has been running dead on his own agenda, and deliberately so, to ensure that all voter eyes are trained on the (risky) alternative. But despite the Seinfeld campaign, the Coalition isn’t actually seeking a mandate to do nothing. As the contest moves into the final week, it’s time to kick the tyres of Morrison’s deft “move on calmly, nothing to see here” campaign impressionism.
There are a few ways we could do this, but one obvious way in is through tax policy. The Coalition’s long-term tax cuts haven’t commanded a massive amount of deep focus for a few reasons. At budget time, all the attention was on the Coalition offering tax cuts for low and middle-income earners to try to neutralise a similar election offering by Labor.

There wasn’t much attention paid to the tax relief for high-income earners slated for down the track, because it was unclear whether Morrison would win the current election, let alone be in a position to legislate a program taking effect between 2022 and 2025. The medium-term agenda attracted a significant discount rate.
As well as the whole idea seeming reasonably hypothetical, there was a second, conceptual, discount factor. The generosity of the tax relief proposed for up the income scales doesn’t sit comfortably with the uncertain state of the economy. It seemed likely that the Senate, if presented with the whole package post-election, and told to take it or leave it, could elect to leave it on the basis it’s not prudent to bake in tax cuts at a time of pervasive economic uncertainty.

So the sum of all the discount factors is the Coalition’s tax package has largely washed through the election conversation without troubling anyone much, apart from appearing as an abbreviated talking point – we’ll give you a nice tax cut and Labor will increase taxes.
But the fact of the matter is the Coalition’s policy is not status quo, nor “nothing to see here”, but instead, a significant change to how the system works now. A couple of experts quoted in a recent ABC Fact Check noted that the package outlined in the April budget would reduce the progressivity of Australia’s tax system.
Morrison and the treasurer Josh Frydenberg have been deeply reluctant throughout the campaign to quantify in dollar terms the tax relief that will flow to high income earners – to people earning $180,000 a year.

The progressive think-tank the Australia Institute has calculated that figure at $77bn over 10 years. The two tax experts quoted by the ABC Fact Check, the Grattan Institute’s Danielle Wood and the Australian National University’s Ben Phillips, say the figure is more like $88bn or $89bn. The government won’t quantify the figure itself because it does not want to hand Labor a concrete attack point it can weaponise before election day.
Another element related to the tax package was flagged by Wood early in the campaign, but the cut-through point she made hasn’t really lingered in the daily hustings conversation.
Wood noted that in order to be able to afford the high-end tax cuts and keep the budget in surplus, the Coalition would need to cut spending by about $40bn a year by 2030.
Faced with this inconvenient fine print, Morrison promptly declared poppycock, but Wood – a respected economic analyst – doesn’t resile from her calculations and, assuming she’s right, that points to the risk of a significant round of expenditure cuts that have not been disclosed to voters before voting day. Tony Abbott walked that same path in 2013 and his story did not end happily.
The other clever teflon strategy Morrison has deployed during this campaign has been to detach himself from the dead weight of the Coalition’s period in government.
He’s done laps of the country as a solo act to project lightness and agility and energy to voters – to present the impression of a political leader in sole command of his enterprise.

Now if Morrison pulls off a victory, there’s no doubt his internal authority will be enhanced, because he will have achieved something that seemed impossible at the time when collective despair descended inside the government after Malcolm Turnbull was deposed last year. If Abbott loses in Warringah (and I have no idea how realistic that prospect is), that will also make life easier for the Liberals to rebuild and steady the enterprise either in government or opposition, because a long cycle of destruction will be broken.
But whatever the abundant gratitude of colleagues post-election, if they find themselves on the government benches against expectations, Morrison will not be in solo command of his enterprise. It’s just not the real world.
Sitting – comfortably obscured behind Morrison’s cheery five-week circumnavigation – is a battle for the leadership of the National party that will blow up after the election if the gritted teeth behind the scenes are a reliable measure, particularly if the election doesn’t go well for the junior Coalition partner.
The Liberals will continue to struggle to agree on things they have spent a couple of terms struggling to agree on. This government roiled right up until the moment when Morrison took himself to the prime minister’s courtyard after visiting the governor-general – and the only thing forcing discipline now is the discipline of people trying to hold their seats.
Morrison had a couple of formulations this week about how he has led and would lead his fractious political organisation. On the ABC, he first declared he was in full command of the show. In the last leaders’ debate, he said he led from the “middle” – a reference to balancing the sensibilities of the right and the left.
In fairness to the current Liberal leader, he’s done that better than either Turnbull or Abbott. That was Morrison’s main claim to the top job when he faced off against Peter Dutton last year.
But with due credit to the massaging given, there remains one live litmus test of who really runs the Liberal party in 2019, and it’s on an issue that sits at the front of many voters’ minds in this election. It’s climate change.
Morrison made a big show in the months before the election of executing a positive pivot on climate change, backing renewable energy projects, rebooting the emissions reduction fund, and at one stage, declining to utter the word coal in deference to metropolitan progressive Liberal sensibilities.
But the election campaign – all the hyperbolic shouting about the costs of climate action, the self-interested and cynical critiques of Labor’s decision to use international permits to lower the cost of abatement (a position the Coalition adopted in 2017 and abandoned only with the election in sight), and the “Labor’s secret plan to confiscate your ute” hyperventilation – speak volumes about who runs the show and Morrison’s inability to move the internal dial to something like a neutral position on the most important policy challenge of our time.
The Coalition remains deeply regressive on climate action.

One Liberal said to me this week: every time we talk about climate change, it hurts us with middle Australia. Right now it’s hard to say with any certainty just how much, but we’ll find out next Saturday night.