The fact the Liberal launch won't be about the Liberals exposes the party's emptiness

Extract from The Guardian 

Australian election 2019

This election for the Liberals has always been Morrison or bust because the party has nothing much left to offer

Katharine Murphy Political editor

@murpharoo

Tue 7 May 2019 20.42 AEST Last modified on Tue 7 May 2019 20.43 AEST

Scott Morrison and Bill Shorten at the first leaders debate. Photograph: Nic Ellis/AAP

We are going to have to wait and see what Scott Morrison bowls up at his official campaign launch on Sunday, but the forward sizzle before the event has been, how can I say this politely? Unusual.
Over the past 24 hours, we’ve had the Liberal party leader and the campaign spokesman both out to stress that Sunday’s set-piece will not be about the Liberal party, which is odd, given a campaign launch is traditionally an event to launch the Liberal party’s campaign for re-election.
Campaign launches are party events by their very nature; a ritual gathering of the clans before the final sprint to polling day.
But apparently not in 2019. Cue Scott Morrison. “You know what I hate about all these launches, is they’re all about the parties. I mean the Labor party’s launch on the weekend was just a big Labor-fest.”

Morrison objected to Labor people patting each other on the back and making the election about them, and ignoring the people at home. Let’s hold fire on the back patting for a minute and zero in on the rest – the all about them point, and the ignoring the voters point.

This observation from Morrison is profoundly odd. The point of a campaign launch is to articulate your program for government. This is not generally considered an act of gross narcissism. It’s generally considered an act of communication.
Last Sunday in Brisbane was about articulating the Labor program down to the footnotes, pulling the story together, and rallying a fighting force to bring the campaign home. Entirely orthodox stuff.
Nobody was ignoring the voters at home. Sunday’s display was entirely for their benefit. The launch had one objective: telegraphing a call to action, saying to voters now’s the time to take notice and make an affirmative decision to change the government.
Back to Morrison again. The Liberal leader has declared enough of the pageantry. Morrison said the coming election was about one thing – “the choice between Bill Shorten and myself”. So in other words, the 2019 Liberal launch will be about Labor. Let that sink in for a moment. Enough about me, more about you, but don’t worry everyone, we are good to govern for another three years.
Just in case we missed the message, Morrison repeated it. “At the end of the day, it’s a choice between me and Bill Shorten. No one else”.
This is what the election is about? Really? A bloke-off? In what universe?
For most people, safely removed from the cult of personality and tedious ambition-laden intrigues dressed up as ideological battles Canberra has dished up in the decade of political unhinging, the election is about the future of the country, and who has the best plan to move the country forward.
It’s not about a bloke-off.
What a strange universe to wash up in, seriously, when the leader of a political party intuits no benefit from situating himself firmly in his own institution, and in fact takes steps to distance himself from it.
Just for the record, the institution we are talking about is one of the great major parties of Australia, a political party with a proud history and tradition, a party that has proved itself an enduring institution, a rampart of the political system. I have never seen a political leader distance himself from the party he heads as the prelude to a campaign launch.
Now of course we shouldn’t build this up as some kind of watershed. Morrison is simply making virtue of necessity.
He can’t choreograph the scenes of ritualised rapprochement that Shorten was able to execute on Sunday. Shorten was fortunate that sufficient time had passed to enable Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard to sit in the same room without coming to blows. Morrison hasn’t got the passage of time to fall back on. He’s just got now.

Morrison can’t sell his front bench team, as Shorten does, because some of his best assets are tied up defending their seats. He can’t invite Malcolm Turnbull without making the show a three-ringed circus, and Tony Abbott is an electoral negative.
So this campaign in 2019 has always been about Morrison or bust, just as it’s been a brand campaign for Labor because Shorten isn’t liked by a lot of voters. Both leaders, in different ways, are doing what circumstances dictate.
Just as Shorten’s unpopularity is a weakness, Morrison’s response to events creates two vulnerabilities. He’s got to be a presidential leader, he’s got to carry the operation, because there’s no alternative.
But Australian voters have paid a high price for this conception of leadership over the past decade or so. When everything is all about the leader, recent history tells us this trend has made Australian prime ministers weaker, not stronger, and more vulnerable to the regicidal impulses of their colleagues.
The “all about me and all about dickhead” conceit also hangs a lantern over another problem. It points to the fundamental vacancy that sits at the heart of Morrison’s bid for re-election.
The Liberal party has spent two terms in government being unable to agree on what it should do. There has been periods of drift and periods of visceral internal conflict.
These folks have not done the work, either on resolving what the program is beyond tax cuts and some expenditure measures, or on working through how you resolve internal conflicts when the default culture is winner takes all.
There is a vacancy here, in a grand Australian institution. The institution is hollowed out and, headed by a leader intent on presenting himself as the solution to those problems, who thinks he can keep the show afloat through an act of individual will.

What’s required right now is not Morrison holding his organisation in a chokehold, but rebuilding the institution, caring for it sufficiently to understand that buttressed institutions and strong executives, and executives are a collective organism, are the only representative ritual sitting between us and chaos.
If you think I’m hyperventilating, look at Britain. If you look there you’ll see why political leadership in the modern era has to be a collective act, with collective purpose, rather than a succession of strongmen and women out front of roiling institutions, trying to bring the hammer down on irreconcilable interests.
But Morrison is in another headspace entirely.
There was a telling moment this week when Morrison was interviewed by the ABC’s Leigh Sales and asked who would have the upper hand in policy development post-election – the conservatives who orchestrated Turnbull’s downfall, or the mainstream of the Liberal party.
Morrison declared he would be the person with the upper hand.

“I will”.