Analysis
Posted
Four days before he would be toppled as prime
minister in September 2015, Tony Abbott found himself standing with his
then immigration minister Peter Dutton and treasurer Scott Morrison in
front of the cameras at Parliament House.
They were waiting for a meeting on Syrian refugees to begin.Mr Dutton was overheard, via a boom microphone, joking that the meeting seemed to be running on "Cape York time".
"We had a bit of that up in Port Moresby," Mr Abbott responded, in reference to talks he had just held with Pacific Island leaders in Papua New Guinea about climate change.
"Time doesn't mean anything when you're about to have water lapping at your door," Mr Dutton continued before Mr Morrison pointed out, sotto voce, there was a microphone overhead.
Four years and two prime ministers on, Tony Abbott is gone, Scott Morrison is Prime Minister and it is he who has just had to face the wrath of Pacific Island nations about climate change.
And as we mark the first anniversary of Morrison's rise to the top job on August 24 last year, the Pacific Islands Forum seems a good place to start in reviewing the his first year as PM, and what has happened to the country and our politics in the meantime.
Managing politics vs managing policy
It is too easy to simply reflect on such anniversaries in terms of what they have meant for the rise and fall of one politician, or even one side of politics.Just as he was the only one to notice an enormous boom microphone on a 3-metre stick hovering above him that day in 2015, Scott Morrison has proved himself a sharper politician than Mr Dutton and Mr Abbott in the way he has gone about running politics as Prime Minister.
He generally eschews the directly confrontational style of Mr Abbott and Mr Dutton, but that doesn't mean he doesn't share many of their views, or that he is not attempting to pursue the same sort of agenda.
The Prime Minister is open about his attempts to get politics off the front page.
But that can reflect what seems to be some confusion between managing the politics of an issue and managing a policy.
Keeping a debate about a dozing economy — and what the Government should do about — tranquilised is not the same as actually confronting the very large policy issues that our economy now faces, with its mixture of low growth, low inflation, and over-reliance on monetary policy.
Eventually conceding this week that the tension between China and the United States kept him awake at night is different from finding a path for Australia through those tensions.
Mr Morrison was able to chuck a bone to the US this week — in an area that didn't offend China — ahead of the G7 meeting, by agreeing to join the multinational' force in the Gulf protecting oil shipments.
That would be a "multinational" force of the United States, Britain and … us (and Bahrain). We provide the fig leaf of respectability to suggest the whole operation isn't one aimed at Iran by the United States, with the hope the language far-flung Australia has used to justify its involvement ("our interest is in de-escalating tensions, not increasing them", "our national interest is in ensuring the continued flow of oil, etc etc") will encourage other countries to join too.
Sleeping giant in the Pacific
Straddling the minefield of internal Coalition tensions on climate and energy policy is a long way short of giving yourself any room to manoeuvre when you are talking to your Pacific Island neighbours.The Pacific Islands Forum was once a definite Second XI event that Australian prime ministers would try to offload onto a colleague.
But it has now become a highly contested event, attended by enthusiastic delegations who consider they have an interest in the Pacific — from China to France and Britain.
And this year's forum came after Mr Morrison had announced the Pacific Step Up: Australia's attempt to win back, or at least reinforce, its long history of influence in the region as China and other countries take an aggressive interest.
The Islands wanted a commitment Australia would agree to start closing down its coal industry — a demand no side of politics was ever going to agree to.
But what was revealing was that there was so little else we seemed to bring to the table, other than $500 million of rebadged aid funding which, it was said, would help with the effects of climate change, not its causes.
Climate change no longer a hypothetical
The Government might have moved publicly beyond the argument of whether climate change is happening. But it is hard to escape the impression it thinks it is happening to someone else and that, therefore, the politics of the issue — apparently reinforced by the swing in coal seats at the election — is clear cut.But it isn't of course. In the Torres Strait Islands, sea walls are being breached in big tides and monsoons. Houses, infrastructure, graves and other sacred sites are being lost.
Elders from the same part of Australia that brought on the Mabo case have lodged a case against Australia in the United Nations Human Rights Committee, arguing that not doing anything about climate change is a breach of the islanders' human rights.
And if the cynics in the Government view this as not an issue because it involves a far-flung community, an Indigenous one at that, and (yawn) the United Nations, they might like to consider how the structures of their own government are now also being influenced by climate change.
When the agriculture portfolio was carved up after the election, David Littleproud became the Minister for Water Resources, Drought, Rural Finance, Natural Disaster and Emergency Management: a range of jobs which bears a striking resemblance to the need to deal with the varying impacts of climate change.
Our politics have changed in the 12 months Mr Morrison has been Prime Minister. The Labor Party is no longer in the ascendancy; the tensions within the Coalition have taken on different forms.
But those tensions have not gone away. We are in a holding pattern on crucial areas of policy on the economy; strategic issues; asylum seekers and climate and energy.
The Coalition saw its election victory as an endorsement of the view the electorate is more conservative, and increasingly driven by people of faith.
But making that political assessment of the views of Australians is different from having a clear-eyed assessment of where policy needs to go, whatever the electorate's views may be.
That would be a lesson many of our current leaders could take when reflecting on the career of Tim Fischer.
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