Extract from The Guardian
Katharine Murphy on politics Australia news
Last modified on Sat 27 Mar 2021 06.02 AEDT
There has been a lot of focus this week, and rightly so, on Scott Morrison making things worse when his objective had been to make them better. There has been less focus, though, on what Morrison thinks he’s doing – on unpicking the underlying objectives of the prime minister’s “I’ve discovered the patriarchy” pivot.
Let me share a basic insight about Morrison that you might find useful. This prime minister speaks almost exclusively to one cohort of voters: men at risk of voting Labor. There was a departure from this strategy during Covid. Morrison engaged the whole country during the pandemic, because that’s what the times required. But outside the crisis, he speaks to blokes who might vote Labor.
If you are a swinging male voter, you won’t notice this phenomenon, because you bask in the warm glow of Morrison’s undivided attention.
But if you are not in this category, you might spend a period of time feeling excluded by the prime minister’s presentation and messaging before it dawns on you that you feel excluded because he’s not talking to you. Eventually it dawns on you that he’s never talking to you, even when words are coming out of his mouth and he’s making eye contact down the barrel of a TV camera.
Suffice to say Morrison has crafted a whole prime ministerial persona around that single objective. Speaking almost exclusively to men who you can court by being their champion, but who remain a flight risk, informs a bunch of the prime minister’s front-facing expeditions – going on 2GB and gritting his teeth while Ray Hadley drones on about himself, feeding the tabloids, appearing on A Current Affair, popping up with the self-styled everyman Paul Murray on Sky News periodically.
These aren’t accidents, they are meticulous calculations, because Morrison thinks like a campaign director. It’s how he approaches the job. This makes him quantifiably different from all the other prime ministers of my reporting lifetime.
But history shows that prime ministers are defined not by their strategising, but how they rise to the challenges no one plans for. Prime ministers have agendas and objectives, of course, but they are defined by events, and how they respond to them.
Morrison has been whacked, and hard, by an event that wasn’t on his permanent campaign plan. This moment is requiring a prime minister who has crafted a prime ministership out of talking to blokes to engage meaningfully with women in all their diversity.
It’s quite the gear shift, and it explains some of the hapless fumbling that’s happened in plain view. Given he’s had absolutely no practice (and seemingly not much interest), the transition has been inelegant, to put it kindly. Morrison has spent the past five weeks bobbing around like a cork on a boiling sea.
Grotesquely (and I don’t invoke the word lightly) Morrison and his backroom have met the moment by continuing to calculate rather than recognising that what was required was two things: empathy and moral clarity.
When I say calculating, Team Morrison has been thinking about narrow paths. This isn’t speculation. The prime minister used the analogy in the Coalition party room meeting last week.
A bit of context, quickly, to set this up. Morrison won the election in 2019 because he identified a narrow path to victory. He stormed up an electoral goat track courtesy of a bunch of fine-grained calculations, informed by good research. When I say fine-grained calculations, this is what I mean: what to say, to which voters, in which parts of the country.
After that “miracle” election win in 2019, Morrison will always back himself to find the narrow path to victory. He’s made that a personal brand.
So last week, when much of the government was completely freaking out that the prime minister was leading them into an epic clustercuss, but were far too polite to say so, Morrison told his MPs in their party room that they all needed to imagine themselves on a narrow stretch of the Kokoda Track.
Don’t fret, in other words.
I’ve got this.
It really wasn’t clear to me at that point what narrow track through a societal reckoning Morrison believed he could chart, but the semblance of a strategy became clearer this week, even in the clutter of his self-inflicted disasters.
When Morrison came out on Tuesday to try to hit reset by telling women he was listening, he botched it. But Morrison was back into the listening tour in the subsequent days, most notably with Tracy Grimshaw on A Current Affair on Thursday night. The narrow path Morrison thinks he’s on became clearer to me then.
Over the course of that interview, when he could get into stride (and Grimshaw, because she is an exceptionally good broadcaster, made that very hard), the prime minister’s core objectives were clear.
Morrison wasn’t trying to speak to all women. He was trying to engage one cohort of women.
For simplicity I’ll call this cohort patient women – a subset of Morrison’s favoured “quiet Australians” – women inclined to understand rather than judge when men refuse to get obvious things.
When you see the cohort he wants to speak to, the political calculation becomes obvious: Morrison understands now that all women have been riled by recent events, but he thinks some women are angrier than others.
The narrowcasting was obvious in some of the locutions Grimshaw didn’t manage to disrupt on Thursday night. Morrison was inviting this cohort of women to imagine their own cheerfully unreconstructed husbands – men who occasionally have an epiphany about social change when they are putting the bins out, or shortly after their teenage daughters slam their bedroom doors in a fit of rage after being told to put something more respectable on, or learn the neighbour they really like is gay.
“I may not have always got it as much as people would like me to,” Morrison said (directly to women inclined to take pity) at one point. “But I assure you, I am doing everything I can to understand it as best I can”.
When Grimshaw, heroically, expressed incredulity for the nation (where have you been/have you been on an island/are you in a bubble), Morrison again honed his message specifically for the target audience. “This is the difficult part of this,” he said. “You understand it in a way that only you could. I have a different experience to yours but I can tell you, for many Australians, this has been like a big wake-up call.”
If you shouted “no shit Sherlock” at your TV at this point during Thursday night’s interview, understand Morrison was not speaking to you.
He was speaking to women who get “insights” like that regularly from their husbands, and respond with nurturing, stoic, patience rather than incredulity and fury. He was also speaking to men like himself, intent on creating a community of interest with blokes genuinely dumbfounded about why women are so angry.
Getting to the nub of the issue, Morrison is battling a significant empathy deficit at the moment, so he needs to make his obtuseness relatable.
That’s been his primary objective this week.
It’s not yet clear what follows from that.
Perhaps for the foreseeable future Morrison’s prime ministership will now have two objectives: speaking to men who might vote Labor, and women inclined to pity unreconstructed men. Perhaps there was always some crossover with these two cohorts.
In any case, I’m not parsing all this as a prelude to informing you what a master political craftsman our prime minister is – in fact, the constant calibrating and recalibrating is alienating and abhorrent.
It is exhausting and diminishing.
I don’t know if Morrison’s narrow navigational path through the shoals of parliament’s #MeToo reckoning is viable or not, and frankly I’m a long way past caring about the efficacy of tactics of a politician who meets a moment like this with three dimensional chess rather than leadership.
I’m interested in right and wrong, and whether Morrison is prepared to act like a leader who understands the difference, because if he doesn’t understand the difference, nothing will change.
While Morrison may have learned things as a consequence of the past five weeks, while he might be on a slow path to enlightenment – and we’d all better pray that he is – the sum of the current behaviour suggests the pivot is more “me” than mea culpa.
I reckon a lot of women can see that very clearly.
The question is, will Morrison ever find the wisdom and the humility to see them?
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