Extract from The Guardian
PM’s audacious, mendacious strategy is that falsehood flies and truth comes limping after it.
Along with mind-numbing photo opportunities of gnocchi rolling and performative haircuts, high on Morrison’s list is technology, not taxes, choices, not mandates, and the “animal spirits” of can-do capitalism.
As for governments? Not a fan, apparently.
Governments, in Morrison’s book, are much too fond of legislation. Particularly “don’t-do governments”, which like to make laws that “tell people what to do”.
Since returning from his overseas trip to the G20 in Rome and the Glasgow summit, overshadowed by Australia’s diplomatic spat with France, Morrison has attempted to shift the focus to the domestic front, in a flurry of seat visits across New South Wales and Victoria.
Morrison has kicked off the campaign for either a March or May election, and is road-testing slogans for the first time since releasing the government’s generously named “plan” to reach net zero emissions by 2050.
But while one might expect Morrison to have been chastened by French accusations of his dishonesty abroad, the prime minister has gone out of his way this week to confirm impressions he is allergic to the truth.
When journalists confronted the PM with his past remarks that Labor’s electric vehicle strategy would ban utes and end the weekend, Morrison dismissed the accusation as a “Labor lie”.
When on Thursday he was again challenged on his about-face, Morrison doubled down and threw another fib into the mix, suggesting that Labor had an electric vehicle “mandate” that would have hiked the price of petrol and forced people to buy electric cars.
It’s worth looking closely at the prime minister’s audacious, mendacious, strategy.
We are all familiar with the post-fact political era, but while in Australia this has largely been confined to the political fringes and social media campaigns (like Mediscare and the death tax), Morrison seems intent on taking misinformation mainstream.
He would not be alone, after the conservative role models of Donald Trump in the US and Boris Johnson in the UK, where accusations of lying have become commonplace.
And while Labor is now openly calling Morrison out, along with some journalists, the prime minister clearly subscribes to the view that a falsehood flies, and the truth comes limping after it.
When Neil Mitchell asked Morrison on Friday whether he had ever told a lie in public life, the prime minister didn’t skip a beat: “I don’t believe I have, no,” he said.
“It’s not something that distracts me. I tend not to take things personally. I think that’s a good practice if you want to be in public life. Just stay focused on the job and don’t get distracted by the sledges.”
Morrison’s attempt to vanish away the past is based on a firm belief that the disengaged voter who will probably decide the election is not yet tuned in, let alone ready to cast judgment.
Which brings us to the animal spirits of capitalism.
In case you missed it, Morrison used a speech at the Victorian Chamber of Commerce and Industry on Wednesday to declare that climate change would “ultimately be solved by ‘can do’ capitalism; not ‘don’t do’ governments.”
“I think that’s a good motto for us to follow not just in this area, but right across the spectrum of economic policy in this country. We’ve got a bit used to governments telling us what to do over the last couple of years, I think we have to break that habit,” Morrison said.
It would be the “animal spirits” of enterprise that would decarbonise the economy, not government policy.
Morrison has laid down the ideological markers for the next election campaign, and his message couldn’t be clearer.
The Coalition government does not want to do anything.
No taxes. No mandates. No legislation. No policies.
After edging slightly to the left to deliver the net zero by 2050 target, Morrison is now retreating to the right, sniffing Palmer’s “freedom” breeze in Queensland and signing up to Barnaby Joyce’s yelling-at-clouds opus that people are sick of the government being in their life.
The hands-off approach couldn’t be more evident than in the Coalition’s “plan” for net zero by 2050 unveiled in the lead up to Glasgow, or in the “strategy” to increase the take-up of electric vehicles.
It’s is a bit like the pseudoscientific self-help documentary The Secret – simply state your goals and sit back and wait for the universe to deliver on your thought vibrations.
Morrison has eschewed the type of market mechanism the animal spirits actually crave, deliberately opting for direct government subsidies for technology (paid for by, ahem, taxes).
Morrison is effectively daring Labor to do something incrementally more than the nothing it is offering.
In this way, the small something that Labor offers up, will be cast as a diabolical threat (a tax, a mandate, or *gasp* legislation) that will form the backbone of a Coalition scare campaign.
We’re at risk of a nothing-off.
Hints this week from Labor that it could tweak the safeguard mechanism were seized on by Morrison as evidence of the opposition wanting to use “heavy regulation to regulate away jobs”.
“They want to legislate everything. They don’t trust Australians to just get on and do it.”
The past week has shown an increasingly desperate Morrison will say whatever it takes to try to tear Labor down, and there will be a scare campaign on climate regardless of where the opposition’s policy lands.
There are mixed views within Labor about how it should respond. The shadow climate change minister, Chris Bowen, has indicated that he wants to be more ambitious than the coalition, while suggesting this may be less ambitious than the policy Labor took to the election in 2019.
But Bowen has also made clear Labor won’t walk into a Morrison trap by opposing the change to the clean energy finance corporation’s investment remit announced by Morrison on Thursday.
Some Labor MPs think Labor should completely neutralise the issue of climate change by “banking the win” on the net zero target and fighting the election on other policy areas of strength.
Others believe that given the widespread condemnation the government’s policy has received, Labor can be more ambitious, helped by the switch in the Business Council and others for stronger medium term targets.
Albanese’s challenge is that in order to grab voter attention in the lead up to the election, he doesn’t have the luxury of making a virtue of doing nothing.
Labor has been effective at focusing the attention on Morrison’s personal failings, reflected in his sinking approval ratings, but it now needs to shape itself as a positive alternative and give people a reason to switch their vote.
We’re assured this is coming – expect positive plans for Medicare, childcare, and jobs over the coming months.
Voters don’t like Morrison, that much is clear, but the Labor party can’t afford to rely on the prime minister’s character to carry them into office. In fact, they should possibly fear it.
And if the coalition’s calculation is right, and voters don’t want government in their lives, then do-nothing Morrison’s don’t-do government has no rival.
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