Extract from ABC News
Analysis
It's been 10 days since it was reported that a Victorian state crossbench MP, Andy Meddick, had been threatened with being shot and his children kidnapped because he had :consulted" with the Andrews Government on its controversial pandemic laws.
And it's a week since gallows and angry protesters, often spouting QAnon conspiracy theories, started turning up outside the Victorian Parliament.
At least two state premiers — Victoria's Dan Andrews and Western Australia's Mark McGowan — have received death threats.
On Thursday, Meddick's daughter was attacked on the street and hospitalised.
On any measure, it's been an ugly escalation in the violence of the language, the extremes of views, and the dysfunctions of our politics.
It's the sort of moment you would expect leaders to emerge to try to settle things down, reset the debate. But it took until Thursday for Prime Minister Scott Morrison to make any serious contribution, and he only then did so in response to journalists' questions, and only then without being able to resist the temptation to put in a political kicker.
Well, of course, those threats and intimidation have no place in Australia, he started.
But it was the "of course" that followed that provoked outrage.
"Of course, there are many people who are feeling frustrated", he said. "I mean, over the last couple of years, governments have been telling Australians what to do. Now, there's been a need for that as we've gone through the pandemic. But the time is now to start rolling all of that back".
On one level, this was merely an extension of his message that Australians have had a "gutful" of governments and want their "freedoms" back.
But by Friday, the PM was on the back foot, having to insist there was no dog-whistling to the anti-vaxxers, and their parliamentary supporters, now circling him, and politics in general in what he had said the previous day.
"I was very clear yesterday in denunciating any violence, threats or intimidation", he said. "That is a plight against anyone. And we have absolutely no truck with that whatsoever. I couldn't have been clearer about denunciating the violence and the threats and the intimidation. They have no place in Australia's public policy debate whatsoever. Whatsoever!"
The mood has shifted
Opposition Leader Anthony Albanese drew a comparison with Morrison's remarks earlier in the year about how lucky women protesters had been not to live in a country where they would be shot.
But there are plenty of other comparisons of relative responses: the condemnation of Black Lives Matters protesters, or the pile on to ACTU secretary Sally McManus for suggesting there was not a problem with breaking an unjust law.
None of these involved threats to kill people.
Being denounced as a liar by French President Emanuel Macron seems to have crunched the gears in politics in the past few weeks, just as the government's own spectacular backflips have caught the PM — almost daily now it seems — being smacked in the face by his own previous utterances.
A majority of voters no longer trust what he says. Newspoll data this week showed the PM trailing Albanese for the first time on measures of trust, likeability, caring and understanding of the major issues of concern for Australia.
But you can also sense that the frame in which he is quizzed now is also disbelief.
Morrison's central message
There is also the jarring clang in the PM's central message: that governments should get out of people's way, shouldn't mandate things, shouldn't legislate things.
After all, this was the government that imposed perhaps the most onerous restriction of all on Australians in this pandemic when it closed our international borders and refused to let Australian citizens come home from India.
It is the government that wants to legislate to make people show ID when they vote and would dearly like to legislate (though its own parliamentary position is so precarious that that is going to be difficult) religious "freedoms" legislation.
Equally, the PM who champions "Can Do Capitalism" and, apparently, "Won't Do Government", is pledging to control things that have eluded governments for decades — interest rates, as well as petrol and power prices.
The talk about governments getting out of the way is a clear attempt to exploit what the Coalition believes is voter anger with state governments over restrictions and vaccine mandates, and a sop to the group of federal parliamentarians who have threatened to stop the government passing any legislation this year unless it acts against vaccine mandates.
This group includes two Coalition senators and One Nation in the upper house, and former Liberal MP Craig Kelly and George Christensen in the House of Representatives.
Scott Morrison has somehow managed to create an unworkable position for himself in both chambers of parliament.
This would be a really big problem if it wasn't for the fact there is precious little legislation on the agenda for the final sitting fortnight for the year — which begins next week — other than the problematic religious discrimination legislation.
Not all that surprisingly, legislation for a national anti-corruption body looks like it's slipping off the agenda for 2021.
Labor makes its move
Morrison has given licence to the anti-vaccine, anti-regulation, and anti-mandate crowd by his language on freedom, and by volunteering that the federal government doesn't believe in mandating vaccines.
Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews observed on Friday:
"Why did we have lockdowns?
"Because we did not have a vaccine. Who forgot to order the vaccine? It wasn't state premiers".
Just two weeks ago, Morrison was boasting that the government was not going to legislate or mandate emissions reductions targets. But on this issue too, it is relying on the states having done exactly that in order to reach net zero by 2050.
The states, understandably, feel Morrison is freeloading on hard work they have had to do in containing the pandemic and dealing with climate change.
Labor finally sees its chance in all this. It believes the PM, with all his backflips and contradictions, has destroyed not just his own credibility but his government's capacity to find any credible policy positions other than the basest and most irrational fears.
Thus it is finally emerging with a few policy positions of its own, but ones honed to the Morrison dilemma: policies that go to the theme that the PM is always late to the party, whether it is on bushfires, climate change or vaccines.
The NBN policy release this week was a case in point: promising to fix up the NBN after it was revealed the government has had to spend more on its technologically more-modest NBN plan (which was spruiked as much more cost-efficient) than had been forecast for Labor's plan.
Morrison goes into the final fortnight of parliament not so much in a spot of bother, but in a Dalmatian's worth of them.
Laura Tingle is 7.30's chief political correspondent.
No comments:
Post a Comment