Film producer 1: You’re lying! You’re lying to me!
Film producer 2: Yes I know! But hear me out!
Old industry joke/reality
As far as Australian politics goes, I have no idea what’s going on. I’m not sure anyone else does either. That may well include the people doing it.
In the past couple of months we have seen the Morrison government and much of the wider right completely pivot to accepting the reality of human-caused climate change, to resituate the right/left divide and to steal a march on Labor. This appeared to fit in with a wider openness by the right towards big government spending and an abandonment of the conservative moralising about small government, the virtue of the private sector, the list goes on.
But that was a week ago. Now we appear to be pivoting again. Using their outrageous simultaneous lies and volte-face on electric cars, team ScoMo has reinstituted the private sector v small government division. They didn’t do it right, the line goes.
Now here we are, and we have to fix it. This is a line that News Corp is running — especially, it seems, in the Daily Telegraph, where gurning clown Joe Hildebrand has become the poster boy for the “we can fix it” school.
The further sense that something may be shifting is suggested by, of all things, Peta Credlin’s most recent column in The Australian. Yesterday, Credlin noted the US Republican victories in Virginia, a state that had been Democrat for a decade and was trending towards solid blue, but went Republican based on a “platform of cutting taxes, cutting regulation and supporting the police — but with the added ingredient of banning leftist race indoctrination in schools. Apparently it “reassured conservatives that the culture wars might be winnable after all”.
That’s an old-school Thatcherite face-saving construction of what was overwhelmingly a culture-war campaign around schools, curriculum, gender and bathrooms. But does it indicate Liberal thinking in the centre of government? Credlin’s cubist meat puppet Tony Abbott is also reported this morning as saying something like this.
So is it on? Are they now going to pivot to a mix of post-COVID anti-government messages combined with a renewed and redoubled culture war? With a bipartisan position established that net-zero is the goal, the politics around it are reduced to questions of means and method — i.e. no politics at all.
Could the Morrison government really now let it all rip? Just ignore its own statism, bang the anti-big-gov message and throw a series of dodged-up culture war conflicts into the mix, aided and abetted by News Corp?
You know it can, and you know that the idea being absurd is not a disqualifier per se — it’s all about the ratio. Can it pivot again without falling over or looking like it’s a modern dance? It seems like it’s going to have a go.
But while that move can clearly still work in the US, is it possible in Australia? Your correspondent suggested recently that the culture wars may be coming to an end here. That may have been a bold oversimplification for effect (so unlike me!); there’s going to be raw material around for culture wars for quite some time, as the knowledge class expands. But the structure and content of Australian life is somewhat different — less religiosity, and an absence of elected school boards as in the US model — and the capacity for culture wars to really take off much diminished.
Furthermore, News Corp has knocked out the keystone of its own culture war triumphal arch — climate change denialism. With the Oz and tabloids bleating about solar panels and green growth, the other stuff is just rubble on the ground. The rubble of their love, from which no castles will be built.
The further risk of such a pivot is that the right may end up on the wrong side of the taxing-spending-debt triad. COVID gave it the cover of a national emergency to spend hugely, run up vast debt and not raise taxes. But it can’t commit to all three forever.
Cutting services and spending will mean that the right loses the socially conservative section of the working class; raising taxes, the lower middle class; and expanding debt, the sections of the middle-middle class listening to Labor’s dissident fiscal responsibility message broadcast from resistance headquarters.
Labor, one presumes, is waiting to see which way the Coalition finally jumps before it decides how to oppose. This now has the left and progressive elites screaming at the ALP to stand for something consistent, and oppose on those grounds. Your correspondent is screaming inwardly, himself.
But one can also see the point as to how politics works these days: if Labor establishes a set of principles, outlines of a program, etc, the Coalition will run against it from an opposition-in-government sort of stance. We are once again caught in keirin-race politics — the velodrome bicycle event where two riders slow down so greatly, as they wait for the other to crack and set the pace, that they will sometimes wobble and fall over entirely.
What I guess this period is a useful test of is how politics works at two levels. Has retail politics become so rapid and transactional that you can keep trying new pivots and feints and then make a final decision ten days before the poll, gain the retail votes and not be penalised by lowered levels of trust from the electorate?
Or has Scott Morrison’s professional adman/PR work history transformed the Liberal Party’s balance between lying and consistency to such a degree that the party centre is now in the grip of magical thinking which obscures to it the damage it is doing to its own brand?
“You’re lying to us!” “Yes, of course we are, but just listen to what we’ve got to offer!”
If team Morrison loses this election, then retrospective wisdom will be that of course you can’t just endlessly lie and pivot and expect to be able to win the electorate over.
And if it wins, of course, then it tells us something about how those levels work in public life today, and the relationship between program and identity affirmation in politics. To vote in large numbers for people who obviously lie and contradict themselves rapidamente is to affirm that you aren’t voting for a program or an action-oriented worldview — for how could you have any assurance it would be delivered? You’re voting instead for the affirmation of an attitude, carried consistently through a set of shifting lies.
It can be a rational course of action but only if the political imperative is to preserve your class/group identity — or contest and resist someone else’s — above all else.
And that’s what team ScoMo appears to be betting on. This is not a time for big political dreams, even though dreams are the only place where truth and lies have no meaning.
Morrison is a moral and intellectual vacuum, so feels no attachment beyond his own self interest and a transient focus on the latest lie. We only have to look at his governmental performance to see a) incompetence and b) no clearly thought-out agenda beyond shovelling advantage to his donors and supporters.
This is supported by his daggy dad schtick, in which he pretends to be the sort of person to whom he would not normally give the time of day were the cameras off – he only started following the Sharks when manipulating his way into his seat, he is naturally far more at home with the rich private school Union types. The list goes on.
It is easy to see through this and to dismiss it, but it is probably a part of his success. By being a moral and intellectual tabula rasa and doing his “everyman” schtick he allows key parts of the electorate to project their own beliefs and frustrations on to him and to delude themselves that he is “just like me, so I’ll give him a go”, thus freeing the voter from the need for critical thought and himself from the messy necessity of having to develop policy, tell the truth about it and argue for it.
It reflects poorly on us that it works, but it does.
A bit of journalistic effort and integrity may help, but this is in short supply – most seem to be stenographers awaiting the next “drop” while living in fear of saying the wrong thing and being cut off from the tit.
..sounds familiar..? but it’s well done.
That is frightening acute.
Mini Trump with a touch of Pinocchio.
More than a touch of Pinochio!
You are right about his beloved Sharkies, before he became PM I would see him at Forshaw Park at Southern Districts rugby games in the directors box drinking free beer surrounded by Trump supporters.
Andrew, you have absolutely nailed it. Your penultimate paragraph however is very sobering.
Shark Smile Scomo grows more Trumpian by the day. Both are neofascist monsters.
Explains why he still has 48% approval. His jingoism has markedly increased as the election looms.
“We are once again caught in keirin-race politics” Niche, but a great analogy! although the image of Morison wobling along in a lycra body suit has quite put me off morning tea.
I also hate labors evasive low policy approach, but think it is correct. There is one primary question rational caring humans should be asking themseles: what can I do to ensure labor wins this election. After that, Greens, progressive independents, whatever actually aligns with you. These lying, corrupt, ecocidal sociopaths must be destroyed.
Might have been a great analogy if he hadn’t got the cycling event completely wrong – the one where two cyclists go as as slowly as possible in an attempt to make the other take the lead (and thus provide the other a slipstream) is the Sprint. The Keirin is a motor paced event behind a powered bike where the motor-pacer picks up speed progressively each lap until finally pulling off the track and allowing the pack of cyclists, now belting along, go all out for a final few laps.
When you think about it, there’s no reason why Labor should put out its policy platform until the election is called. It is the Government who should be telling us what their policies are as they are supposed to be running the place. If Labor puts out any kind of policy statement now, Morrison will misrepresent it into something no one would want to vote for. The question is why aren’t the Liberals being questioned about what they are doing in government. For example what have they done to implement the recommendations of the Royal Commission into Ageing? Etc etc.
Bush fires and and and……………
The question JMNO is why aren’t Labor as adept at the Coalition at misrepresenting their opponent’s policy into something repellent to the retail voters.
Ineptitude?
It can’t be anything to do with an ethical aversion to misrepresentation as they do that constantly to voters since the Right took over postWhitlam, the last person to enter Parliament with honest intentions.
My head hurts! But I liked this description “ Credlin’s cubist meat puppet Tony Abbott” he he he
That almost forgives the rest of the article – if only his grasp of history & analytical skills matched his occasional verbal pyrotechnics.
At least his faith in the ‘knowledge klass‘ nonsense disappeared for a while (out of sheer, disabused embarrassment?) but it has coming roaring back lately, apparently unabashed.
All Liberal politicians, Morrison included, sign on to the Hypocritic Oath, which includes the promise to “primum non nocere ad childrenoal” (‘first, do no harm to coal” – except maybe burn it).
I think what we are witnessing here is the unedifying spectacle of the Coalition wedging itself. On one hand, they need to say they are going to do something. On the other hand, they need to look like they are doing something. They are caught in the middle, desiring to do nothing, but wanting the electorate to believe that they are.
I like it: wedged between needing to say they are going to act, needing to look like they are acting, desiring do nothing and wanting us to believe they are acting. Apart from plaudits from their claque for E grade thespian skills, there is deafening stunned silence followed by uproarious raucous laughter and jeering from us punters.
Nicely put. On my planet, you would be elevated and they would be vaporised! (Can’t we vote on instant vaporising, please? It’s common elsewhere in the galaxy…?)
Don’t worry Mr Graeski, we couldn’t wait, so we made an effigy and vaporised it to stop our hands shaking.
Yes, a no shaking of the hands policy with him is definitely a health imperative. No knowing what you might pick up from such a seemingly normal greeting, is there? Or even a touch on the shoulders.
A handful of coal producing seats have been holding the country to ransom.
I’ll believe News Corps Damascus conversion when they sack Andrew Bolt from Sky After Dark and relegate him to doing a column in the Hun on boutique whiskeys that none of his readers can afford.