For the younger Crikey readers — you raving under-50s — the term “silly season”, popular in the Australian media, once meant this: with a combined Christmas/summer holiday and a MSM chokehold on news, the joint just shut down for five weeks.
Agencies spat out telexes from faraway places for the middle pages — cities falling, foreigners blowing up planes and so on. But here, as everyone busked it out until a final blow-out on Australia Day — the only meaning that day has ever found — a skeleton staff promoted dogs who could howl “Up the Cazaly”, or the armed robbery of a pizza joint in Thornbury to the front page. Each would get three days in a row. Then the dog would be taken to the pizza and lo, it was good — for everyone except cadets sweating through their chocolate-brown, drip-dry nylon shirts wondering if there was going to be a paper tomorrow.
That was silly season. Now, with the world on a 24/7/365 rotation, “silly season” has become the process by which important decisions have to be made by tired people who are over it, never wanted to be there in the first place, and aren’t much chop at it when they’re at the top of their game. So silly season has swung to the very opposite of the spectrum, from the sort of story you fall asleep over on a banana lounge to the one that has you sitting bolt upright wondering if you need to put the family civil emergency plan into action.
Silly season now is realising that nothing ever stopped, no one is in charge, anyone even nominally in charge is, by definition, not competent for the job, and the return of the big girls and boys will only make things worse.
With this government, the summer, and the Omicron wave, it’s a perfect three-point trajectory. We all knew it was coming but we were too drunk and then too drowsy to really face it. The lower death rate of Omicron was enough for us to give ourselves a pass on outrage, until it became clear that the Morrison government had stuffed up beyond the implicitly agreed-upon limit and had once again endangered health system capacity, basic travel, assured contact with elderly relatives and, above all, school reopening.
As Scott Morrison remained absent, was then shoved in front of cameras to tell easily busted lies, offered us a fish it seemed he was not himself cooking, invoked magic Jenny and then disappeared again, it became clear to millions that this was not only worse than we thought it would be, it was worse than the worse than we thought it would be.
The federal government’s incompetence, insouciance and apathy have been something other than ham-fisted bumbling, such as would make the queues of cars and pedestrians waiting for a shot, a test, reminiscent of, silly season: shots of petrol shortages or Christmas strike queues from the ’70s. They looked like that other silly season staple: breakdown of order in African country X, courtesy of Reuters, anguished Third-Worlders arguing with sinister troops, aerial photos of someone capturing the radio station.
This disastrous period has a flavour of generalissimo government, an arrogant disdain for the people that is almost sensual. Morrison’s ever-ready impatience with actual questions has become a pre-emptive irritation. In those couple of disastrous press moments, with the stories about stopping to buy a test (apparently a lie), Jenny buying one (possibly true), and a homily about self-reliance and the private sector, one heard the irritated Sunday school teacher — which Morrison has surely been — snapping at someone asking a question that’s not about the book of Esther. The Thick Of It-style omnishambling?
Morrison is a preacherman, certainly above being the prime minister of some dogshit continent suburb far from heaven. Surely this has now become clear to anyone paying attention. He wanted the gig, sure, but he didn’t want it in a way that would kill him if he didn’t get it. He wants worldly success, his church is the 30 suits in a motorised-rail-walk-in-wardrobe more than sackcloth-and-ashes type, but it is only an expression of God’s plan. So it’s like playing golf after you just got a hand job in the clubhouse bar. You’re relaxed, you want this shot, but who really gives a damn if you miss? So you get it every time. Christian Zen. Your opponents are so twisted with stress they go straight into the bunker.
God is the hand job in this parable*. The Pentecostal God that Scott Morrison worships is not the absent-present post-Auschwitz god of the anguished. Though his faith is ostensibly Protestant, it’s really pre-Isaiah, a Yahweh protecting the tribe of the elect.
Morrison’s simple and repeated inability to feel COVID as a moral emergency comes from his inability to take on the moral universalism that is demanded of the prime minister of a multicultural society. No one believes, or should, that a PM is responsible for every life and death. But the moral role of a PM, in situations of medical extremis, is to act on the assumption that their every action will make a difference, to feel the fierce urgency of the role they chose and were chosen for. They should be able to repeatedly regroup the scattered feeling and broken sense of a whole, so that people can act together, with leadership.
But for the Pentecostalist, it’s the opposite. You’re not here to make people think it’s alright; you need people to be aware that they are responsible for their own salvation, whether it’s getting an antigen test or accepting Jesus, the former a step towards the latter. You would be betraying their soul if you gave them false comfort through minimising the risk to their body. Morrison is giving us a chance to save ourselves.
Even these at-home glimpses are part of it. The Jenny and Scott routine is straight out of a Hillsong marriage guidance pamphlet: men and women are equal, but a marriage has a leader, usually, guess who. In the Scott and Jenny parables, it’s usually Jenny drawing the water, hewing the wood, and finding the testing kits. And the fish? Well it’s always a fish! He’s a fisher of men. You know who else was great at catering seafood on a large scale, hmmmmmm?
Morrison connects with people who live modest lives amid a vast and roaring cosmos in ways that Labor still cannot. It’s part of its minimal strategy, but it leaves Morrison’s narrative and persona intact — and, strategy aside, it doesn’t do what an opposition, especially a progressive one, should do, which is to name utter dereliction and wilful, negligent, sabotage, when it appears.
That’s what has made this a silly season rather than a hunting season; this sense of a gap between the state and ourselves, between the rulers and the ruled, which finally has the feeling of abandonment — if neither side can voice a strong ethical relationship between government and governed, however compromised it might be in actuality.
*Few theological systems recognise this.
Morrison has shown that Australia doesn’t need a Federal Government. Not only are we better off with State and Local Governments running the country, but we are better off without the incompetent politicians that are attracted to Federal politics. It would be almost impossible to pick a more hopeless mob than the current Federal Mob. I have been voting in elections for more than 60 years, and until now I rated Billy McMahon as our worst Prime Minister, he has been well beaten by Scott Morrison.
“Morrison has shown that Australia doesn’t need a Federal Government.”
Morrison and his gang will be delighted to hear it. Their ideology says government is bad. They try to make their point by governing badly (and credit where it is due, they are phenomenally good at it).
For a more substantial argument about the harms done by Federation, there is a good piece in The Monthly (Dec 2021) by Alan Atkinson, ‘Did Federation compromise our democracy?‘ which shows that more than a few wise souls foresaw the downside while it was under construction.
Charles, while I agree with your assessment of the Morrison rabble, I disagree that they have shown us we don’t need a federal govt. IMHO they have shown starkly that we do – but one that actually functions. Lots of good work could and should be done at state and local level – and sometimes is – but surely it’s only at a national level that we can at least hope to tackle the really big things: climate catastrophe mitigation and adaptation; responses to COVID; a treaty with, and Voice for, indigenous people; taxation and redistribution policies; defence; etc.
The fact that some of the states have done at least a passable job in their responses to COVID does not mean we can or should task them with running everything.
Except the Federal government creates the currency by the act of spending it, so we do need them. Rather desperately. We just need a competent one.
Not sure where Rundle spent the summer break, – certainly not examining his tedious fixation on Labor’s endless shortcomings nor his banal contrarian impulses dressed up as insight – but for anyone paying attention, Labor generally and Albanese specifically, have hammered home the drumbeat of Morrison’s zealous incompetence and his wilful indifference. That the media barely covers this, beyond a strangled sound bite, speaks to the media’s folly, not Labor’s.
Re that ‘…strangled sound bite..’, you’ll probably find that it is the Invisible Man’s natural voice – like a granny who OD after finding the kid’s Ritalin when looking for her specs.
Now THAT was funny. Must be my morning for laughter.
It’s pretty simple.
Guy Rundle is a shameless Greens booster and uses most of his columns to attack the biggest enemy of the Greens, Labor.
Simple things like reality or the fact that most Australians can’t stand the Greens won’t stop him.
“* Few theological systems recognise this.”
Haha! Gold
**based on legal advice.
Morrison still connecting with the general public? Somehow Labor has done itself no favours? Don’t get it. At least not from the article (which i enjoyed i should add 🙂 )
the article’s sub-headline involving Labor seems like a bit of an afterthought…the vast bulk of the article is about Morrison’s shambolic performance.
Agreed. There is only one use of the word Labor in the body of the article. That is in a sentence discussing Morrison and the Coalition rather than Labor and it gives no basis for the subheading. However, the subsequent sentence in the article then discusses an ‘it’. Normal English usage would connect this pronoun to the preceding sentence’s main concern, the Coalition, but this makes nonsense and so instead the ‘ít’ has to be Labor, or maybe Labor’s strategy, or Labor’s something, who can tell. Once that confusion is sorted the origin of the subheading emerges, but it’s still flimsy when laid against the rest of the piece.
So it’s just more sloppy writing.
Certainly “just more sloppy writing” but that’s to be expected of grundle.
Back in prehistory, any subby with a concept of grammar would have rewritten it to be intelligible English.
Or, more likely, whacked it back on the spike whence it came, in a slow news moment.
That “It’s” is where it all goes wrong. Substitute “Labor’s approach” or somesuch and you’re all good. Guy isn’t responlsible for the headline which roped Labor into a column almost entirely about the so called Government.
Well I enjoy Grundle’s flights of fancy and Tom the Red’s creativity! Gold stars all round!