(Image: Mitchell Squire/Private Media)

“We can now achieve an unemployment rate with a three in front of it this year,” said Scott Morrison yesterday in his attempt to reset an election campaign that’s been under way since November.

They don’t really have much corporate memory in the prime minister’s office, do they? They’re the outfit that thought “can-do capitalism” would be an election-winning slogan last November, before realising “can-do” would lose votes all over the place north of the Tweed by evoking memories of “Can Do Campbell” Newman, leading to its instant retirement from the prime ministerial lexicon after one day’s outing.

Plainly no one in the PMO was aware of who the last PM to talk about “unemployment with a three in front of it” was. Perhaps understandably, given no one in the press gallery appears to recall, either. It was John Howard, just out from the 2007 election, after the Liberal Party had put itself through that absurd theatre of Howard offering to quit mid-APEC.

Low unemployment didn’t save Howard from the wrath of voters who’d grown tired of him and his self-obsessed government. And Howard was competent, an adjective no one would ever apply to Morrison — now more likely to attract words like “psycho”. Howard managed unemployment in the low fours despite a budget surplus and rising interest rates.

Morrison is running the biggest-spending government since World War II, running up a trillion-dollar debt, has interest rates at near zero and has had the borders closed for two years. If you can’t get full employment with those settings, you never will.

But “unemployment with a three in front of it” was the extent of Morrison’s vision to Australians yesterday, having spent much of his National Press Club speech claiming that, apart from a few stumbles along the way on vaccines and aged care, everything was going well for the country. Just as with Howard, it drew more attention to Morrison’s lack of an agenda than to his economic management skills.

The nearest Morrison got to any explanation of what he’s actually trying to achieve as prime minister was what he called the Coalition’s “broad vision”:

Where Australians can live the life they choose for themselves and make their own way. To run their businesses, to get that job, get the skills they need to achieve their goals. To own their own home, raise and educate their kids the way they want to do it, to be able to save for their retirement, not get into too much debt, and take that occasional family holiday. To give back to their community wherever they can, as they want to, and including taking care of their local environment. And to live in a country that is safe and secure. These are what I describe as the great Australian aspirations.

To call it motherhood would be generous; pabulum would be too kind. And what’s missing are minor matters like the climate emergency — please limit your environmental concerns to your local neighbourhood — Indigenous recognition and closing the gap, looking after seniors, a health system that works, a democracy not riddled with corruption and extremism. Still, who cares about those?

How to achieve the “strong economy” that would enable these great aspirations? Morrison — like Labor — is keen on manufacturing protectionism or, to use the new jargon, “sovereign manufacturing capability”, because putting the word “sovereign” in, like inserting the word “security”, requires the immediate suspension of critical thought.

Manufacturing’s not exactly a Coalition strength, either politically or in the real world — since November 2013 Australia’s lost more than 8% of our manufacturing workforce, while the total workforce has grown 14%. The biggest decision of Morrison’s prime ministership was to dump the Naval Group submarine deal in favour of a vague idea of building them mostly in the US or — a remote likelihood — the UK. Even by its own protectionist lights, this isn’t much of a manufacturing government.

Still, while Morrison was pointing at areas of policy failure, he committed to throwing $1.5 billion at commercialising university research. Having spent the past two years attacking, defunding and interfering with Australia’s university sector, Morrison seemed to be saying it’s good for only one thing: generating economic growth via stronger private sector profit.

Of course, Morrison knows better than that. He knows universities are good for bringing in export income via foreign students, who in turn provide an easily exploited low-skilled workforce.

Not that he broached the subject of wages growth at any point. That’s another area of policy failure — on a massive scale — for this government. But you’d have thought that given the RBA — even now, after the recent rise in inflation — continues to insist that wages growth must lift above its current pre-stagnation levels for interest rates to start rising, Morrison would have touched on the central issue of economic policy.

But that was absent, along with so many other things. Indeed, it was a speech composed almost entirely of absences, of holes where meaningful policy — hell, any policy — should be. Like the man who delivered it, it was defined by a lack of substance, a vacuum where the nation’s leader should be.