Suppose they gave a national security scare and nobody came? That seems to be the latest fine mess the federal government has got itself into with its attempted takedown of the opposition by way of the atavistic “Manchurian candidate” meme.
By week’s end, the media commentariat reaction to the scare was near universal — and near universally critical: “Morrison weaponised national security,” wrote Guardian Australia’s Katharine Murphy. For the ABC’s Laura Tingle, it was “a grubby descent into public policy madness”. Even Paul Kelly in The Australian was displeased: “Such language has no place and no justification.”
The media reaction was bolstered by the horror of the national security establishment that — gasp! — its briefings were being engineered for party political gain (apparently this has never happened before).
Scare campaigns are harder than they look. They demand precise measure: “Six drops of essence of terror, five drops of sinister sauce,” as Professor Weirdo chants in the opening to the classic 1960s cartoon Milton the Monster, airing during Morrison’s childhood.
Above all, it calls for a just-enough splash of credibility. The 2019 death taxes worked because to a low-attention audience, what was one more tax among all the others Labor was proposing? Same with 2016’s “Mediscare”: the 2014 budget’s co-payments mixed up with a bit of hairy-chested Tory privatisation chatter made it all too plausible.
On Insiders yesterday, Liberal Senator James Paterson rolled out the thin facts of the charge sheet, including (shock!) the anodyne diplomatic niceties that Anthony Albanese delivered in Mandarin in a 2018 speech that, according to news.com.au, passively “emerged” last week.
Too late: the intervention of the national security apparatus has given the media permission to deny the scare the repetition that delivers credibility.
Morrison is proving a poor salesman. In the same week when you brag to your partyroom of being all politics all the time, expect people to take you at your word. According to Guardian Australia, he told his colleagues: “I know how to do that, and I know that is how you win elections. I know what the path is and I’ll be following it.”
Fair enough. But when the media has factored #Scottyfrommarketing into their thinking, these words almost demand they refuse the scare on offer. It’s possible that leaving the job to Defence Minister Peter Dutton with his “tough man for a tough job” reputation could have gained more traction.
It’s why, too, the job is being handed off to the self-professed “modern Liberals” fighting off “Voices of” independents — like Wentworth’s Dave Sharma.
It’s taken a while, but Australia’s media are coming to recognise the inherent “atavism” of the scare (to adopt the highfalutin’ word of the Herald Sun’s James Campbell on Insiders yesterday). Sounds like a carefully legalled term to describe the tendency to revert to ancestral practices… like, maybe, anti-Asian racism in what was once the country’s consensus White Australian political discourse.
The Liberal Party has discovered that anti-Asian racism is more than offensive, it’s politically dangerous. There are at least four Liberal must-hold seats that rely on the votes of Asian-Australians — the sort of voters who made John Howard’s once-safe Bennelong a marginal seat.
The original “Manchurian candidate” was a fictional trope from the depths of the Cold War — a POW brainwashed by the dastardly Chinese turns presidential candidate featured in Richard Condon’s 1959 novel of the same name and brought to the big screen not once, but twice: in 1962 at the height of the Cuban missile crisis and again, post 9/11, in 2004.
As abuse, it’s as close as a politician can get to “Yellow Peril” in polite society.
The anti-China national security scare is a US Republican talking point. The government has taken the “socialism!” designed to scare Cuban and Venezuelan Americans and “defund the police!” for white suburbanites and adapted them for Australian use.
But outside US demography and history they’re struggling for pick-up.
There’s still hope. In its tabloid machine, News Corp seems eager to join in, as they did yesterday linking the headline “Chinese spy ships in laser attack” with body copy of “accusations … that Chinese spies had sought to influence the selection of Labor’s candidates in NSW”.
And Liberal strategists will be hoping that war in Ukraine might just provide the spark to sputter the scare into life.
Someone who’s obsessed with wedges,
dirty tricks and nasty sledges,
that’s our ScoMo, pleading, crying
for a government that’s dying,
short on brains and new ideas,
in the gutter stoking fears,
grabbing at this China twaddle,
thinking it’d be a doddle
trapping Labor, but they’ve muffed it,
Albo’s got the wedge and stuffed it
right back where the sun ain’t shining,
consequently undermining
rants by ScoMo and P Dutty,
sending them completely nutty
as they fight for Biggest Liar,
seeing who is pissing higher,
so these two appalling numpties,
cracked and broken Humpty Dumpties,
trapped in desperate embraces,
splattered egg across their faces
I doubt the two amigos could have been more aptly described, Gazza.
“two appalling numpties,
cracked and broken Humpty Dumpties,
trapped in desperate embraces,
splattered egg across their faces”
Excellent prose…on point, once again, Gazza.
Now that one is a real classic, Gazza. Although maybe you held back a bit??
Personally I am getting tired of Morrison spruiking about how much safer we would be under his watch.
Remember this guy lies to save himself, you cannot take him at his word on anything and all these promises he makes now will invariably be discarded if re elected.
Unless of course, some of hus mates can get a kick back, ” then” he will proceed.
Now to put in perspective this us and them argument on China.
As reported un Crikey, which Government was in power when Xi visited Australia and the innaurgaral meeting un Parliament ?
Which Government signed agreement to allow Chinese workers into Australia?
Which Government signed a leaae to China on Port of Darwin?
And one of his ministers was handubg out paraphenalia espousing the virtues of CCP propoganda in Universities, according to a stydent at the time.
Morrison is a charlatan, a lier and corrupt Politician in a corrupt Government.
Moving on frim there we have Dutton, a former detective in Campbell Newmans Government in Queensland, I recollect in the day that they were pretty heavy handed when dealung with public amd Inspector Clossuea would gave fitted right in ” and” now he is Minister for Defence!
Talking about buying submarines from U.S, U.K that will not arrive till way down the track, talking about buying Bradlet tanks ( manufactured in U.S) a d so until the subs arrive we can put these tanks to giid use aling our vast coastline ( just in case)
My younger brother was in Navy all his life, my self i was in Army Reserve and my sister is marrued to ex military.
In all our tume we have never seen such a shambolic inept Givernment as in power now.
But it was Nero who sat and played fiddle whuls Rome burnt..Now is Morrisons to strum ukelele and watch Australia divided and in chaos,
Does he deserve anotger term, he f**ked up 3 years that he should never have got, he deserves to go down in annals of history along with mad monk as two mistakes Australia shiuld never have made!
Exactly. Anybody with half an ounce of self respect, introspection or shame, would have slinked off under a rock years ago, whan faced by the appalling spectacle of their own ineptitude. The LNP only do theft in its various forms, and shame or acceptance of responsibility is not in their makeup.
Your are quite rightly pretty emotional about this waylaider. Couldnt agree more . . .
I couldn’t agree more but I fear that Morrison will say anything now to feed a right wing press that may not want to research the truth of the matter and just broadcasts to an audience that similarly may not want to read more widely?
PS Csn someone please explain to me why we bring out any fighting words with regard to China? I mean- they are like- bloody huge! We have 25 million people and they have 1.2 billion or so—-if they attacked, wouldn’t we just all be dead before any country got it together to help? Hello America UK? Isn’t that why we do diplomacy????
Look what happened to the ship of Australian Navy that broke down on rescue mission after to Tonga.
They had to call in repair crews from Australia to fix the vessel and whilst this was happening the Chinese rang rings around our ship as they continually delivered supplies.
And this useless/inept Government wants to purchase submarines in U S/ U.K, how does that enhance maintenance facilitues in Australia in case the subs have problems?
Do we wait whilst they fly out people from wherever they are purchased to fix any issues?
The Bradley tank is also being purchased from the U S, yepp I temember a while back when Australia purchased two ships from U.S it was not long after the purchase they were scrapped.
“The original “Manchurian candidate” was a fictional trope from the depths of the Cold War — a POW brainwashed by the dastardly Chinese turns presidential candidate featured in Richard Condon’s 1959 novel of the same name and brought to the big screen not once, but twice”
FFS. Wrong wrong wrong. How is it this keeps getting repeated? Nobody who has read the book or seen the film should be able to get this so utterly wrong. The brainwashed POW is not the candidate. He is never a candidate. He has been programmed by mind control to help the candidate. The Manchurian candidate is actually a candidate, of course. He is a dim-wit US politician (being used by others) who is destabilising representative democracy by his hysterical McCarthyist anti-red rhetoric and wild accusations. The conspirators behind the candidate want to create a crisis that would enable a dictatorship led by the candidate to take power. Condon was trying to show that raving anti-red scare campaigns are not patriotic, they can can be a danger to democracy and they can easily be exploited by the enemies of democracy. The nearest we have in Australia at present to anyone acting like a Manchurian candidate is either Morrison or Dutton with their hysterical accusations.
It’s interesting that the Manchurian candidate is controlled by his wife, who is the real brains and the ruthless driving force behind the conspiracy. (A great role for Angela Lansbury in the 1962 film.) It would be outrageous to suggest any comparison between this character and Jenny Morrison, or to find any parallel between the extreme ideology and aims of the conspirators in Condon’s story and any beliefs strongly held by the Morrisons.
I thought Speers did a pretty good job on Senator Paterson yesterday, boxing him into a corner where he effectively had no alternative but to acknowledge that Dutton had got it wrong.
Something else – if Dutton told Parliament there was open source and secret intelligence that Albanese was soft on China, and MIke Burgess said on 7.30 that Albanese has the same policies on China as Dutton, doesn’t that mean that either Burgess was lying or Dutton was misleading Parliament.
Finally, just to clarify the Manchurian Candidate was not a candidate for the US Presidency. He was trained as an assassin.
The Manchurian candidate in the book/film is a candidate for Vice President. The conspirators plan to assassinate the candidate for President in a way that would cause enormous public shock and sweep their VP candidate into office where he would use dictatorial emergency powers.
The 1962 film was released not long before Kennedy was assassinated. There is a horrible coincidental similarity between that part of the film and the real murder.
Surely by playing into Morrison’s narrative the Chinese have demonstrated that their preferred candidate is actually Morrison? If they wanted Albanese to win, wouldn’t they have held back on attacking our planes with a laser until he was safely in the Lodge?
More seriously, the media-savvy ‘Canberra bubble’ may have seen through the scare campaign, but I suspect the intended audience in the key marginals don’t read newspapers or listen to the commentariat. That’s why Patterson was happy to repeat the Manchurian candidate slur before quickly clarifying that it was quite properly withdrawn – because he, like Morrison, knows that about 30% of people only remember the slur, not the withdrawal.
Of course, few of that audience will understand the real Manchurian candidate reference – but again, that’s fine with Morrison et al – they just want to associate ‘Chinese sounding name’ plus candidate plus ALP in their mind. They’d be perfectly happy for us to whinge that he was actually an assassin etc etc. – that just demonstrates that we are the elite who look down on the ordinary voter.