One of the tasks of being in opposition after you lose government is understanding and dealing with the legacy of your time in office. It can be difficult, regardless of whether that legacy is positive or negative. Labor struggled with the seemingly positive free market economic reforms bequeathed by Paul Keating, but learnt well from the toxic Rudd-Gillard-Rudd years. The Coalition effectively used John Howard’s relative fiscal discipline during its time in opposition.
Now Peter Dutton and the remnants of the Coalition have to deal with a legacy both toxic and alien to its professed principles. There’s the personal taint of Scott Morrison, who ended with a profoundly poisonous political personality and was deeply unpopular, and there’s his large, incompetent government.
Under Morrison, the Coalition permanently increased the size of government in Australia to around 27% of GDP. It wasn’t a short-term increase to deal with the pandemic; it was forever — the last Coalition budget predicted ~27% of GDP in government spending into the 2030s, well above the 24-25% inherited from Labor in 2013.
This was in tune with other governments around the world. Governments everywhere massively intervened during the pandemic to protect jobs and support demand, usually funded by near-free borrowings. There was barely a peep from diehard neoliberals as the most basic tenets of the past three decades were thrown out, usually by right-wing governments — in the US, in the UK, in Australia.
But despite increasing the size of government, Morrison wouldn’t and couldn’t govern. Like Donald Trump or Boris Johnson, the actual day-to-day work of governing was beyond him. Sourcing vaccines, rolling them out effectively, protecting senior Australians in nursing homes, checking to make sure businesses that didn’t need support didn’t get it, developing a contact tracing app — all proved beyond the capacities of his government.
That was consistent with the wider performance of his government. Morrison had no agenda to implement and no capacity to implement it if he’d had one. What few policy initiatives he took — on industrial relations, or trying to destroy industry super — fell over. Notoriously, he was unable to address the most urgent policy issue outside the pandemic: energy and climate policy. His idea of governing was issuing media releases, calling press conference, and covering up embarrassments, of which there was a multitude.
It was a contrast to Malcolm Turnbull, who had an idea of active government driving innovation and encouraging Australia to embrace opportunities outside its traditional comfort areas of extractive industries, tourism and education. The contrast was symbolised by the ill-fated submarine project: Turnbull wanted them built by the French in Australia; Morrison dumped the entire agreement for a media release and a joint press conference with Biden and Johnson, leaving us with a yawning strategic gap.
In other areas, too, Morrison was caught out by changes in the historical tide of government. Decarbonisation demands serious government involvement in the economy via an activist energy policy. The NDIS and aged care demanded effective government supervision of the delivery of the care services it funded. Workforce challenges loomed across the economy. On major issues, the economy needed active, competent government; Morrison’s mindset was that none of it was his problem.
Dutton has begun in opposition the same way. He looks like Her Majesty’s Loyal Sulker, dealing himself completely out of the climate debate and rejecting participation in the jobs summit. Both, he reckoned, were “stunts” — understandable from a man whose primary experience of government was of stunt after stunt after stunt.
Politics has passed Dutton by: the central debates in public policy are no longer big government versus small, but who can manage big government best to deliver for the country. He remains locked in a mindset that sees active, engaged governing as unnatural and unfortunate — no wonder he can only see “stunts” in anything Labor now does. Having created big government in Australia, the Coalition is abandoning the field rather than making it work properly.
In time the Liberals might find a leader who thinks they can govern better than Labor, not govern less than Labor. But along the way they’ll have to deal with the legacy of big government incompetence left by Morrison.
Is there any way for the Liberals to regain credibility, let alone power? Let us know your thoughts by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.
What a great, honest and damning assessment of the Morrison years. Dutton gives no hope at all and seems destined to make the LNP so irrelevant that politics will pass them by, and they will take a long time to even be considered as a potentia givernment.l
One can only hope…………
Yes, I’m ever hopeful.
The assessment is damning enough, but there is a great hole where the role of one Tony Abbott should be in the demise of any last shred of decency the LNP once had.
And Turnbull did very little to correct those enormous moral failings.
Turnbull’s chief concern was trying to lead a mob that didn’t support him and which he knew was coming to get him again. Dutton was the lead protagonist then and was always going to be a disaster if and when he got the job. It’s hard to know which of Abbott, Morrison and Dutton is the most deluded about their talents and ability. Had Dutton and his Push been content to be in a Turnbull Govt, they might still be there, but his ego won out and he showed his willingness to trash his party in search of personal ambition.
Which of Abbott, Morrison and Dutton is the most deluded about their own capabilities! What a mind boggling sentence! The evidence so far indicates a triple dead heat. The one distinction between them is Abbott appears to be decent company. The other two make my skin crawl.
And Abbott has written a book.
Colouring in?
By numbers…
surely not all by himself?
I found his ‘Battlelines’ – 10¢ at an op-shop – useful for keeping the chook house door open.
Perhaps Turnbull, was the only one who stood up to the Murdoch propaganda machine
No, he didn’t.
Peta Credlin and hubby say he did.
Yes, why is Abbott missing? And why does Turnbull get a tick for having “an idea of active government” when Gillard is elided as one half of the “toxic Rudd-Gillard years”? Sure, we are focusing on the LNP, but then why mention her at all? Rudd tried to do things, in his micro-managing anal way, Abbott wrecked things, Turnbull tried and failed almost completely, Morrison didn’t want to govern. Gillard governed, methodically, doggedly, effectively. She made some poor decisions, but she knew what government is for. She is the positive role-model in this story.
Let’s make that one third: “toxic Rudd-Gillard-Rudd years”.
Agree,
until now Gillard was the only productive govt.
For all the sniping against her, Gillard should rightly be remembered by history as the most competent prime minister in the decade or more after Howard.
The best prime minister in recent memory, only one fault, she wasn’t a he.
She had bigger cojones than the current sad excuse for a PM.
Imagine how she would have dealt with Scummo had she be Opposition Leader!
Yes, a little non plussed at BKs “toxic Rudd-Gillard-Rudd years” in a critique of the LNP. BK never misses an opportunity to bag Gillard but avoided any mention of Abbott (numbered amongst the worst PMs EVER).
It must be one of his KPIs – ‘bag Labor as much as possible’.
The frequency suggests that his income depends upon doing so at least twice per article.
A great article and a succinct summary by you. One can only hope that dopey Dutton leads the opposition for as long as possible.
The liberal party can only govern “well” when the country is in good times (unrelated to their capacity to govern competently. The booming 60’s. The mining boom of the two thousands. But their true ability is demonstrated in difficulty times and it ain’t pretty.
McGowan was right about Spud Dutton: he is a dumb ex-copper plodder. And he is the best the Libs think they have. The Liberal Party is no longer a political organisation, it is the spent waste from the comedy and satire of Micallef.
Micallef’s show two days ago was top shelf.
Agreed but I wish Albo and co would do a little more “governing” in regards the fossil fuel industry. Make them pay tax for starters.
Christ only knows what promises were made prior to the election.
Yes, Morrison has scared Labor into the “governing less” mindset. See how often they palm responsibilities off to the states
The weaker the LNP and Murdoch become as political forces, the more leeway there will be for Labor to move more boldly.
I remain hopeful that Labor will be able to kill fossil fuel expansion on environmental safeguards grounds.
Yes, hopeful not confident.
Maybe. A female Labor MP from WA said recently,’ we’ll only open new coal mines if they stack up environmentally.’ How can any coal mine stack up environmentally?
To me that says no more new coal mines.
Yep – even the UK has introduced an energy windfall tax (https://www.bbc.com/news/business-60295177). This is the most disappointing non-action by Albo to date.
Thinking about the death of Anne Moylan due to private hospital incompetence, revealed in The Age this week, I tried to make a list in my head of the deaths and neglect consequent upon privatisation and/or attempts to reduce costs of various services that I’ve read about in the past few years: Ann-Maree Smith’s death in SA’s privatised system for care of the disabled; St Basil’s nursing home, death and neglect of the elderly; today’s Age: the removal of local council home care for the elderly; the suicide rate of returned army veterans; the unequal allocation of resources to education such that private schools can more easily make claim assistance for disabled pupils than government schools, along with all of the other inequities in the funding of the schools that serve the majority of the population; the difficulty of accessing Medicare and bulk billing, let alone dental care for those without private insurance; Workcover’s spurious reasons for refusing compensation; the degradation of a once well-respected tertiary education system into a system for selling degrees to overseas students; etc. etc. And these are only the disasters that have received media attention.
Our government is not going to abolish social welfare services outright because they know the voting public would not approve; nonetheless they are engaged in killing them gradually, hoping we won’t notice by starving them of funds and outsourcing them, forcing anyone who can afford it into profit-focussed providers.
I’ve come to the conclusion that those who advocate smaller government actually want nothing more than an increase in their personal wealth via a program of lower taxes and profit-focussed social care providers.
What is appalling is that these people truly do not care about the suffering and deaths that follow, have followed, inevitably, from reducing care to a matter of profit, attempting to recast greed as a virtue.
Excellent comment. If a low-paid worker like a bus driver or taxi driver kills one person through momentary inattention, they’d be charged with manslaughter quick as look at you. Politicians and senior bureaucrats make conscious, planned decisions that lead to many deaths, and escape both penalty and scrutiny. Time to bring in bureaucratic manslaughter laws, I reckon, to help focus the minds of these (illegitimate children starting with ‘b’) on the effects of their decisions.
Look to the UK Tories for the ‘education’ of our conservatives. Remember the great bludger himself, Joe Hockey, on return from the UK babbling about ‘lifters and leaners’ and the age of entitlement being over?
Except for his enormous self and his mates, of course.