A study of the least interesting man in the world

The Game: A Portrait of Scott Morrison. Sean Kelly. Black Inc 

About a decade ago, there was a brilliant international ad campaign for the beer Dos Equis, involving a character dubbed “the most interesting man in the world”. The actor playing him was a gold-tanned, silver-bearded aged lion, featuring in disconnected clips which mimicked filmic styles of the ’50s and ’60s. This most interesting man was a sort of amalgam of Omar Sharif, Burt Lancaster, Papa Hemingway and a few others, the male fantasy figure of the postwar jetset.

Here he was carrying a newborn lamb over his shoulders across the snow to his waiting yacht; there he was in grainy process colour winning at jai alai; then in newsreel black and white sharing a cigar with Fidel Castro — all while a surreal voice-over played: “He once had an uncomfortable moment, just to see what it felt like… He is the most interesting man in the world!”

At the time I thought that found footage and a similar vocal would do for a mash-up parody of John Howard. “He flosses his teeth after he’s flossed his teeth… He once put a volume of Wisden to sleep… He is the least interesting man in the world!” But Howard was gone by then and we had Tony Abbott as Liberal leader, against whom such a campaign would most definitely not have worked. The moment of the wilful suburban nobody leader had passed.

And then came Scott Morrison to say: “Hold my Dos Equis.”

Writing from the inner city, the only words to describe Morrison’s suburban schtick are “voluptuous” and “rococo”. From our perspective, there’s a sort of luxuriating in the blankness of it all, something which Sean Kelly partly captures in what might be best called a study of Morrison, The Game.

Biographical inquiry into Morrison’s life before a political career is minimal and fragmentary: the preacher-cop-mayor dad, the bizarre brief child actor career, a few anecdotes from his private-sector flak catcher days at the Property Council and elsewhere. But digging into the roots of the new least interesting man in the world is not Kelly’s purpose. Indeed, The Age/SMH columnist and former adviser to Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard explicitly conjures up psychoanalytic interpretation, only to dismiss it in the search for who Morrison is. 

That’s largely because Kelly is out to portray Morrison as nobody at all, a politician largely conjured into being by the settings of the new politics, in which appearing on Kitchen Cabinet with Annabel Crabb is as necessary as being on the ground after the summer fires whether you are wanted there or not.

For Kelly, there is a real Morrison behind both the ham-fisted media appearances, the dropped-in references to Jen and the kids, and what appears to be a genuine disconnect from suffering — of refugees, of Indigenous people — but the distance between the real self and the public man is air-gapped. Consequently Morrison the politician, and the short period he has dominated, is better understood by reference to his shifting images and appearances and the rhetoric of his media appearances than by any sort of deep dive, or a quest for the truth about what really happened at Engadine Maccas.

That quest draws in various theoretical and literary reflections, and it makes for a far more interesting book than the usual run of Australian journalist-written political biographies. But it falls short of the full encounter it needs to have, and in the process becomes as illuminating about the minds of Australian mainstream progressives such as Kelly, and the limits of their ability to fully understand the appeal and drive of people such as Morrison, as it does about Scotty from the Shire.

Starting with Morrison’s tenure as immigration minister — in which in press conferences he took obfuscation and circular logic to new, and ever more maddening extremes, combined with a cold querulousness all his own — Kelly suggests that, more than anyone to date, Morrison has turned the practice of politics into game practice, the essence of the game being that of the closed system, with no reference to the outside world.

This is the Morrison we have come to know and loathe, the ad man always ready to render an encounter purely strategic and “transactional” (a term he used to avoid having a coffee with Nick Xenophon; to be fair, such an event can turn out to be a 12-hour thing): how January 26, 1788, wasn’t that great a day for the arrivals as well as the “hosts”, “how good is…” — Kelly has a list of all things that are how good, including “Bernice who called into 2GB”, “mining”, and “the city of Parramatta” — “I don’t hold a hose, mate”, and that triumph of Morrisonia, too recent for inclusion, “the Australian way” on net zero.

Kelly draws in multiple theories of performance, analogies from literary criticism and the like to essentially give a catalogue of Morrison’s public gestures and tactics. But he is not arguing that it is only politicians who are doing this: we, the jaded public, are giving them and ourselves “an alibi too, because we allow ourselves to believe that whatever our politicians do in our name, it is not entirely meant” (p135). 

Many of the moments are astute and drily rendered, such as memories of the deployed photos of Scott and Jen’s “date night” seeing Tina Arena at Rooty Hill — a lot going on there, ’burban memewise — some are Year 11 (Macbeth? Really?), and some are illuminating about the real dislike Kelly has of Morrison’s callous politic. He quotes the queer theorist Eve Sedgwick’s argument that trying to decide between lethal state conspiracy and mere murderous indifference (as in the AIDS crisis) is a diversion from seeing power and cruelty as it is, and analogises to Morrison’s position on refugees and lassitude on climate change as possibly related to the apocalyptic nature of his religion, the sort of “it’s gonna get a lot hotter than two degrees for anyone who doesn’t accept Jesus mwahaha” sort of thing.

But this is where Kelly’s interpretive ability reaches its limits, and the book starts to work in reverse. He uses a couple of different frames to try to understand how Morrison’s religiosity connects with the callous acts and affects of his politics — displaying the bizarre metal boat diorama labelled “I stopped these”, sent to him by some addled fan — but he relies on American anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann’s notion of multi-levelled action in the way in which extreme Pentecostalists go about their daily life while keeping God in their hearts.

But I think Kelly has oversimplified Luhrmann’s argument, and also that it’s a predisposed secular approach.

The problem is a familiar one: how do monotheists act and decide if they believe God ordains everything — as Morrison believes he ordained his and Jen’s natural pregnancy after failed IVF courses? A better answer than Luhrmann’s, especially for someone like ScoMo, would come from the psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, to see the Pentecostal God as a “transitional object” simultaneously present and suffusing reality but not “there” at all in the action.

Transitional objects, for Winnicott, are everything from a child’s favoured toys to great works of art, things seen as simultaneously chosen but impossible not to exist. When that object is a simplistic God — all-seeing, granting individual prayers — “the game” of it is a perpetual logic loop: I’m doing what God wants me to do, and God must want me to do it because I’m doing it, and round it goes. That is more a mobius strip than a matter of levels.

It would also seem to far better explain why Morrison can communicate — for all his blunders and anti-charisma — in a way that many progressives cannot, and cannot understand. For the plain fact is that outside the knowledge class (and within it) this is how a lot of people think and live their lives, whether they are officially religious or not. In that respect, it is telling that Kelly has nothing on what I saw as the most important moment of Morrison’s campaigning: his unveiling of the “promise of Australia” concept at the deliberately dowdy Liberal campaign launch in 2019. (Kelly relates Erik Jensen’s coverage of it, which was a quite wrong application of the “prosperity gospel” idea, to the modest life aims Morrison was celebrating.)

This moment fused religious to secular-national hopes and spoke to many Australians who, unlike progressives, are left cold by progressives’ central drive for national meaning, reconciliation and redemption of relations with, and status of, Indigenous people. The “promise of Australia” wasn’t used much, but it seems to me to have served as a conceptual anchor, to give familial individualism a form of collective being.

Labor had nothing to match it. It still doesn’t, because the expanded Labor tribe is not really convinced that a politics of meaning is necessary. Aside from race matters, it finds it in technocratic reform, and no matter how hard it tries it finds it near impossible to think its way into the appeal or politics of a Morrison.

That is where Kelly’s elegant, well-made and very readable study hits its limits — and in doing so, has a second meaning as a source book for diagnosis should Labor lose the election to a leader who, being the least interesting man in the world, has become somewhat more interesting than many because of it.