Scott Morrison used his press conference yesterday to tell journalists that a potential interest rate rise in the middle of an election campaign had nothing to do with politics.
“It’s not about politics. What happens tomorrow deals with what people pay on their mortgages. That’s what I’m concerned about,” he said.
Then, the most Morrison of lines:
It’s not about what it means for politics. I mean, sometimes you guys always think, see things through a totally political lens.
It was a claim so brazen as to be amusing. Morrison is the prime minister in the middle of an election campaign. Everything he does or says is political. A rate rise two weeks out from a poll in which cost of living looms large in the minds of middle Australia will clearly have political ramifications.
Also we’re talking about Morrison, a bloke whose family dinners and footy team seem like they’ve been focus-grouped. Labor was, unsurprisingly, a bit shook.
“I mean, is the guy serious or what?” Labor’s Katy Gallagher said.
Labor leader Anthony Albanese said: “This is a guy when he was in the Lodge quarantining didn’t take his economic policy adviser, he didn’t take his national security adviser; he took his photographer. He took his photographer. Everything that this guy does is political.”
The rate rise comment points to a very classic Morrison tendency to try to frame the government’s failures as beyond its control, and outside the realm of the political battle — in itself an explicitly political sleight of hand. The infamous “I don’t hold a hose” comment is probably the defining example of this.
Of course, Morrison is partially right to argue that a global inflationary spiral triggered by a foreign war, potentially forcing the hand of an independent central bank to raise rates, has nothing to do with him. In the same way a bushfire crisis, exacerbated by an economy that was powered by fossil fuels long before Morrison was waving lumps of coal in Parliament, isn’t strictly the PM’s fault.
The problem is that voters, slugged with higher prices for everything, may no longer care whose fault any of this stuff is, or whether it’s politics or not. Pre-poll voting opens next week, and such issues are inevitably going to guide the inherently political choice they make about who forms the next government.
But that widely mocked soundbite also points to the thin ice Morrison is skating on in his quest to “Steven Bradbury” his way to victory for the second straight election. The government needs voters to credit it with the positives about Australia’s economic situation — historically low unemployment, withstanding the global pandemic better than much of the world — while passing off less flattering news as a sadly inevitable reflection of the state of the world.
It’s that narrowness — coupled with the fact Morrison, Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce and Treasurer Josh Frydenberg have been forced to run separate campaigns in different parts of the country — which has led to disjointedness around the Coalition’s message.
Just moments before saying the rate rise wasn’t about politics, Morrison had used the prospect of higher rates as a warning to voters not to abandon the government.
“How we manage the economy, how we manage the government’s finances, will impact potentially on what happens to rates,” he said.
For close followers of the PM’s press conference, the messages seem in tension. But we’re not the audience. All Morrison needs is for enough uninterested undecideds to soak up the positives and forget about the rest.
And am I the only person completely sick of Morrison constantly telling us what Australians do or don’t care about, which always remarkably aligns with what he would prefer we do or don’t care about?
And am I the only person completely sick of Morrison
constantly telling us what Australians do or don’t care about, which always remarkably aligns with what he would prefer we do or don’t care about?No
Reminds us that for Morrison politics is a weird, seamless stream of seemingly-endless statements that make no sense if anyone stops to examine them. Hence the role played by the Murdoch press and the ABC with its “what the papers say” view that the narrative is whatever is on the fpage of The Australian.Hopefully people (or enough of them) are just tired of the sound of his voice.
The trouble for Morrison and his need for us to not risk the unknown Labor is that we are all too aware of the known LNP. I think most of us would accept a fair bit of risk on an unknown Labor govt before we would be prepared to accept another three years of what we know about the LNP.
Doesnt bear thinking about.
Morrison has an unfortunate tendency to render me apoplectic, as he throws out yet another lie. Today’s effort was “this government has built a shield against [all the pressures of rising fuel prices from the war in Ukrainian, the rising price of wholesale electricity, due to rising prices for coal, gas and cover for failures in coal power stations, all of which are jointly due to government policies, etc]. In response, I shouted at the TV “what … shield!! Do you mean the “shield” you’ve created for contract and casual workers, the freezes you’ve imposed on Medicare rebates, which raise costs for visiting a doctor, the freezes on public service salaries, the squeezes on the possibility of industrial action!!!” John Howard had a “shield” when he had a rate rise during the 2007 election. It was called “Work Choices” and like the loose equivalent Morrison has created for this rate rise, it cost Howard the election and his own seat. Unfortunately, Morrison might keep his personal seat.
How can journalists let him take the credit for keeping interest rates low (‘interest rates will always be lower under a Coalition government’) and not hold him to take responsibility when they rise?
Journalists or parrots?
I am waiting for him to roll out about Paul Keating anf interest rates under Keating, a man with everything to lose and nothing to gsin will try anything to try to get back in the race!