A few weeks ago, the ever-astute Niki Savva wrote that Scott Morrison could be remembered as the prime minister who won the election he should’ve lost and lost the election he should’ve won.
Many people, particularly progressives, would likely take umbrage with the idea that Morrison should be winning this election. After all, this is the prime minister who went to Hawaii during the bushfires, ballsed-up the vaccine rollout, failed to plan for the Omicron wave, remained tin-eared around serious matters of sexual misconduct within the Coalition, and, by his own admission, has little policy ambition for what would be the Coalition’s fourth term in office.
But putting aside all that, Morrison has presided over a remarkable pandemic success story, which should have the Coalition cruising toward a landslide rather than praying for another miracle. Australia has had one of the lowest COVID death rates in the world. Our vaccination figures are also world-leading. Those months of painful pandemic restrictions are a thing of the past. So are the horrifying images from March 2020 of Centrelink queues stretching down the block — just over two years on, unemployment is at a 50-year low.
There’s a sense of frustration from Morrison when he talks about Australia’s position compared with the rest of the world. Twice this week, he’s mentioned a New York Times article that suggests nearly a million Americans would be alive today if the United States had Australia’s COVID death rate.
But voters don’t care about the Times. Instead, they care about Morrison’s egregiously bad vibes, and an unpleasantness so palpable it has remained Labor’s strongest electoral asset throughout a shaky campaign.
Morrison has tried hard to cast himself as a kind of heroic wartime leader. But through three crisis-ridden years, the prime minister’s manner has been anything but soothing. Too often, he’s come across as both hectoring and tone-deaf, a man so obviously driven by little more than the relentless pursuit of the shortest-term political gain.
It’s that short-termism that explains some of his more infamous moments. The “it’s not a race” comments were made when the government simply hadn’t shored up vaccine supply. And on COVID matters, he’s so often been an opportunistic weathervane.
When cases rose in Sydney last June, he first praised the NSW government for avoiding restrictions, then insisted a hard(er) lockdown had to work, before trying to cast himself as the voice of vaccine-driven freedom.
Morrison sledged Mark McGowan over Western Australia’s hard border, intervened in Clive Palmer’s legal challenge to open it up, and then started posing for photo ops with the WA premier because the government needs to hold its seats in Perth.
These are just a couple of incidents that sum up Morrison’s intensely cynical approach to the pandemic, an approach that has left a bitter taste in the mouths of so many voters around the country.
It’s also reinforced the feeling that where Australia has succeeded, it’s been in spite of the prime minister, not because of him. The first COVID lockdowns in 2020 came at the urging of Gladys Berejiklian and Dan Andrews. State premiers made and wore the politically painful decisions around locking down, and reopening their borders (with little help from Canberra).
Andrews and NSW Premier Dominic Perrottet have essentially led Australia through the latest stage of the pandemic (it was the latter who first reopened international borders unilaterally).
All of this has made it far harder for Morrison to “own” the successes. And when failures do happen — the early days of the vaccine rollout, the abrogation of leadership during the bushfires and the floods and the Omicron wave — his stubborn refusal to take any responsibility has made him an obvious punching bag.
Morrison can’t escape the stench of those failures because by offering no policy ambition, he’s cornered himself into an election about the past three years, with a thoroughly dispiriting message of “stick with the devil you know”.
On the challenges Australians actually fear, Morrison just offers more cynical short-termism.
On climate, a few PowerPoint slides and a net zero commitment vague enough to keep the Nationals happy. On cost of living, a suite of short-term measures designed to win an election. On housing, a dumb policy coughed up days before the polls open.
Even so, the “headline” pandemic record alone should be enough for a government to win on, especially when COVID has generally been so generous toward incumbents. If it isn’t, blame must fall on Morrison, and the terrible vibes he can’t help but give off.
