On Tuesday, before confirmation of a Covid infection sent Scott Morrison into isolation, the prime minister spoke about democratic values.
“My government will never be backward when it comes to standing up for Australia’s national interests and standing up for liberal democracy in today’s world, which is demarcating between autocrats and authoritarian regimes, invading and seeking to coerce liberal democratic regimes,” Morrison told reporters in his courtyard.
“We can’t be absent when it comes to standing up for those important principles.”
Joe Biden used similar language in his State of the Union address on Wednesday. Biden declared democracies were “rising to the moment” in an epochal battle between autocrats and democrats. This morale boosting, band-of-brothers sentiment (ever so briefly) quelled America’s polarised derangements.
Forceful assertion of liberal democratic values is a common theme around the western world at the moment, for obvious and entirely valid reasons. The democratic world is rallying to match the moral and material courage of the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, who is resisting the territorial aggression of Vladimir Putin.
But this inexorable triumph of democratic liberalism over autocracy narrative misses some important nuances.
The first is the resurgence of autocratic regimes hasn’t occurred in a vacuum. Autocracy has staged a comeback for a range of reasons. Sadly, one of them is democracy doesn’t always deliver for people, because leaders don’t always discharge their responsibilities with the welfare of citizens front of mind.
Democracy becomes fragile and eventually, imperilled, when politicians lose their way, and people lose faith that the system is serving their interests. As a proof point, we need only ask the citizens of the US who willingly elected Donald Trump – a post-truth proto-fascist – to “drain the swamp”.
The other point to be very clear about is democracies are not defended by rousing rhetoric. They are defended by actions.
Democracies are defended by leaders who regard themselves as the custodians of powerful customs and values.
So Morrison can be as Churchillian as he likes in his courtyard on a Tuesday morning, but people will judge the prime minister by what he does.
Standing up for liberal democracy in today’s world isn’t a soundbite, it’s a calling. It’s a substantive task that starts at home.
This weighty responsibility doesn’t require the convenient counterpoint of an autocrat with sharp elbows in Moscow or Beijing to make it true, or urgent or pressing. Maintaining the institutional foundations of democracy is core business for any prime minister worthy of the title. It’s also an objective test that a prime minister either passes or fails.
So let’s nominate some ways Australia’s prime minister could actually rise to the occasion.
The prime minister could start by delivering the federal anti-corruption body he promised to deliver years ago. Morrison once described an integrity commission as a “fringe issue”. It isn’t. It’s something very tangible – foundational even. A credible federal anti-corruption body, which imposes a culture of consequences on the most powerful people in the country, gives citizens a level of trust that there isn’t one rule for the political class and another rule for them.
Morrison could also value the parliament and the deliberative processes he spends a lot of time maligning as “bubble stuff”. In more than 20 years of reporting from Canberra, I’ve never seen a prime minister less interested in the foundational processes of Australia’s democratic system than the current incumbent. Morrison sees these things as constraints. He chafes against them.
The prime minister could embark on serious donations and electoral disclosure reform to give voters more confidence that money doesn’t trump democracy.
Morrison could also choose to take accountability seriously. He could be accountable himself, and require his ministers to be accountable. The prime minister doesn’t have to wait for the Australian National Audit Office to savage the government about the latest outrage. He could spare himself the inevitable savaging, and the months of refusing to accept responsibility for whatever the latest atrocity is, by choosing not to preside over atrocities.
Morrison could also value bipartisanship when those moments present. During the first wave of the coronavirus pandemic, the prime minister experimented with the idea he could be a “big tent” leader – a person capable of working constructively with his political opponents and uniting a country.
Those were Morrison’s best months in the prime ministership. Voters rewarded him with high approval ratings. A number of surveys also tracked a return of institutional trust. But more recently, Morrison’s partisan recklessness – the apotheosis being branding one of his political opponents a Manchurian candidate because he hoped a scratch McCarthyist show trial in the House of Representatives might serve his immediate political interests – has been worrying enough to provoke a rare public rebuke from Canberra’s national security establishment.
Finally, the prime minister could also end his flirtation with alternative facts. Verifiable facts aren’t abstract concepts. They actually glue liberal democracies together. They create safe zones for productive resolution of conflict. They create a shared foundation for collective action in the national interest.
Let’s take just one practical example. In Australia, we now live on the frontline of the climate crisis. That’s a fact. And the prime minister continues to pretend that the Coalition’s climate policy is adequate to the task of managing risk.
This pretence is offensive at the best of times, but it’s even more offensive when Australians are battling the latest harbinger of heating – the extreme weather currently battering the east coast of Australia.
Morrison likes to style himself as a prime minister who takes national security seriously. He’s the prime minister protecting Australians from coercion and foreign interference. But climate change is also a pressing security issue. Managing the risk of climate change is fundamentally about protecting people from existential harm while creating opportunity in the transition, and the Coalition has done everything it can over the past decade to comprehensively fail the citizenry on this issue.
This week, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change tried again to warn people about what is coming. Australia, it said, can expect “further warming and sea level rise, with more hot days and heatwaves, less snow, more rainfall in the north, less April-October rainfall in the south-west and south-east, more extreme fire weather days in the south and east”.
As flood waters surged in south-east Queensland and down the coast of New South Wales, the IPCC noted the socio-economic costs arising from climate variability and change were continuing to increase. “Extreme heat has led to excess deaths and increased rates of many illnesses”. It said nuisance and “extreme coastal flooding” had increased due to sea level rise, high tides and storm surges.
The latest report warned of “cascading, compounding and aggregate impacts on cities, settlements, infrastructure, supply-chains and services due to wildfires, floods, droughts, heatwaves, storms and sea level rise”.
Obviously the failure to confront these realities is a global one. But Australia, under the Coalition Morrison leads, has spent the past decade actively contributing to that global failure.
The IPCC’s prognosis reads like an abject failure of democracy – the triumph of powerful sectional interests over the interests of people. It reads like victory for the vacuous ranters of the culture wars at the expense of ordinary people who can’t insure their homes.
Morrison would be well advised to keep these measurable failures in mind when he styles himself as democracy’s champion.
