The self-anointed national saviour now struggling to save himself

Although climate and Covid have been sidelined in this campaign, they will help determine its outcome. That is not good news for the old or new Scott Morrison

HOW HAVE THE last couple of years been for you? For me, not too bad really. All things considered, I lived through the two pandemic years well. And as far as I can tell, most older people like me with decent retirement incomes and a nice place to live, did okay.

That is, if they had not yet been put into care and so were not exposed to the horrors - the lockdowns of their homes, the deaths, the fears, the loneliness - inflicted on the elderly in those virus infested care homes.

How have the last couple of years been for you? I imagine that if you live in those inner suburban seats where the “teal independents” are giving the so-called progressive Liberal members - including the Treasurer Josh Frydenberg - hell, you did okay too. Lockdowns were not all that pleasant, but you were locked down in a pleasant place, you could mostly work from home and your stock market investments did well.

How have the last couple of years been for you? If you live in the outer suburbs of Melbourne, in particular, these pandemic years have probably been a nightmare. Locked down for months on end, out of work, the kids at home - and mostly home schooling is just too hard - relying on government support for the first time in your life.

Many of you worked those essential jobs that made it possible for me to order my shopping online and order take away meals that you had to deliver. And yes, some of you worked in our hospitals - cleaners and orderlies for instance - where you were daily exposed to Covid and to its often-ravaging consequences.

How have the last couple of years been for you? If you live somewhere in areas prone to fire or flood, these years have been tough. Well, beyond tough, given that you lost your home or were forced into shelters and couldn’t work and there were lockdown orders in place, but you had no home where you could safely lockdown.

Which brings me to this question, given that we are in the end days of the election campaign: How have they been for Scott Morrison in particular, these two pandemic years?

Last Sunday, at his campaign launch, Morrison said the challenges of the pandemic filled his every waking, and sleeping, hour because he had just one goal, just one: to save Australia. And you know what, he said: "save it we did. We are saved!"

So, what now? Well onwards and upwards to our bright future for which he has a dazzling plan, with a new prime minister - no more bulldozer, no more negativity, no more scaring the wits out of us with Albo nightmares - a new PM who happens to be called Scott Morrison.

The thing is, if he saved Australia - 40,000 lives he reckons he saved and millions, squillions, of jobs - how come he looks likely to lead his coalition government to defeat on Saturday?

I mean, look at Mark McGowan, who reckoned he saved Western Australia during the pandemic. In the 2021 state election the people of WA seemed to agree with him: the Labor Party won 53 of the 59 seats.

Not even a believer in miracles like Scott Morrison - neither the old nor the new Scott Morrison - even with a god on his side, could possibly hope for a McGowan-like outcome on Saturday.

And how is it that the saviour of our country seems likely to lose on Saturday to a politician who for most of his time in parliament, his decades in politics, did not ever really think that he would one day be prime minister - and nor for that matter, did his colleagues?

Anthony Albanese is no Bob Hawke or Paul Keating, nor even is he a Kevin Rudd, all three of whom managed to win an election for Labor from opposition. Not to mention Gough Whitlam, who I am sure is a hero of Albo’s.

On any reckoning he has had an ordinary campaign which you would expect from a bloke who has lived his adult life as a quintessential Labour Party functionary.

But the country’s self-anointed saviour, even before the campaign, decided that what he would do to give himself the best chance of winning the election, is to not say much of his government’s achievements - there must be plenty if they saved the country - but instead spend endless time and money trying to destroy Albanese. Sometimes in very nasty language.

So how has that worked out for him?  That depends to a large extent on how people might answer the question: How have the last couple of years been for you? If you live in those teal middle class relatively affluent seats where the virus was a nuisance more than anything else, Scott Morrison, the nation’s saviour has not played too well. 

He has banged on about Albo, said nothing really about some of the most difficult issues facing women and waffled on about why Labour from opposition should have introduced integrity commission legislation.

And he has repeated over and over again that no matter what, he will never ever do anything about climate change, except hope that some sort of new technology will come along to make it possible for Australia to get to net zero emission by 2050 - which he reluctantly committed to - but which the Nationals and some Liberals oppose.

The people of these seats, having done okay during the pandemic, have the luxury - and I don’t mean this pejoratively - to worry about climate change, government integrity and Morrison’s ham-fisted responses to women’s issues like violence and sexism and the gender pay gap.

Morrison is not their saviour to say the least. Nor most probably is the new Morrison who says he will be a kinder gentler PM with a yet-unspecified plan for Australia’s future.

Nor is he the saviour of Australia, I imagine, for the people who lived through those fires just before the pandemic started, when Morrison jetted off for his Hawaii holiday and when he came back, in answer to a question about why it took him so long to come visit the fire-ravaged parts of the country, said he did not hold a hose. Did they feel saved by Morrison? Did the flood victims in Queensland and New South Wales feel saved by him?

How did the fire and flood victims feel when Morrison and others in the Coalition said these were just normal regularly occurring events in Australia that had nothing to do with climate change?

And the people in the outer suburbs who, apart from the elderly, who were in care homes, suffered the most during the past two and a half years, locked down regularly, without work or working because they were essential workers and thus exposed to the virus at a time when no vaccines were available, their kids at home and often unable to learn properly online. Do they think Morrison was the saviour of the country? Of them?

Probably not. But if it is true, as some polls suggest, that Victorian Premier Dan Andrews is on the nose in these outer suburbs - that he is being blamed for their suffering - then even if Morrison isn’t their saviour, he is not Andrews and would never do to them what Andrews did to them... maybe there’s hope for him.

But then Scott Morrison went and said that Albo was going to destroy the economy with his support for an inflation-linked rise in the minimum wage. Guess where the people who earn the minimum wage might live? Did Morrison not know that?

Talking up the trans “threat”, saying you will put the religious freedom bill to parliament again if re-elected and you won’t worry about protecting gay and transgender students might earn Morrison some votes in these outer suburbs.

But not as many as he might lose by telling people to cope on an inflation-eroding minimum wage that Albanese so egregiously wants to increase in line with inflation.

The two major issues that perhaps should have dominated this election campaign, climate change and the Covid pandemic which is still raging (Australia has now the highest per capita infection rate in the world) have been mostly sidelined, ignored.

But in different ways, these issues will determine the election outcome. And that is not good news for the old or new Scott Morrison.

Photo: Scott Morrison, March 2021 (AAP)