“There’s room at the top they are telling you still
But first you must learn how to smile as you kill
If you want to be like the folks on the hill
A working class hero is something to be
A working class hero is something to be.”John Lennon
“According to a well-known expression, Rome’s emperor at the time, the decadent and unpopular Nero, “fiddled while Rome burned.” The expression has a double meaning: Not only did Nero play music while his people suffered, but he was an ineffectual leader in a time of crisis.”
History.com
Some of you will have seen Mr Morrison’s exercise routine with Twiggy and those workers in WA. If not, there’s a link here. However, unless you like watching Morrison smiling and jerking and joking to the sounds of Jimmy Barnes’ “Working Class Man”, I suggest you give it a miss.
So what was he doing there when he’s got vaccines to find, you ask?
Well, Mr Morrison doesn’t actually find the vaccines. It’s his job to tell others what to do and if they don’t succeed, it’s his job to get very, very cross with them. Apart from that, his only job is travel round the countryside being the lovable daggy dad that we never had because nobody’s father was this embarrassing.
There’s a well established path for Liberal leaders which goes like this:
- When in Opposition, tell everyone how much better than Labor you are. You’re allowed to boast and tell the world that you’re just awesome and if you were in power there’d be no problems because you’d fix them.
- When first in power, you argue that you haven’t had time to fix things yet because – even though you told everyone this was the biggest disaster in the history of the world – it’s worse than you anticipated and it will take most of your first term to fix it.
- When facing the election you tell everyone it’s fixed but any evidence of this isn’t available at the moment due to all sorts of reasons but remember the mess we inherited.
- When the fan is hit, you pretend it’s something totally unforeseen even though some of those silly people who don’t accept that you know everything told you exactly that.
- Plead for more time because it’s only reasonable given the circumstances.
- Let your friendly media sources explain how it’s all a reset and you’ve grown as a leader and all should be fine from hereon in.
- Try to convince people that the economy is booming even though they personally haven’t found work or been given a pay rise.
- As people slowly turn on you, blame them.
- Start doing lots of interviews where you say that you don’t comment on the polls.
- Leave politics and either give a tell-all interview or write a memoir explaining how you were let down by your colleagues.
Numbers 3 to 7 were repeated on a loop from election to election under Howard and even Fraser. However, in this fast paced world we now live in, the Liberals have accelerated this and eliminated the need for being voted out of office by replacing their PM in between elections so that we feel like we have a new government and they deserve to be re-elected at least once. People seem to have forgotten that the Morrison government is actually the same Coalition one which stretches back to Tony Abbott.
Unfortunately for the Liberals, they seem to have forgotten how well this strategy works for them and they have a PM in permanent campaign mode. This would be all right were it not for the fact that the normal process is to promise that things will happen if you’re re-elected and then make up some excuse after the election and hope that people will have forgotten by next election. Morrison announces that things will happen and then forgets all about them. Without an election giving them a chance dump the promise and have voters forget all about it in the ensuing three years, people actually expect some sort of follow-up. For example, people mistook the word “secured” when talking about vaccines to mean that we had some sort of contract which would involve the vaccines actually arriving at some future date… And certainly before we open up the international border. However, I understand that Hillsong have a conference planned for late June and Scotty has already had his dose of Pfizer, so why not get out from under the doona and let the cases fall where they may.
At the previous election voters were promised an integrity commission, a Budget surplus, religious freedom legislation, protection from Bill Shorten destroying the weekend with his proposal that in 2030 half of new car sales would be electric (was that a target or an aspiration because, as we’ve recently learned with the vaccine rollout, targets are just a loose idea). All of these things needed to be abandoned so that the government could concentrate on the pandemic. The integrity commission was paused while Christian Porter looked up the meaning of “integrity”, and the whole religious freedom thing was just too hard.
But all these things are now forgotten because Morrison’s strategy seems to be to make us forget the most recent scandal or non-delivery of promised action by creating an even bigger talking point.
My guess is that he’s attempting to get us all comparing his exercise routine to the recent outrage over the dancers at the naval event, but I won’t be falling for that one.
No, I’m going to keep my eyes firmly on the fact that Morrison can gyrate all he likes. His days are numbered because he thinks that rules do not apply to him because God will protect him and he can always count on a miracle.
Unfortunately, God doesn’t run the media in Australia and there seems to a subtle change in his support from the Murdoch media.
We shall see.
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