When the Turnbull spill was on, I asked the question: Would the next leader be Dutton or Bishop? I then suggested that maybe Morrison would do a Bradbury and skate through while the rest of the field crashed into each other and fell.
The role of luck has been slightly overestimated in Steve Bradbury’s win – it was the result of the tactics he’d chosen to employ. He explained that he reasoned that he wasn’t one of the fastest three skaters so his only hope was if one of them fell, so his plan was to hang back and avoid trouble so that he could pick a clear path and possibly sneak a placing. He didn’t expect the whole field to go down.
Morrison, on the other hand, was planning for the whole field to go down from the moment he lay his hands upon Turnbull with the blessing, “I’m ambitious for this man!” In fact, there were Morrison supporters actively telling Dutton to go for it because they were backing him, only to turn around and prepare the ice for a Morrison clean sweep.
Nobody gave Scotty much chance of victory in the federal election. The lack of a parliamentary majority once Dr Phelps won Malcolm’s seat meant that it was difficult for the Morrison government to achieve much. Party discipline was lacking. And Labor was such a sure thing that one betting agency paid out the day before the election.
Then came election night and Morrison had once again seized gold. He’d done so by a combination of clever marketing and spreading fear about both Labor policies and the Labor policies that weren’t actually policies but figments of someone’s imagination.
In the past few weeks, I read commentary that pointed out that Morrison was the first leader since John Howard to face consecutive elections. I remember thinking that this might not be correct. Not because the Rudd/Gillard/Rudd show and the Abbott/Turnbull/Morrison soap opera hadn’t occurred along with the Truss/Joyce/McCormack/Joyce sideshow. No, it was simply that Morrison hadn’t actually made it to the election and given the past few years of surprises perhaps 2022 didn’t want to be left out.
Yes, I know that it now requires a two thirds majority to call for a spill of a sitting Liberal PM, but in reality what leader could realistically continue if the majority of his colleagues called for a spill but fell short of two thirds?
Ok, maybe a man like Morrison but still…
After 2019, some hoping for a Labor victory are afraid of counting their chickens and are worried that Scotty from Marketing will succeed again.
Making predictions in this century is a great way to look foolish, but as it doesn’t seem to stop the media from interviewing Nick Coatsworth or Gerard Henderson, I figure I might as well give it a go and gloat later that I was right. If I’m wrong, we’ll never mention it and I’ll continue to behave with the infallibility of a Sky After Dark presenter and just move on to the future. Like Morrison, there’ll be no looking in the rear vision mirror… which as I’ve pointed out before, is a pretty dangerous way to drive… particularly if you’re about to pull out into the lane where you intend to overtake.
There are some big differences between now and 2019. Sure, the Coalition only has a slender majority but that was true in 2019. To me, the biggest difference is that the Morrison schtick of showing that he’s just an ordinary bloke was appealing then because the electorate didn’t know him. Now that we’ve had the disasters of the bushfires and Covid, we don’t want an ordinary bloke; we’d rather someone exceptional. If we’re going to have an ordinary bloke, we’d rather have that Albanese guy because it doesn’t seem like all his colleagues hate him and he doesn’t do creepy things like wash a woman’s hair.
Every time Morrison posts a photo of him doing something ordinary, most people are thinking, “Why aren’t you doing something about (PLEASE FILL IN LATEST PROBLEM HERE SUCH AS AGED CARE OR NATURAL DISASTER OR RATS)? How have you got time to go the cricket/make curries with your daughter/wash a woman’s hair/pretend to drive a truck/pretend that it doesn’t matter that your Deputy PM thinks your a liar/pretend that you believe your Deputy PM when he says that he doesn’t believe what he said a few months ago?”
It’s worth remembering that Morrison wasn’t the PM who instigated the “bonking ban” and cost Barnaby his job the first time. Scotty knifed Turnbull – the man who you’d expect Barnaby to be sending nasty texts about. The fact that Joyce was giving such a frank character assessment of his leader certainly doesn’t fit that old saying about the enemy of my enemy is my friend. Or is it the friend of my enemy is my enemy. Or with friends like him you don’t need an enema?
Whatever!
Ok, we’re supposed to have the unemployment with a three in front of it and while I suspect that the underemployment rate already has three in front of it (30%), this may sound to a lot of voters like his BACK IN BLACK which was going to happen after the 2019 election but apparently two things stopped that: Covid and the Treasurer’s incompetence with numbers.
The fact that this picture is on his Instagram account today shows how desperate things are. Ronni Salt has written about how Morrison rotates his photographic images between a series of set pieces which is a bit like seeing that photo of George Christensen in that singlet with a whip. Once you’ve got the picture, it’s hard to forget it.
So a photo of a curry is one of his go to images after a bad week, as is a photo of him doing something family related. However this is the first time I’ve seen him combine the two. Things must really be bad. His only consolation would be that, if Josh is counting the numbers, there’s a good chance that he’s sixty billion out!
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