The terrifying thing about the government’s scare campaign is how badly it was botched

Suppose they gave a national security scare and nobody came? That seems to be the latest fine mess the federal government has got itself into with its attempted takedown of the opposition by way of the atavistic “Manchurian candidate” meme.

By week’s end, the media commentariat reaction to the scare was near universal — and near universally critical: “Morrison weaponised national security,” wrote Guardian Australia’s Katharine Murphy. For the ABC’s Laura Tingle, it was “a grubby descent into public policy madness”. Even Paul Kelly in The Australian was displeased: “Such language has no place and no justification.”

The media reaction was bolstered by the horror of the national security establishment that — gasp! — its briefings were being engineered for party political gain (apparently this has never happened before).

Scare campaigns are harder than they look. They demand precise measure: “Six drops of essence of terror, five drops of sinister sauce,” as Professor Weirdo chants in the opening to the classic 1960s cartoon Milton the Monster, airing during Morrison’s childhood. 

Above all, it calls for a just-enough splash of credibility. The 2019 death taxes worked because to a low-attention audience, what was one more tax among all the others Labor was proposing? Same with 2016’s “Mediscare”: the 2014 budget’s co-payments mixed up with a bit of hairy-chested Tory privatisation chatter made it all too plausible.

On Insiders yesterday, Liberal Senator James Paterson rolled out the thin facts of the charge sheet, including (shock!) the anodyne diplomatic niceties that Anthony Albanese delivered in Mandarin in a 2018 speech that, according to news.com.au, passively “emerged” last week. 

Too late: the intervention of the national security apparatus has given the media permission to deny the scare the repetition that delivers credibility. 

Morrison is proving a poor salesman. In the same week when you brag to your partyroom of being all politics all the time, expect people to take you at your word. According to Guardian Australia, he told his colleagues: “I know how to do that, and I know that is how you win elections. I know what the path is and I’ll be following it.”

Fair enough. But when the media has factored #Scottyfrommarketing into their thinking, these words almost demand they refuse the scare on offer. It’s possible that leaving the job to Defence Minister Peter Dutton with his “tough man for a tough job” reputation could have gained more traction. 

It’s why, too, the job is being handed off to the self-professed “modern Liberals” fighting off “Voices of” independents — like Wentworth’s Dave Sharma.

It’s taken a while, but Australia’s media are coming to recognise the inherent “atavism” of the scare (to adopt the highfalutin’ word of the Herald Sun’s James Campbell on Insiders yesterday). Sounds like a carefully legalled term to describe the tendency to revert to ancestral practices… like, maybe, anti-Asian racism in what was once the country’s consensus White Australian political discourse.

The Liberal Party has discovered that anti-Asian racism is more than offensive, it’s politically dangerous. There are at least four Liberal must-hold seats that rely on the votes of Asian-Australians — the sort of voters who made John Howard’s once-safe Bennelong a marginal seat.

The original “Manchurian candidate” was a fictional trope from the depths of the Cold War — a POW brainwashed by the dastardly Chinese turns presidential candidate featured in Richard Condon’s 1959 novel of the same name and brought to the big screen not once, but twice: in 1962 at the height of the Cuban missile crisis and again, post 9/11, in 2004. 

As abuse, it’s as close as a politician can get to “Yellow Peril” in polite society.

The anti-China national security scare is a US Republican talking point. The government has taken the “socialism!” designed to scare Cuban and Venezuelan Americans and “defund the police!” for white suburbanites and adapted them for Australian use. 

But outside US demography and history they’re struggling for pick-up. 

There’s still hope. In its tabloid machine, News Corp seems eager to join in, as they did yesterday linking the headline “Chinese spy ships in laser attack” with body copy of “accusations … that Chinese spies had sought to influence the selection of Labor’s candidates in NSW”.

And Liberal strategists will be hoping that war in Ukraine might just provide the spark to sputter the scare into life.