The making of a Liberal god

Well with Labor on 54-46, the Coalition being battered by internal disunity, evidence of profligate and politicised spending, and an election looming, we are on the edge of … Scott Morrison clawing back enough support with the assistance of his News Corp buddies to eke out a narrow victory once more.

It’ll be ghastly if it happens, days or weeks in the sorting out, recounts in seats like Bass and Macquarie, a plurality rather than majority sought, and Rebekha Sharkie or some such suddenly the kingmaker. 

If it does, Morrison, the jowly blue-singleted man-boobed happy-clappy from the Shire, will join the pantheon of Liberal gods. Not at the very centre of the assembly of the gods; somewhere in the middle, like those minor Roman gods of horse stirrups or sneezing.

But a god he will be, having got a full term, won two elections, and cemented a 30-year era as a Coalition one.

The bare consolation for the rest of us will be the consignment of Tony Abbott from a single paragraph in history to a footnote, after Earle Page, the philosopher prince of the right reduced to a trivia quiz question.

Morrison’s moves at the moment show why he might just be the bloke who can do this. He has the right instinct for the supreme political virtue, the capacity to cut your losses and move on when you’ve lost a fight. Howard and Hawke had this in plenty; Morrison only just gets there.

For days he gets stuck in some combo of indecision, fear, recalcitrance, who knows? And maybe his shifts only come after days locked in a room with a team of advisers yelling at him to do the obvious, who knows with that also? But shift he does, and history has shown that that is most of what the Australian people want from a politician in recent times: to concede the bleeding obvious and move on. That is not to portray the Morrison command into some sort of thrumming machine of political efficiency. Lurching from crisis to crisis appears to be its default management style.

The net zero plan is a piece of butcher’s paper with the words “do stuff” written in crayon. There appears to be some spirit of gonzo joy in the way they do this, seeing what they can get away with. Most likely that’s just the view from the outside, as ScoMo’s team of desperate mediocrities, drawn disproportionately from the ranks of the happy clappies, try to measure up to the basic tasks of modern politics. But it sure looks like they’re having fun.

Should they lose the election, the moment when they lost it was almost certainly when Barnaby Joyce was returned to lead the Nationals. Whatever he may do in warding off extra-right challenges in the bush, from One Nation to the Shooters, he is poison in the city. 

The Coalition benefits from the Country/National party when its leader speaks softly on the national stage, acting as haha wise elder and as a back-of-the-ute populist in the bush, away from media scrutiny. Black Jack McEwan was the last leader before Joyce to play populism on the national stage, and though he was replaced before the 1972 election the damage was done, and it helped Labor look commanding and the Coalition in disarray. Joyce, bless his gammon face, has done the same. He has the political appeal in the city of dead carp rotting in the sun on a riverbank, and nothing will fully remove the stink. The only question is what the Coalition can do to detract from it.

The answer of course is culture wars. The answer is always culture wars. They always work to some degree for the right, because they know that progressives will always fall for it, just cannot resist the bait.

The Pru Goward extravangaza last week was case in point. As the smoking gun document for the Berejiklian affair lands — with some disgusted adviser having named, in writing, the “Daryl McGuire Centre for Clay Pigeon Shooting Excellence” — progressives fell over themselves to assail Goward’s piece of performative bourgeois stupidity about “the proles”.

Doubtless Goward believes what she writes, but how useful it was as an example of the “dead cat on the table” school of politics (dead cats, dead carp — much more rotting flesh laid around and we can get a Visual Arts Board grant).

The right depends on this asymmetry in the culture wars. It knows we care about ideas, and good writing, and truth, and oppression, and people not being denigrated, and it doesn’t give a rats about any of that. It cares about power and soft furnishings and the scratch on the Audi, and the kids articling with Clayton Utz, and that’s about it. It doesn’t have to fake moments like Amanda Stoker’s disdain for the archives she’s meant to be responsible for, full of “old things” which “decay”‘, big deal, have you seen what old newspapers do to cream upholstery ewwwww.

The right knows we feel we can’t not respond in the name of memory against forgetting blah blah, it knows it’s nihilist, and doesn’t care, which is pretty essential to being a nihilist. 

The latest salvo is Alan Tudge’s totalitarian idea of history education as a device for imparting a series of fixed, politically set, truths about our past, as the means to a specific ideological result — Anzac Day as a recruitment device, education as affirming, rather than questioning, whether the country is all that great.

Tudge is a drippy, creeping, Jesus type who appears to have got a big dose of Noel Pearson’s bulldust working at the Cape York Institute when young, and so he too no doubt believes the vaguely hysterical-historical idea of Anzac as some unquestionable myth to be imparted. But once again, the right knows it drives us nuts. Over time, from the Howard years to the Morrison period, such initiatives have got cruder and cruder. Howard talked about “black armbands” and maybe we’ve got too guilt-ridden and so on. Tudge wants, or purports to want, an end to all debate on Australia’s greatness. 

This stuff will come around fortnightly or so I presume, until the election. Deprived of climate as a culture war battlefield — that battle is now on our terrain — the Coalition has no choice but to try one last round of skirmishes. It must know that these opportunities are running out too, and that the era of the culture wars — at least in the major cities — is coming to an end.

The knowledge society, genuine multicultural population profiles, 30 years of the internet, 15 years of social media … the whole idea of cultural fixity has become unfixed for large sections of the population. We’re now here, in the future. We’ve arrived. Morrison had enough nous to recognise that in his climate position shift, and he got away with doing what killed Turnbull.

Labor has eaten away at the Coalition’s lead by a thousand small skirmishes. But when the campaign starts, and it has some genuine space to make its argument, it is going to have to mount a full-force evisceration of the Coalition, a crushing case for the prosecution, or ScoMo will slip the pincer movement, save the furniture, mix the metaphors, and emerge victorious to sit in the Liberal pantheon once more.