Rate rises aren’t about politics, Morrison says, as Liberal campaign flip-flops

Scott Morrison used his press conference yesterday to tell journalists that a potential interest rate rise in the middle of an election campaign had nothing to do with politics.

“It’s not about politics. What happens tomorrow deals with what people pay on their mortgages. That’s what I’m concerned about,” he said.

Then, the most Morrison of lines:

It’s not about what it means for politics. I mean, sometimes you guys always think, see things through a totally political lens.

It was a claim so brazen as to be amusing. Morrison is the prime minister in the middle of an election campaign. Everything he does or says is political. A rate rise two weeks out from a poll in which cost of living looms large in the minds of middle Australia will clearly have political ramifications.

Also we’re talking about Morrison, a bloke whose family dinners and footy team seem like they’ve been focus-grouped. Labor was, unsurprisingly, a bit shook.

“I mean, is the guy serious or what?” Labor’s Katy Gallagher said.

Labor leader Anthony Albanese said: “This is a guy when he was in the Lodge quarantining didn’t take his economic policy adviser, he didn’t take his national security adviser; he took his photographer. He took his photographer. Everything that this guy does is political.”

The rate rise comment points to a very classic Morrison tendency to try to frame the government’s failures as beyond its control, and outside the realm of the political battle — in itself an explicitly political sleight of hand. The infamous “I don’t hold a hose” comment is probably the defining example of this.

Of course, Morrison is partially right to argue that a global inflationary spiral triggered by a foreign war, potentially forcing the hand of an independent central bank to raise rates, has nothing to do with him. In the same way a bushfire crisis, exacerbated by an economy that was powered by fossil fuels long before Morrison was waving lumps of coal in Parliament, isn’t strictly the PM’s fault. 

The problem is that voters, slugged with higher prices for everything, may no longer care whose fault any of this stuff is, or whether it’s politics or not. Pre-poll voting opens next week, and such issues are inevitably going to guide the inherently political choice they make about who forms the next government.

But that widely mocked soundbite also points to the thin ice Morrison is skating on in his quest to “Steven Bradbury” his way to victory for the second straight election. The government needs voters to credit it with the positives about Australia’s economic situation — historically low unemployment, withstanding the global pandemic better than much of the world — while passing off less flattering news as a sadly inevitable reflection of the state of the world.

It’s that narrowness — coupled with the fact Morrison, Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce and Treasurer Josh Frydenberg have been forced to run separate campaigns in different parts of the country — which has led to disjointedness around the Coalition’s message.

Just moments before saying the rate rise wasn’t about politics, Morrison had used the prospect of higher rates as a warning to voters not to abandon the government.

“How we manage the economy, how we manage the government’s finances, will impact potentially on what happens to rates,” he said.

For close followers of the PM’s press conference, the messages seem in tension. But we’re not the audience. All Morrison needs is for enough uninterested undecideds to soak up the positives and forget about the rest.