Thinking readers, how are we to explain our prime minister's much-reported clodhopping insensitivity towards the peoples of the Pacific threatened with climate change oblivion?
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Methinks we're given an inkling now, thanks to Erik Jensen's just-published Quarterly Essay The Prosperity Gospel and especially thanks to Jensen's recent ABC Radio National Big Ideas discussion of the essay.
"There are things about Scott Morrison that are difficult to reconcile," Jensen told Big Ideas.
"He is an extremely bright person [but] is deeply unable to imagine anyone not like him. It is a troubling failure of the imagination."
Jensen went on to enlarge on this theme while one mused that, yes, if it's true that Morrison struggles to put himself in the shoes of other Australians, how much more baffling for him to try to imagine himself an alarmed islander of the Pacific. No wonder that in Tuvalu he failed so clodhoppingly.
How pointless then the recent inquiry in a Question Time if the PM thought he'd be able to manage on Newstart's impoverishing $40 a day. This required him to imagine being disadvantaged, unemployed and battling. One might as well ask a butterfly to imagine what it is like to be an echidna.
Speaking of echidnas, Jensen's session on Big Ideas bristled with as many ideas as an echidna has quills.
Jensen is a biographer and newspaper editor-in-chief who followed, on the media buses, the recent federal election campaign. His harvested election impressions and diagnoses make for bristling reading and listening.
For example, here he is offering a diagnosis of the hard-to-define whatever-it-was that made it so hard for so many of us to like Bill Shorten (his eerie unpopularity shown again and again in preferred prime minister polls).
Shorten "is a very insecure person", Jensen thinks.
"[Shorten wants to be loved and admired] enormously, to a degree that is troubling to the public ... and this election shows that really unpopular people can't take really ambitious policies to the people. All politicians have an extraordinary need to be loved. But Bill Shorten's need is something more. It's a desperate need to be loved and I think that's something that repels people.''
If Jensen is right, it helps explain why some of us who find insecure, troubled souls perfectly bearable and even admirable in daily life (we play tennis with them, like them as our GPs, plumbers and pilates coaches, engage sympathetically with them when they are Shakespeare characters, like tortured Hamlet) found Shorten's personality so alienating. A Hamlet on the stage at The Globe is one thing - a Hamlet in The Lodge is somehow another.
Jensen, right or not about the people finding Shorten repellingly needy, thinks insecure Shorten would have been a ripper prime minister. Jensen thinks the nation is in desperate need of a thinking, sometimes self-doubting leader instead of the smug, unthinking simpletons we keep opting for.
And on May 18 enough Australians, alarmed by the thought of a thinking prime minister with a head full of reforms and thoughts, opted instead for bovine Scott Morrison, a grazing Pentecostal cow. On the campaign trail, Jensen studied our prime minister with fascinated horror.
"Scott Morrison is staggeringly ordinary," Jensen told Big Ideas, "and the closer you get to him the more ordinary he becomes."
"That person is simple. His aspirations for this country are as simple as his own life. This is a man who met his [future] wife when he was 12. Certainty is a feature of every moment of his existence."
Jensen finds all that "pretty uninspiring" but diagnoses, rightly or wrongly, that someone who preaches the prosperity gospel (which this atheistic columnist interprets as "God wants us to be prosperous and helps those greedy enough to drive ruthlessly towards becoming filthy rich") is a good fit in today's Australia in which the once modest dream is now a greedy dream, Jensen says, of "extraordinary wealth".
Yes, driving home from what became a woebegone election night party on May 18 (the full moon alarmingly huge, as if offering a portent of ghastly things) some of one's horror was horror at what the election result showed of what Australia and Australians have become. Who are these strangers who wanted a PM like this awful, awful one?
Scott Morrison can't imagine being you and me. And some of us, out of touch with our nation now, can't any more imagine using our votes in selfishly gospel-greedy ways than a butterfly can imagine being an echidna.