Up until the last two weeks, the Prime Minister looked, and clearly felt, like he was safe. Now his safety rating has changed. The government's spin about how good it has been for Australia has been pushed into the shadows. And the Prime Minister, and his government, are seen by many as being anything but safe to be around.

There are six elements in the radically changed public perception of the government's capacity to be trusted. They are not usually viewed together, but they are actually deeply interrelated.

First, the Morrison government has proven itself incapable of acknowledging the gravity of allegations of sexual assault. Those of us who, because of the position of unequal power and privilege we are born into due to our gender, are not qualified to speak to the gravity of this violence are all the more compelled to respectfully listen to, and learn from, the experience of the women for whom it is a constant reality.

This is not because of anything along the lines of the Prime Minister's unconscionable "what if that was your daughter?" trope. Rape is deeply embedded in the way our society is structured along gendered lines. It is a violent imposition of power, a glorification of inequality, an integral part of what patriarchy means. The Morrison government does not want to understand this.

It is little wonder that it has shown such callous self-interest in the face of the human stories that it has been confronted with. Our parliament, public institutions, corporations, workplaces, and public and private spaces are deeply infected with the virus of patriarchy, and the violence, injury and inequality it perpetuates and normalises.

Second, the release of the final report of the Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety lays out the toxic fruits of the Morrison government's ideological commitment to the principle of profit in aged care, and its attendant regime of cost-cutting and care minimalisation. While it was the Howard government that zealously took Australia down this path of putting profit before care, the report is clear on the current government's responsibility for the current crisis: "The government has been in a position to create mechanisms for measuring performance of the aged care system and identifying areas for improvement. It has been responsible for the design of an effective regulatory system. It has failed to discharge these responsibilities."

But as the Prime Minister declared in his press conference on the release of the report: "These are knotty problems. They're hard to solve." Everyone knows that if you spin something as being too complicated you are setting yourself up not to address the complexity, but to avoid taking even the most unambiguously simple actions. Mandated minimum staffing ratios are an obvious case in point.

Third, we have the Morrison government's obsession with hurting working people, after last year praising them as heroes. The IR omnibus bill is a means of making job insecurity the norm for workers, exposing more of us to casualisation, lower wages, worsened conditions, the loss of penalty rates and leave entitlements, and the completely undemocratic attempts to further restrict the right of workers to stand together, and bargain together, in unions. It increases the power of large corporations and disempowers the working people who make the economy strong and who keep us safe.

The Morrison government is ideologically fixated on boosting profits for its friends in big business, by reducing what they call the cost of labour and what we call our ability to make ends meet. One of the great and enduring lessons of the pandemic was the truth that workers are essential and should be respected and protected. This bill does neither.

Fourth, the vicious treatment of unemployed workers. Two million workers are unemployed or underemployed, and a further 1.3 million rely on JobKeeper. And yet the government has cruelly pulled the coronavirus supplement and, in its stead, offered a piss-weak $3.57 a day increase. The pandemic shone a light on unemployment, revealing how vulnerable most of us are to having this imposed on us.

With measures such as the dob-in line, the government reveals its persistently paternalistic attitude towards all of us, again placing even more power in the hands of employers, with a view to augmenting the IR omnibus bill with a framework to lower wages and normalise poor working conditions, which particularly affects women exposed to sexual harrasment in the workplace and young people struggling to survive in the face of systemic power imbalances and unsafe working conditions.

This treatment of unemployed workers, carers, people with a disability, and students, is aimed at reducing social expenditure, lowering the cost of labour and lowering the value of life.

Fifth, the government's response to the climate crisis. Nothing to see here. Literally, nothing.

Sixth, the government's refusal to acknowledge the fact of colonisation and that we live on land that always was, and always will be, Aboriginal land. More and more of us are becoming aware of this fundamental contradiction in our polity, a contradiction that, left unaddressed, continues to be a gaping social wound. The Uluru Statement from the Heart is a powerful act of poetry and truth. It states:

"Proportionally, we are the most incarcerated people on the planet. We are not an innately criminal people. Our children are aliened from their families at unprecedented rates. This cannot be because we have no love for them. And our youth languish in detention in obscene numbers. They should be our hope for the future. These dimensions of our crisis tell plainly the structural nature of our problem. This is the torment of our powerlessness. We seek constitutional reforms to empower our people and take a rightful place in our own country. When we have power over our destiny our children will flourish. They will walk in two worlds and their culture will be a gift to their country."

That was written in May 2017, nearly four years ago. Since then, there has been a constant, and completely preventable, increase in the number of First Nations deaths in custody. In the meantime, the Morrison government clearly wishes to delay, rather than deliver, the urgent achievement of a First Nations Voice to Parliament.

MORE JOHN FALZON:

Things may be falling apart for the Morrison government, but more importantly, the Morrrison government is presiding over an accelerated falling-apart of our society. Things fall apart for victims of sexual assault. Things fall apart for older people being abused or neglected. Things fall apart for workers who are being deliberately exploited or excluded. Things fall apart when the planet is destroyed by wilful greed. Things fall apart when First Nations people are silenced or unheard. Things fall apart while deepening inequality and deepening disrespect for the value of community remain hallmarks of the government's neoliberal agenda.

Is there a way out? Theorist Judith Butler writes: "We can always fall apart, which is why we struggle to stay together." The union movement and other grassroots social movements for social justice and social change are obvious spaces where we can stand together and stay together.

We must struggle to stay together to dismantle the patriarchal structures that privilege men and subject women to systematic violence. We must struggle to stay together to look after each other, including those among us, such as older people, who need special care. We must struggle to stay together to protect our rights and our livelihoods as workers, including when we are not in paid work. We must struggle to stay together to confront the climate crisis and to collectively care for the planet. We must struggle to stay together to dismantle the degrading and disempowering structures of colonisation.

During the bushfire crisis of the summer of 2019-20, Prime Minister Morrison excused himself from his responsibility to care by glibly stating: "I don't hold a hose, mate, and I don't sit in the control room." During the COVID crisis his government persists in hiving off much of its responsibility to the states and territories. Whether his mandate to remain in the control room of government is renewed is now seriously in question. What is unquestionable is that we must struggle to stand together for a more socially just, more compassionate and more equitable society, one in which everyone gets a fair crack at happiness.