Turns out I was wrong all along.
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I thought the Prime Minister's responsible for keeping us safe from COVID, but it now turns out it was the premiers' job all along. It's a bit like expecting somebody to hold a hose. You might think they'd do their best to help out, but you'd be wrong. There are some things Scott Morrison just doesn't do and holding hoses is one of them. Along with ordering and distributing vaccines; mandating a common COVD test kit and ordering enough of them to go round; mandating masks or other protective measures: the list goes on.
This is why it's difficult to find a rubric against which to measure this PM. He slips out from the shackles that constrain our idea of what a leader should be or how they should act by using his magic formula - "that's not my job" - although he does do press conferences very well. That's because these can be carefully orchestrated to ensure he retains control. Morrison immediately slips into his favourite persona, the well-meaning, ordinary dad who tries so hard, only to discover that everybody else has let him down. His act works brilliantly when he's on stage, turning the snags in front of the TV cameras, smiling and dispensing his one-liners with the complete self-assurance that accompanies his apparently quite genuine belief that he's never made a mistake. That's why he will never step forward and take responsibility for something that's happened on his watch.
One sees it in every gesture. He absolutely believes he's been chosen - so he can never be caught out in a press conference.
He simply ignores questions he doesn't want to answer, dismissively spitting answers at anything he doesn't like before wandering away as soon as things get a bit tight. He's not acting. Morrison genuinely believes his interrogators have got the wrong end of the stick and that's why, when it comes to avoiding responsibility, Morrison's in a class of his own. He slips the constricting chains of, for example, accepting responsibility for last week's testing debacle where queues stretched for kilometres faster than anyone can say "Harry Houdini" by simply insisting this is a state issue.
Ignore the reality that a national framework was clearly required - after all, both the Constitution and High Court have made it plain that interstate commerce is a Commonwealth responsibility. But Morrison, believing in little government, has left it all up to the premiers and failed to provide leadership, order testing kits, or anticipate any of the obvious problems that would inevitably come as the virus spread uncontrollably through the community. He doesn't see, quite genuinely, what the problem is here because it's not his job to do the sort of things that might have helped the country avoid this third wave of the virus.
Morrison genuinely believes his interrogators have got the wrong end of the stick and that's why, when it comes to avoiding responsibility, he's in a class of his own.
That's why Morrison is such a superlative performance artist. Look at the way he blames those who didn't need tests for soaking up resources that were needed elsewhere. The way he formulates the issue ensures that we are asking the wrong question. Attention is focused on the detail (the extraordinary large numbers of people who require tests) rather than the strategic issues (such as why wasn't this demand anticipated and prepared for). He chooses the way he constructs these questions brilliantly because the formulation predicates the answer. Judged from within the narrow confines of Morrison's own logic it's obvious that he can't be blamed for the way things have turned out.
He's not bothering to play a 'get out of jail free' card because he doesn't accept that an offence has been committed. The lack of tests isn't his fault. The failure to implement a rapid system of national testing isn't a Commonwealth responsibility. And the lack of a national plan to constrain the spread of the virus today, some two years after it first began, well, that's not his problem either.
And then, cue to an artistic moment of perfection, the slow, sad head-shake of a man who's been let down. His best efforts effectively sabotaged; people who should have known better acting like ... well, people.
How could anyone expect him to be called to account for the exponential growth of the virus across the border, hours-long queues, and waves of sickness clogging intensive care wards in Sydney and Melbourne?
Morrison's problem is that his alternate reality must inevitably interact with the real world. The only way he can survive politically is if people continue to accept his way of defining issues, and that's why the fracturing of the media landscape has become so critical.
A printed newspaper sends all sorts of ancillary cues to its audience about what issues are relevant and which stories are important. None of these interpretative aids are present when somebody scrolls down a Facebook page. That vision of a shared community with common perspectives vanishes as we become lost in our own deep dive. Instead of attempting to resolve contradictions by doing the hard work of searching for our own answer it's so much easier to get on board with someone who appears to exude authority, and just accept the way they view the world. We search for people in public life who seem 'real' and, without bothering to think too deeply, lock in behind their way of defining issues.
This explains the incredible levitating bubbles of self-assurance of 'leaders' like Boris Johnson and Donald Trump overseas and Morrison here. Nothing will ever puncture their visions because they create a world of virtual reality that surrounds them. Inconvenient details are air-brushed away until nothing disrupts a simple, all-embracing narrative that insulates populist politicians from failure.
There is, of course, nothing new about politicians seeking to define the world to suit themselves. New media simply makes it easier for them to do so. The pandemic has changed all that. The complacent political bubbles of perception are about to come into contact with reality. Both can't exist in the same space. One or the other must explode.
- Nicholas Stuart is a Canberra writer and a regular columnist.