On August 24 last year the Liberal Party surprised itself and voters nationally by elevating Scott Morrison to the leadership.
The new prime minister was among the least surprised.
Inside what he would later sneeringly call the “Canberra Bubble”, Mr Morrison was alongside the craftiest and most ambitious of schemers.
He was like a political Pac-Man, a “voracious blob”, former Treasurer Joe Hockey is quoted calling him in David Crowe’s book Venom. But he was astute enough to see Australians were tired of political surprises.
RELATED: Scott Morrison’s first year in government
RELATED: Morrison Government faces backlog of problems
RELATED: Data reveals who really has power in Morrison Government
As the third Liberal prime minister in five years, Mr Morrison was aware the electorate needed to be calmed and reassured, preferably by simplistic reassurances.
And one way of doing that was, in essence, to do nothing.
The Morrison agenda of the past 12 months has been dominated by a Budget created to be taken to an election and achieving victory in that election.
The rest has been housekeeping.
It has been a direct contradiction of the view, held by Labor and the Greens in particular, that government had to energetically engage innovation and change.
However, the future has a way of kicking the tripe out of the status quo, whether invited or not.
Buried in the documents that accompanied Mr Morrison’s last Budget as treasurer, his department warned Australia was vulnerable to global movements including interest rate cuts, trade growing protectionism and military tensions.
In May last year, then-Treasurer Morrison was asked by a reporter: “Is one of the greatest risks to this Budget Donald Trump?”
Struggling for a suitable analogy, Mr Morrison replied: “The world is not free of risk. Walking out of this building is not free of risk, but we all plan to leave the building at some point.
“You get on with life.”
However, his political life could soon be altered by those factors Treasury warned of — and Trump erraticism.
The Prime Minister could be forced to be action man, a role he has rejected in favour of being relaxed suburban man.
Mr Morrison wanted to assure voters their incomes would not be reduced to pay for a bold future when they wanted a more-comfortable present complete with Budget surpluses.
The absence of major policy innovations meant the lower possibility of renewed internal Coalition battles that were the source of the PM three-peat.
And the relative peace was a way of telling voters the Muppets had left the building.
“It was a confusing and bewildering series of events and not ones that I had any part in,” Mr Morrison, who was at least an active spectator to those events, told the Seven network in early September last year.
“The curtains have come down on that Muppet Show and an absolute new curtain has lifted up.”
Mr Morrison announced “a new generation of leaders” as he appointed a ministry that looked remarkably like the old one.
His parallel effort was to highlight a set of values he outlined in his “Until the Bell Rings” speech in Albury soon after his elevation. The event was a Liberal Party commemoration of founder Sir Robert Menzies over 70 years earlier.
Like a faithful monk who turned the Gospels from Latin to English, Mr Morrison set out to translate Ming into ScoMo.
In his first major speech as PM, he told his Albury audience, “I haven’t come to you today with a to-do list of stuff.”
And for a year he has stuck by that.
He explained his mission that day in Albury by quoting founder Menzies: “No party seizes the imagination of the people unless the people know that party stands for certain things.
“And we’ll fight for those things until the bell rings.”
What followed was a string of nostrums that over the past 12 months have become increasingly familiar.
“It’s not about everybody getting the same thing,” he told the Albury gathering.
“If you put in, you get to take out, and you get to keep more of what you earn.
“I don’t think that, for someone to get ahead in life you’ve got to pull others down.
“I believe that we should be trying to lift everybody up at once, that we get away from the politics of envy.”
Ring a bell, even if not the last one?
Malcolm Farr is news.com.au’s national political editor. Continue the conversation @farrm51
Read Again https://www.news.com.au/national/politics/the-secret-to-scott-morrisons-surprising-victory/news-story/1dfd203d5d0c5e34d7efcd30a7d3b277Bagikan Berita Ini
0 Response to "Australian politics: How Scott Morrison’s stupidly simple strategy won Liberal Party the election - NEWS.com.au"
Post a Comment