“Scotty from Marketing” is yet another inane hashtag sneer from the Twitter left. If only it wasn’t so damned on-point.
On the one hand, Scott Morrison genuinely deserves to be lauded for holding a strong line against China’s trade and diplomatic bullying. On the other, domestic, front, though, Morrison has a deplorable habit of treating every policy issue as a clever marketing exercise. For instance, Morrison rushed to make the unsubstantiated allegations in the Brereton Report public, apparently trying to “get ahead of the story”. It all blew up in his face, of course.
Now, Morrison is about to make the same mistake with climate policy.
His aspiration seems apparent — to take to the next election a 2050 net-zero emissions reduction goal, to be delivered by a technology agenda, while keeping his own side of politics relatively united.
“Net-zero by 2050” is a green fantasy, achievable only at ruinous expense or by blatantly fudging the books. Neither is going to fly. Especially given the massive debt incurred already by the COVID panic, hammering households – many of whom are already struggling to pay soaring power bills – with extra green spending is hardly going to win hearts and votes. The Greens have attacked the Coalition in the past for “faking” emissions reductions.
He knows the lesson from the 2019 election — that opinions in this country on climate vary enormously from Melbourne to regional Australia, and the only way forward for his government is not to align with either ideological camp but continue to find the balancing point in an evolving narrative.
The politics are dangerous. That’s why Morrison floats notions of getting to net-zero before or after 2050 depending upon the method. He sells the idea that 2050 won’t be achieved by higher taxes, a prelude to embracing the goal but keeping credibility with conservatives.
If he really had learned the lesson from 2019, he’d dump “net-zero by 2050” as the dead, rotting political dog that it is. If Morrison wants to throw away everything the Coalition gained in Queensland – where Labor was all-but annihilated – they’re going the right way about it.
If Morrison wants to repeat Turnbull’s magic act of turning a landslide victory into minority government – or worse – he’s going the right way about it.
Morrison, however, needs to avoid John Howard’s pre-2007 election blunder — when Howard pledged to achieve his Kyoto targets but refused to sign up to Kyoto because it was a hopelessly flawed treaty. Howard declined to ratify a treaty whose domestic targets he pledged to uphold. It was an absurd contradiction. Howard’s policy didn’t matter; it was the symbolism that mattered. The very world Kyoto was sanctified by the progressive media — it equated with virtue.
The new virtue is “net-zero at 2050” and every pet shop galah knows it.
Exactly. So why bother signalling it?
Morrison would be better off to tell the progressive media to get stuffed and ignore the screeching and wailing from inner Melbourne and Sydney. The rest of Australia will make up their own minds.
At the same time, Morrison must judge the withdrawal of JobKeeper and implement his toughest rule: that support is temporary, and that he doesn’t run a “blank-cheque budget” when many people think that’s exactly what Morrison runs.
The Australian
Good luck with that. How often has a government introduced a “temporary” welfare measure that becomes a permanent drain on the public purse? The left-media are already screaming blue murder at the very idea of ending JobKeeper. This is their big chance to get their newest hobby-horse, Universal Basic Income, implemented by stealth – and by a foolish, so-called “conservative” government.
Morrison seems to be yet another conservative who makes the fundamental error of thinking he can buy off the left and keep them satisfied.
Every policy inch only encourages them to demand another mile.
And suddenly yesterday’s extreme left nonsense is today’s “new normal”.
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