As I’ve written several times, Australians have to deal with two Scott Morrisons. There’s Scott Morrison the global statesman, justly recognised around the world for his government’s brave and resolute stance against unprecedented trade and diplomatic bullying from China. Then there’s the domestic “Scotty from Marketing”, who seems to cave to the left on every domestic social policy issue.
It’s all very well for Morrison to try and hand-wave away so many domestic issues by claiming, as he did in a radio interview, that Australians aren’t interested in woke, lefty stuff, and that it’s his job to manage the economy. In the first place, a great many Australians do care about the woke, lefty stuff and what it’s doing to our country. In the second, by gutlessly folding on green fluff like “net zero”, Morrison is de facto slugging Australians with skyrocketing energy bills and a ramshackle, failing power grid.
Australians, especially in Queensland and Western Australia, voted for the Coalition in droves at the last election precisely because they were opposed to Labor’s ruinous climate policies. Spinelessly giving in on climate policy isn’t exactly a vote-winner. Nor is pandering to the screeching ninnies of the far-left on social issues.
Is reality slowly dawning on the Prime Minister? Has his wilful and egregious myopia towards all matters cultural and ideological finally caught up with him? And will he now change his behaviour or is it already too late?
Morrison has absolutely correctly refused to stand Christian Porter aside. But, at the same time, he has run scared on other, unproven allegations from a former staffer. He can’t have it both ways.
Whichever way Scott Morrison now turns, he is culturally outflanked. On the completely unconnected but poisonously entwined issues of the Brittany Higgins allegations of being raped inside Parliament House and the Christian Porter alleged 1988 rape of a debating friend, the Prime Minister turns to the morality locker and finds it is bare. Correctly demanding ‘presumption of innocence’ as regards the latter, and accurately or otherwise claiming ‘I did not know’ to the former, in both instances he has little to offer the baying mobs of agitated women. This is because on the one hand he never bothered to raise any questions around ‘always believing the victim’ as demanded by the #MeToo movement and, on the other, the ridiculous comment at the time of the Higgins revelations about not realising how serious things were until he’d spoken to his wife.
The latter is a particularly awful example of “Scotty from Marketing” thinking. Morrison lamely tried to “manage the story” and completely screwed it up.
Morrison has failed, like so many other conservative politicians, to learn the cardinal lesson of dealing with the looney left: never give them an inch – they’ll only demand another mile.
This is the problem with virtue-signalling and pandering to the woke mob by eschewing ‘political ideology’ (an abused term that has been twisted to be derogatory to conservatism but admirable on the Left.) Ultimately, ‘ideology’ is simply a road map, a set of measures by which any given value or principle can actually be achieved. What is glaringly absent from those demanding some dramatic response to the two rape allegations, as well as to the broader issues of sexual misbehaviour in the workplace, are any concrete steps to address clearly identifiable problems. It is simply not good enough to have the debate at a purely emotional level (‘things must change’, ‘women are angry’, etc.) without firstly identifying what the genuine problem is, and then proposing practical, legislative and enforceable measures that could achieve a fair and just change. Thus far, the only solid proposal (from the UK, where for very different reasons a similar debate is being had) is a 6pm curfew for men in order to prevent nighttime sexual assaults on women. As preposterous and crazy as this suggestion may be (it came from the Greens, natch!) at least it is a solid proposal to a genuine problem. Here, the PM was forced to draw comparisons to neighbouring countries where demonstrators are met with bullets. A valid point perhaps, but laughable as well as way too late.
The unfortunate reality is that if you don’t always stand on points of principle and fight for values – such as the presumption of innocence or the importance of individual responsibility – when you have the leeway to do so, then you won’t get the opportunity to when you don’t.
Spectator Australia
Remember when Scott Morrison taunted the left in parliament, with a lump of coal? That’s the Scott Morrison Australians voted for, not some spineless, valueless marketing executive.
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