Annus Horibilis

2021 began bleak and fully lived up to its promise. The year opened hopefully looking to the much vaunted ‘bounce-back’ to pre-Covid life. But we soon found ourselves wrestling with a new and more deadly pandemic mutation that threw renewed focus on our wildly underprepared quarantine system and the beginnings of a ‘blame game’ between levels of government. In spite of claims by Prime Minister Morrison, it turned out that we were not, after all, at the front of the queue for the new and most effective vaccines against Covid-19. In the case of some, we had not even joined the queue yet.

Thrown back on the trickle of home-produced AstraZeneca, the government scrambled to borrow vaccines from abroad. The rollout stalled for a while in the wake of research showing rare side effects from this vaccine, stoked by unhelpful and poorly communicated warnings from the federal government’s public health agency and the personal brain-fade of a Queensland government health officer. In the vacuum, anti-vaxxer forces mobilised. These forces brought together a noisy cacophony of right wing anarchists, religious fundamentalists and Neo-Nazis, together with anxious people confused by the unprecedented scale of the disaster who were desperately looking for answers and reassurance. The efforts to mount a public campaign to communicate the facts and persuade undecideds as to the need to vaccinate fell into ridicule. Thereafter the federal government gave up and waited for the states and territories to shoulder the load, including making the hard decisions to lockdown cities in part or whole and in some cases whole jurisdictions and close state borders to contain the virus spreading. Distant and hazy memories and sepia photos of the great flu epidemic of 1918 were dusted off.

Later in the year the volume of mRNA vaccines began to appear and the rollout/strollout gathered pace, from dead stop. Unsurprisingly Morrison and his Health Minister claimed credit on the ‘better late than never’ platform. It’s hard to deny this dictum but ‘better early than late’ is even more compelling, I would have thought. The real heroes, of course, are not the politicians, and certainly not ‘Do Nothing Morrison’ (my suggested three-word slogan for next year), but the thousands of medical, care staff and paramedics who kept the public health and hospital systems from imploding in the states and territories. Secondly, the broad Australian population which joined the real queues to get jabbed deserve self-congratulation. One particularly dire consequence of the eminently avoidable delays in getting to the truly amazing national average of 90 per cent plus double vaxxed rate has been the rebirth by Clive Palmer and Craig Kelly of the spectacularly misnamed ‘United Australia Party’, feeding on the disparate gripes of the anti-vaxxers, lining up for another tear around Mount Panorama at next year’s federal election– “How good are utes?”. This political phoenix would better be called ‘The Disunited Australia Party’, feasting on propaganda imported from ‘the Disunited States of America’.  

During the long winter of discontent, lockdowns impacted most harshly on lower socioeconomic groups and particular ethnic minorities. These were the people whose jobs in retail, hospitality, construction and logistics were warehoused. Many were also among the least likely to be vaccinated as the government’s poor public health campaign stalled. Some Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities fared worst on both counts. The federal government’s income support packages began to be phased out just at the time that the sixth lockdown in greater Melbourne was coming online. The National Cabinet, begun with such high hopes, disintegrated as individual premiers tore up agreements as they flew home or switched off Zoom.

But wait, there’s more.

Early in the year, news broke of a young woman staffer in the Commonwealth Parliament having been raped some years before. The government’s crisis-management machine was cranked up, just as it had been during the original crime. Initial attempts to make the issue go away failed and eventually the Prime Minister found it necessary to tell the House and the nation that thanks to his wife, ‘he got it’. In a separate case,  a senior Minister outed himself as the person referred to in a decades old rape claim by a woman now dead. Initially, he was supported by the Prime Minister who argued that he should stay in his job as senior law officer of the land while the claim was investigated. Eventually, among rising anger, especially by women who gathered  in front of Parliament and marched in cities throughout the land, the Minister was demoted but still retained a significant portfolio. After an ill-advised defamation action against the national broadcaster, he eventually announced his decision to not recontest his seat at next year’s election. Soon after, the Health Minister Greg Hunt also announced that he would not stand again. The trifector was completed by the standing aside of a third Minister as a female ex-staffer accused him of past abusive actions towards her. To paraphrase and extend oscar Wilde’ witticism: to lose one Minister might be accorded a misfortune, to lose two looks more like carelessness, but to lose three is positively culpable.

Now I too have an intelligent wife and two daughters, but I don’t need their reminder that sexual assault is heinous, nor that violence against women and girls is endemic in our society.  For God’s sake, we’ve had Royal Commissions documenting at least the iceberg tips of crimes against women and children, much of it lodged in the murky past of God’s churches. The Parliamentary year ended with a report by the Sex Discrimination Commissioner detailing the shocking prevalence of sexual assault, harassment, bullying and general appalling behaviour by politicians and senior staffers in the Parliament building.

As far as I’m aware, very few perpetrators have been held accountable for their misbehaviour and crimes. The Jenkins Report tells us why. There is simply nowhere for the victim of abuse to go, no one other than her boss and possible abuser to complain to. Parliament House is a den of small businesses run as personal fiefdoms, consigning junior employees, especially women, to the powerless status they suffered everywhere in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when sexual discrimination and abuse were so entrenched as to be invisible. At least in recent times and at the level of lip service, the abuses and crimes are a little more difficult for men in power to ignore. But as the Jenkins Report sits gathering dust, the political leaders turned their attention to the important stuff, how to win the next election. Move on.

But surely some good things must have come out of 2021. Surely, some new vision for the future, with policies appropriate to realising it must have surfaced. Well, no. The Opposition has walked (run is too energetic a description) a ‘small target’ strategy, treading a fine line between driving loyal supporters to the Greens and giving the arch-liars of the government opportunities to demonise a future Labor government. The government never had a vision and has reached the end of the year failing to pass promised legislation on religious anti-discrimination and an anti-corruption (euphemistically called an Integrity) Commission. After a long running political soap opera in which luminaries like Barnaby Joyce, Matt Kanavan, George Christensen and Pauline Hanson starred, the Prime Minister was able to take a Clayton’s promise to the Glasgow COP26 meeting and finish last in the medals (another race that wasn’t a race). It’s official. Australia is the advanced world’s leading laggard in the fight to contain climate change. Well played, Prime Minister.

Completing a truly terrible year for Scomo, his vaunted popularity rating is heading south. His integrity and honesty are being called into question, by no less a judge than French president Macron. Surely not. Isn’t Morrison always straight with voters? Doesn’t he always admit his mistakes (we’re all human) and move quickly to fix them? Doesn’t he always fulfil his promises and follow through on his big policy announcements? I’m tempted to respond – “I don’t think, I know” [the answers to these questions]. I think you do too. Classic smoke and mirror tactics, like floating the possibility of a disgraced former Liberal State premier running to win back a prized silvertail Sydney electorate, quickly evaporated having grabbed the news cycle for a nanosecond. A government backbencher’s attempt to railroad a US-style voter suppression bill through Parliament disappeared into the smoke. The sniff of desperation hangs around our increasingly unpopular leader as he searches for the right target to get stuck into. His natural allies in the business sector are slip-sliding away on climate change, even among some of the large mining companies. He is becoming uncomfortably wedged between the pro-coal government MPs in Queensland and the moderate Liberals holding inner city seats at risk in inner Melbourne and Sydney. This is the position he manoeuvred Labor into at the 2019 election, a nice irony. Apart from Labor, Morrison faces an onslaught by well-financed independent candidates riding the rising wave of angry moderate liberal voters disgusted with Morrison’s weakness on issues of climate change, government rorts and women’s safety.

If Morison is on the final roller coaster ride to the politicians’ graveyard, who will take over as leader of the Liberal Party? The two front runners, Frydenberg and Dutton, have first to retain their seats. If both do, my money is on Dutton (you can remind me if I’m wrong). He will be needed to mount a vigorous Abbott-style war on a new Labor government, inside and outside Parliament. Otherwise, if the Coalition wins again, it will be Morrison redux.

Happy 2022.