A Man Without Qualities

Robert Musil’s unfinished masterpiece paints its protagonist Ulrich as a strangely disengaged and ambiguous character, a hollow man responding rather than leading events that tumble through his life. Wikipedia has him thus: “His ambivalence towards morals and indifference to life has brought him to the state of being "a man without qualities", depending on the outer world to form his character. A kind of keenly analytical passivity is his most typical attitude.”

As I watch the recent performance of Australia’s Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, I seem to see elements of Ulrich in inaction. Morrison fell into office by squeezing between two dominant political characters to the extreme right and left of his parliamentary party. His ‘flexibility’ served him well as the ideologues vying for the crown fell away.  He could turn a face in every direction.  As an apparatchik who moved from a state party branch of the Liberal Party of Australia into the Federal Parliament, Morrison was able to use his marketing and organisational skills to gather the numbers in the party room, to harvest the votes of those who were opposed to each of the two remaining candidates, Peter Dutton and Julie Bishop. The opposition of the supporters of vanquished Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull mostly went for Morrison, unable to contemplate a female leader and fearful of the lurch to the hard right if Dutton prevailed. Undecideds were driven by the culture of bias against women in the Liberal Party and prevalent throughout Parliament. Some saw Morrison as a stop gap and easily malleable until a real leader could be elevated to the Prime Ministership. A number of volunteers polished their Field Marshall’s batons in keen anticipation and waited for the government’s electoral defeat.

The Labor Party was widely predicted to win the March 2019 general election. It didn’t, managing like their opponents twenty-six years earlier, to lose the unlosable poll. Morrison’s close victory was modestly proclaimed ‘a miracle’ by the man himself. His one seat majority, recently reduced to reliance on the casting vote of the Speaker of the House, has held to date. His miracle began to fray late in 2019 when terrible bushfires raged up and down the East coast of the continent, as the PM took his family for a holiday in Hawaii. The clumsy efforts of his office to hide the fact forced an early return to duty. But his ham-fisted attempts to reassure those burnt out and grieving by the magic of his presence turned into a public relations disaster, patently at odds with the real disaster unfolding on his sleepy watch. He was rapidly being reframed by the environment around him as inept and out of touch, a taker not a doer or, in the words of a departed senior colleague, a leaner not a lifter.

Then came Covid.  Here was a chance to redeem himself in the eyes of voters and the gathering gaggle of party colleagues beginning to doubt his capacity to spring another electoral miracle. He started well, pulling together and naming a ‘national cabinet’ of state and territory premiers around himself and his deputy, Treasurer Josh Frydenberg. The aim was to devise and deliver an integrated response to the Covid-19 pandemic beginning to arrive at the nation’s airports and seaports. Australia, like New Zealand is an island nation. Geography had handed us an opportunity to limit the grip of the pandemic as the countries of Europe, Africa and the Americas bore the full brunt. But confusion, complacency and the normal conflicts between the state and commonwealth governments began to chip away at the effectiveness of the national cabinet. Individual premiers with electoral timetables that differed among themselves and with the Commonwealth led to each taking advice from their own public health experts and rolling out their own regulatory controls. This included imposing snap border closures depending on where cluster outbreaks and quarantine failures occurred.

Initially Morrison tried to finesse the crisis by talking up the idea, also embraced by other conservative heads of government, like Donald Trump and Boris Johnson, of a ‘balance’ between controlling the pandemic and not destroying the economy. Morison even made the point of being seen in the middle of a large weekend crowd at the game of his favourite football team. Fairly quickly, however, he was converted to the reality that there was no neat trade-off, no balance, just the overwhelming imperative to get Covid under control before it gained an iron grip. He also came around to the unheard of – the over-used term is ‘unprecedented’ – need to helicopter money directly to the unemployed and firms to keep their workers employed though idle, while upping government spending on programs designed to encourage new households into home ownership and existing owners to renovate existing housing. Consequently, the federal budget deficit is in the process of blowing out to two hundred billion dollars. This precisely at the time Morrison and his Treasurer were expecting to celebrate Australia’s first budget surplus in a long, long time.

But an ungrateful public is not giving Morrison the credit he demands. It is the state premiers and territory first ministers who are reaping the voters’ gratitude. Every sitting government that has gone to the polls over the Covid period has won handsomely. In the traditionally strong Liberal state of Western Australia, the Liberal Opposition party leader conceded defeat three weeks in advance of election day. He was correct, spectacularly so, with his party reduced to two seats that didn’t include him. This bodes ill for the federal government with an election due by early 2022.

And then there has been the continuous undertow of government scandals and incompetency. ‘Robodebt’ harassed age pensioners and other welfare beneficiaries with what turned out to be illegal imposts. Shameless pork-barrelling towards government held and marginal electorates were met by unpersuasive stone-walling and blame-shifting. Donors close to the Liberal Party happened to benefit from large government contracts with dubious probity credentials. The government was found to have paid well over the odds to party donors for land designated for Sydney’s second international airport.

Back to Covid. The federal government lined up well back in the queue to secure supplies of the new vaccines being developed in the US and Britain. A failure to indemnify some vaccine manufacturers wiped out two of the contenders. An Australian trial vaccine was dumped, probably too soon, leaving us dependent on the Pfizer and AstraZeneca jabs. As it turned out, supply chain breakdown and delays in local production of AstraZeneca have thrown the vaccine rollout well behind schedule and well behind the early start in America and Britain. Health scares over AstraZeneca have further shredded the government’s timetable and credibility. To rephrase Health Minister Greg Hunt’s ‘mission accomplished’ moment – the eagle has crash-landed.

All this leaves the country nervously waiting for the next failure in quarantine to spark the next clusters and internal border closures. The federal government has the unambiguous constitutional powers over both foreign arrivals and quarantine. Instead of moving boldly from the beginning to use those powers and isolate all foreign arrivals in Commonwealth facilities, using the resources of the Australian Defence force, Morrison has persisted in shoving responsibility onto each state jurisdiction, all the better to blame them when things go wrong. And they went badly wrong in Victoria where more than 90 per cent of total deaths in the nation from the virus have occurred. The feds also have constitutional power and responsibility for aged care. And yet, two-thirds of residents and carers in aged care facilities are yet to receive their Pfizer jabs, continuing the government’s abysmal record in the sector recently documented by yet another Royal Commission of Inquiry. Once again the Prime Minister has allowed external developments to define him.

And then there are the exposés of rampant sexism and misogyny in the commonwealth parliament itself. The third most senior member of the government, Attorney General Christian Porter, was forced to front a press gallery to deny claims that he had raped a woman while at university decades before. Another cabinet Minister also took medical leave when news leaked of her abusive reference to an ex-government adviser who claimed she had been raped in that minister’s office and then encouraged to hush it up. Both Ministers were demoted but kept in the Cabinet, the government not willing to risk resignations and byelections with a hung parliament in play. It couldn’t get worse, could it? Well, no, it could and did. News broke like the next rolling wave of a storm-tossed set about internet video coverage of a male MP masturbating on a woman MP’s desk and a group of his mates exchanging misogynistic images and texts. Rumours of sex acts in the building resurfaced, along with believable stories of incessant and demeaning treatment of female politicians and staff. This finally unleashed a barrage of fury from female MPs and Senators, pushing Morrison to reach for that mainstay of political crisis management, the establishment of an inquiry, in this case four. This hardly made a dent in the upswell of anger that saw women from all walks of life and many men rally outside the Commonwealth Parliament and march in other cities around the country to demand action not words to change the sexist culture of the legislature and government. Morrison’s own personal attempts to corral and reset the narrative have been dismal, an object lesson that neatly expressed his general inability to ‘get it’.

The sum total of the challenges facing Morrison as PM has over the last year exposed a brittle personality, with no discernible qualities of empathy or commitment to achieving anything but a limpid-like determination to cling onto the government benches. This is looking like his biggest challenge yet. A kind of keenly analytical passivity is his most typical attitude, as he looks heaven-wise for another miracle.