The New Daily - Richard Flanagan*
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| Richard Flanagan has called out Australia's "gaslighter in chief". Photo: TND |
The
return of Nero was scripted by Scotty from Marketing and embellished
and blown up by his colleagues in Publicity over at News Corp.
Admittedly,
as some may have whispered at his office’s Xmas drinks, Scott really
only had one line in copywriting, but it had in the past worked well –
or well enough.
These days though all his old lines were becoming national jokes so well known even Lara Bingle was in on them.
And
no matter how many cuddles would be splashed in coming days over every
News Corp paper as our Prime Minister would be photographed with the
bereaved and the exhausted, the soot smeared and the tear stained, none
of it seemed to quite paper over the growing sense of moral failure at
our nation’s centre.
The worry was Scott – who had worked so hard on his image, even inventing his own bizarre moniker, ScoMo
– might now be on the way to becoming the national joke himself. Engadine Scott. Smoko. Scummo. Sooty. Smirko. The quiet Hawaiian.
Aloha? Was anyone home?
No.
Australia’s answer to the Griswolds had been on Christmas vacation in
Hawaii, inadvertently feeding the nation some of the most insulting
images it has suffered since the days of Aboriginal ash trays: Scott in
boardies, arms around some beery mates, throwing a hang loose shaka
while homes burnt and people died. Scott and Jenny at a beachside café,
checking, yes, their phones. Scott, alone.
And it was this last image that perhaps reveals more about where Scott was and where we had got to as a nation.
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| Scott Morrison at a cafe in Hawaii on the weekend after saying he’d rush home. |
The café looked joyless and Scott looked overwhelmingly sad and lost.
At
some point, a leader and his nation had lost sight of each other. Scott
was texting, not waving; for reasons that escaped him for much of the
week away the nation was burning, not cheering.
It was a problem. It was, it had to be said, a growing problem.
His
return – what should have been a triumph, what should have been moving,
what should have been a victory of faux humility the likes of which
hadn’t been witnessed since his comrade-in-flames Rupert Murdoch fronted
an English parliamentary committee investigating the horrors of his
journalists’ phone hacking, and declared that it was the humblest day of
his life – wasn’t working.
Scott was similarly sorry.
He
invoked his wife more, one suspects, as protection so any who criticised
his decision to take a holiday was criticising his family who were, of
course, private and off bounds except for when Scott made them public
and in bounds – just like his religion.
It was confusing, one
thing meaning another thing and nothing all at the same time. That was
Scotty from Marketing though. He and Jenny were sorry. He understood.
And so on.
Somehow it felt as hollow as did a nation that had
slowly been brought to the realisation by Scott’s holiday that it was
led by people who seemed to care little about the national tragedy that
was affecting millions, to say nothing of the dead, the newly homeless,
the devastated business and lives, the continuing terror that still has
months to be endured and hopefully survived.
His
‘everybloke’ lines were beginning to approach panicked derangement
(going to Hawaii was like taking a plumbing contract on a Friday
afternoon?) and every second item trending on social media seemed to
involve some further humiliating take down of the Prime Minister.
There was something vaguely
Ceausescu-like
about a complacent leader coming out on a platform to be cheered, only
to be met with boos. His masks of concern and compassion couldn’t hold a
candle to the grief and rage that was everywhere.
Almost every journalist had got the holiday to Hawaii wrong. It wasn’t the issue, they told Australia.
Australia begged to disagree.
It was the very heart of the issue.
Was
the country run by leaders or by perk bludgers permanently on
undeclared leave? It humiliated people to be reminded that no matter
what they suffered and what they felt, no matter what they feared nor
what greater horrors today awaited tomorrow, there now seemed only one
certainty: Your government had abandoned you.
By the time Gretel Killeen stole the
Sunrise
show by stating what almost every journalist seemed to have missed,
that in times of national emergency our leaders were meant to lead,
Scott’s Big Hawaiian Adventure was its own bushfire.
And now, like the real thing, it was not so easily put out.
Not
content with not being there, not satisfied with his office having lied
about where he was for some days, and determined to remind everyone
back in the country he ostensibly led that not a word he said had any
meaning on this or any other planet, he promised on Friday morning he
would return as a matter of urgency only to not make it back until
Saturday evening. It was just one day before he was going to come home
anyway.
Morrison has never been accused of lacking political calculation in his decisions.
And
by taking his holidays in the middle of a national emergency, wasn’t he
saying that this too was normal, as bushfires have always been with us
and always will be? It was a supreme act of show, not tell.
The
problem was that it showed something other than what, we can only
presume, he intended: It revealed that Morrison is wholly indifferent
both to the immediate crisis and more fundamentally to its root causes,
climate change.
It symbolised a contempt for all Australians.
In
one sense, politics is only symbols, but symbols become reality. By
showing he didn’t care, he was showing he wouldn’t act. It may be our
problem – our homes, our lives, our futures – but it was not the problem
of his government.
Having on Sunday been finally forced to pay
lip service to the notion that climate change was part of the problem,
he immediately doubled down on the government’s complete dereliction of
responsibility to act on climate change, continuing to mouth the now
very stale lie that Australia will meet its Paris targets, that
emissions are falling, and then seeking to bring the story back to one
he could control, one of Just Another Bloke.
The creepy
gaslighter-in-chief was soon in full pitiful mode, trying to guilt the
nation over denying Jenny and the kids a family holiday just because of
an unprecedented global catastrophe.
Still, he was comforted by the fact:
"… that Australians would like me to be here simply so I can be here alongside them as they go through this terrible time.’’
Scott Morrison
Really, Scott?
Don’t be scared, he had told us when he had so infamously brandished a lump of coal in Parliament.
But
the nation was terrified, he had no answers, he was another
door-to-door salesman selling his sham evangelism. No, he said
repeatedly, he wouldn’t hold a hose – but he would, one feared, arrive
at where your front door had been until yesterday wanting to hold your
hand.
“I don’t expect him on the hose, he’s pathetic at
everything. He would be useless at it,” Susan Alexander told ABC News in
front of the smouldering ruins of her home.
“I don’t expect him on the comms, but I do expect him to lead.”
Back
at the RFS headquarters, in the absence of rain, Scott from Marketing
continued to rain down the sort of patronising nonsense that offended
almost everybody.
“You may want to think of dropping off some toys
for the children of the firefighters,” he was now saying, “who may not
have had time to go out and buy some this Christmas because they have
been too busy.
“These are things that people can do constructively. Australians, we need to rally together. The time for argument is not now.”
Certainly, from Scott’s point of view, it wasn’t the best of times for reflection on what his government had done
constructively about the crisis these past few weeks.
Other
than being absent, other than Michael McCormack suggesting that
exploding horse sh-t was also to blame for the fires (which, in a sense,
every time I hear Michael McCormack speak, I am inclined to think may
well be the case), there was one supreme act of bastardry that was best
avoided.
Morrison’s government had only the week before played a
leading role in scuppering any significant agreement at this year’s
international meeting on climate change action in Madrid.
It
was no small achievement, one even meriting global criticism –strange,
really, given we are frequently told by Scott from Marketing that we are
the Little Nation that Can’t.
But it had – at this moment of, as
everyone acknowledged, unprecedented catastrophe – been doing all it
could to ensure the next catastrophe would be that much worse and that
much more unprecedented. And who better for the task than a man whose
entire political career has been serial head on collisions with reality,
the boy who cried
Woolf himself, Angus Taylor?
For
the hapless energy minister had managed in Madrid the one success of
his ministerial career to date and that was to discredit our nation in
the eyes of the world by being in cahoots with such colleagues as a
nation led by medieval butchers, Saudi Arabia, and Russia, a nation led
by a latter-day vivisector, exactly the sort of pariah states any
democratic country feels proud to have as allies.
“That is why,”
Scott from Marketing continued, “Australia is the best country in the
world and that is the country I am proud to lead.”
Really?
Actually, out of 57 countries recently rated on climate change action Australia is ranked 57
th.
Which is not best. Which is last. Which gives us the claim to be the
worst country in the world on the most important problem facing mankind.
Thanks Nero. Thanks Angus.
And, in any case, is it the best
country for those people whose towns ran out of water months ago? Whose
insurance premiums are about to become unaffordable? Whose farms are
now, according to a recent report, 22 per cent less profitable because
of climate change? For those millions fearful for their children’s
health, or, for that matter, their own as the smog continues?
For
the hundreds of thousands more who have several more months of fear as
to whether their home might be next, before the ever-shrinking respite
of winter and then the return of the next and now inevitably worse fire
season?
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| The fire season is well and truly here – and it’s just the beginning. Photo: Getty |
Celebrating
the resilience and strength of individual Australians is the cruellest
insult if our government’s only policy is leave them to perish, to
choke, to burn and, if fighting the fires, having to crowd fund such
basic equipment as face masks.
The science is long in as to what
is happening, why it is happening, and how to resolve it. And given this
knowledge, why do the highest officers in our land, charged by us to
act in our interest, continue to act in defiance of that knowledge,
knowingly complicit in destroying lives, homes, and livelihoods?
Are they criminal in their dereliction of responsibility? As the law stands they are not. But the law needs to change.
Before
this cruellest of summers is over more innocent people will be dead.
More homes will be lost. More families and friends will be grieving.
More towns and farmers will have no water. More people will have lost
their livelihoods.
Australia will have become become Ground Zero
for global heating and Scott from Marketing will have moved on to
booking his next family holiday with Jenny and the kids.
Morrison’s
Pentecostal faith teaches that the end of days is signalled by a time
of fire, flood and famine, known as the Tribulation. This is a wonderful
time for the elect, who ascend to heaven in the Rapture.
If
Morrison is genuine in such beliefs, is he in any way a fit person to
lead our country at this time of crisis that his religion sees as a
joyous moment? Either he is sincere in his faith or he is sincere in his
oath to office, but he cannot be both.
Which is it, Prime Minister?
This
fundamental question matters and cannot be fobbed off with the line
that religion is private. When an election was in full flight and votes
were needed, his religion was very public.
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| Award-winning author Richard Flanagan: ‘Scott Morrison is no leader’. Photo: Getty |
Anyone
who thinks Morrison will change, that he will genuinely address
Australia’s grave climate crisis, is grievously mistaken. In January he
goes to India, where he will meet Gautam Adani. What promises will be
made there, what further subsidies of our money offered, in order that
our fires grow bigger and our droughts worse?
His government will
not change its criminal course of inaction on climate change. It can’t
and it won’t, in part because many of its leaders are climate change
denialists, in part because of the curious, inexplicable hold the fossil
fuel industry has over it, and in part because it owes Clive Palmer big
time, and he wants his giant Galilee Basin coal mine in return for
buying Morrison his one-seat majority.
And in part because, when all is said and done, it’s winning.
Labor
appears Morrison-lite, and there is no effective political expression
for the growing national anger about the climate catastrophe and our
political leaders’ determination to make it worse.
When they are
up against a megafire, firefighters don’t say I’m only one man or one
woman, or that our crew are only six people. They do their bit. They
stand up. They fight. They make a difference. Where’s the fight in Scott
Morrison?
He’s a small man, a man who uses his wife and children as cover for his own bad decisions, who runs away when the heat is on.
He’s
no more or less than a shill for the coal industry. When they gave him
the only clean coal on the planet, a carefully varnished piece of black
rock, he was a big man in Parliament waving it in all our faces: His
dark master, our black future.
But when the gates of hell opened,
he was in Hawaii, a little man making hang loose signs, reportedly
saying fires were a state, not federal, issue.
He may be our elected Prime Minister. But he is no leader. And no matter how many die this summer his position will not change.
It is we who must.
*Richard
Flanagan is an award-winning Australian writer. His achievements
include journalism prizes for his essays and the Man Booker Prize for
his novel The Narrow Road to the Deep North. This is his first piece for The New Daily.
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