Scott Morrison and the Death of Dignity
I was born in an age of pomp and circumstance, when Empire was still a living memory. The image of Our Gracious Queen gazed serenely on her subjects from every official wall, and her viceregal representatives added a sense of occasion to all the stone-layings, tree-plantings, openings and addresses that she couldn’t appear at herself. Foremost and most adoring of her subjects was the Prime Minister. The first PM to impose himself on my infant consciousness was Robert Gordon Menzies, who loomed above it all with magisterial eyebrows bristling. For all his drumming up fear of Communist bogey-men, his arrogance and pomposity, Menzies was a picture of something that has disappeared from contemporary politics: dignity. Dignity, arguably an essential quality for any aspiring statesman, existed to wildly varying degrees in Menzies’ successors. Harold Holt was an urbane bed-hopper who grovelled to President Lyndon Johnson, but he mustered it when he needed to. So could the man who ...