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 took over after Holt’s fatal swim, boozy, skirt-chasing and remarkably progressive John Gorton. William McMahon, the treacherous, bleating schemer who knifed Gorton in his scrabble to the top, displayed little.

Gough Whitlam, a soi-disant Great Man among pissants, brought more dignity than an army of McMahons could ever produce to the PM’s office. Tall, cultured, resonant of voice, he was all that McMahon was manifestly not. Whitlam was booted out by gimlet-eyed, patrician, Malcom Fraser. Dignity was probably his most positive attribute, scarcely tempering his flinty aloofness. (On an interesting side-note, Gorton warned that Fraser was too right-wing for the Liberal Party. Some decades later, after a shift in his views, Fraser was seen by some of his successors as a dangerous lefty. He resigned from the party in disgust.)

To an extent, how someone is perceived depends on the way they project themselves. Senator John Button was one of the most imposing people I have encountered, even though he spent his life below most people’s eye lines. He was far from tall, but he possessed an extraordinary charisma. Before you saw him, you could sense there was someone of significance in the room. Bob Hawke, the man who ended the Fraser austerity, was also a man of no great stature. Gifted with a heroic capacity for drink, phenomenal self-belief, and a voice like a cockatoo skating down a rusty tin roof, he was a large presence. I’d argue that the decay of Prime Ministerial dignity began to take hold on Hawke’s watch. He had charisma, but not much in the way of gravitas, as the notorious America’s Cup performance attests. It was the sort of stunt no PM had engaged in before.

His successor, the saturnine, sharp-suited Paul Keating, brought some stature back to high office. His speechwriters gave him great material, which he delivered with flair. The Redfern Speech remains one of the peaks of political discourse in this country, but eloquence couldn’t save him from an electorate that had tired of him. After Keating’s departure, the rot really set in.

It’s not possible for me to hide my loathing of John Howard, a man described by someone in his own party as “mean and tricky”, and known to the Press Gallery as The Toad. In my admittedly prejudiced view, he poisoned the nation’s soul with artificial fear, and swayed the gullible with the false promise of an informer’s reward.

Howard was actually slightly taller than Hawke, but he was always “Little Johnny”. It was the way he projected, assisted in no small measure by a ghastly adenoidal snivel of a voice. His one laudable act was gun control, but given the magnitude of the situation, only a criminally incompetent moron could have screwed it up. Howard fawned on foreign leaders to an extent that made Holt and LBJ look restrained: at times, he seemed to be about to hump George W. Bush’s leg. If that wasn’t enough of an affront to dignity, his insistence on togging up in a green-and-gold tracksuit and taking his morning strut in front of the cameras certainly was. It was clear that he lacked the slightest awareness of how ridiculous he looked, but by now, the performative part of being PM was established.

Howard eventually suffered the ignominy of losing his own seat, but has been preserved by the next generation of Conservatives as some sort of sacred mascot, wheeled out on occasions to utter some peevish pronouncement as he hunches blinking in the harsh light of irrelevance.

There was probably one moment of real dignity in Kevin Rudd’s Prime Ministership – his apology to the Stolen Generations. The rest of his time in office seems to have been split between control mania and the sort of tantrums a tightly-wound high school history teacher would throw at morning tea when he found there were no more orange cream biscuits.

Rudd bracketed the tenure of the under-appreciated Julia Gillard. She maintained a truly remarkable composure in the face of blatant sexism and downright misogyny. After she was rolled in a leadership spill, dignity more or less left Parliament House with her.

If voters get the government they deserve, Tony Abbot, the belligerent, leering fanatic that replaced Rudd II, begs the question “What did we do to deserve that?” His insistence on being filmed in brief swimwear was something best understood by psychologists, a sign that dignity was a concept quite beyond him. Abbott was one of the creatures spawned in the Howard Ministry, and there is an amusing irony in the fact that he suffered the same electoral fate as his mentor. Today, he is fighting more of a battle with irrelevance than Howard.

Money, as the saying goes, can’t buy class. Still, having funds in the Cayman Islands can afford a chap a certain amount of aplomb, as displayed by Malcolm Turnbull. Seen as a more palatable alternative to the onion-chomping lunacy of Abbott, Turnbull could at least be trusted not to gnaw the furniture. Nonetheless, he was not above squalid political chicanery. The Godwin Grech affair was enough to place him below contempt, but it didn’t really matter in a party that had developed a fondness for trying to eat its own face. This is where the PM at the time of writing makes his appearance, but more of that in just a bit…

Recent years have given us the bawling vulgarity of Trump, and the Public School Rag Week buffoonery of Boris Johnson, both of them fronting administrations that took corruption, incompetence and contempt for the electorate to unplumbed depths. Scott Morrison plonked himself firmly into that zeitgeist.

For decades, the business of the House of Representatives has been conducted with all the sober grace of gangs of baboons flinging dung at each other. In 2017, as Federal Treasurer, Scott Morrison reduced Parliament to a shabby pantomime. The Bring Your Pet Piece of Coal to Work stunt set the pattern for what was to come.

When 2021 Australian of the Year Grace Tame was seen throwing a contemptuous glance at Morrison, there was much conservative shrieking and pearl-clutching about respect. This was predicated on the idea that the PM is somehow worthy of respect, when he has made that nearly impossible. How so?- in so many ways. Not just the smug denial of all responsibility, the gaslighting, the hypocrisy and the industrial-scale lying. It’s not just shambling up to people in distress in the delusion that mauling them will bring the touch of his deity into their lives… or the fact that his Government has literally hounded people to death. Morrison’s insistence on being seen having a go at a real job, no matter how ludicrous he looks, no matter how cack-handed his attempts, have reduced his role to a hollow joke. After all the meaningless gestures, the performances, the stunts and the third-rate marketing ploys, there is nothing left to respect.

 Morrison is a cartoon, an imbecile impersonating a marketing shyster.

And yet, just when you think he can go no lower, he asks you to hold his Cronulla Sharks stubby-cooler while he opens up a fresh new abyss and leaps into it with an inane double thumbs-up.

 In less than a week from writing this, the position of Prime Minister of Australia will be determined in the 2022 Federal Election. Whoever occupies the position next will have to pull off a miracle if they expect to restore its credibility, because dignity is dead, buried and cremated.