IS THE PM ALL SMILES AND NO ESSENCE?

CRACKS are appearing in Scott Morrison’s desperate bid to save the Liberals from being smashed at the next election.

The Prime Minister has been great at showing he’s likeable, energetic, sharp and direct — a great salesman.

Ask a voter whether they’d rather have a beer with him or Labor leader Bill Shorten, and Morrison would never go thirsty.

But voters don’t want to drink with their Prime Minister. They want him to give them stuff.

Morrison’s problem right now is that he’s a great salesman with little to sell, and too often caught refusing to sell just what voters want.

Compare: Tony Abbott as Liberal leader won an election with clear promises: stop the boats and axe the carbon tax.

What are Morrison’s promises? He still lacks a cutthrough message that sums up the difference between his Liberals and Labor.

Shorten isn’t making it easy. Morrison last week promised to bring forward promised tax cuts for small business, but Shorten instantly promised to match him. The difference vanished.

Meanwhile, Morrison is too crippled by caution to fight Labor on the potent issues where it would struggle to say “me too”.

Polls show the public wants cuts to immigration and to power prices, driven up by useless global-warming policies. But so far Morrison is trying to have it both ways on both issues, and can’t get cut-through on either.

He says he’ll somehow stop new migrants from moving to our crowded cities, but he won’t cut the intake. He says he’ll somehow cut power prices, but he won’t scrap the Paris agreement that threatens our coal-fired power stations.

Meanwhile, Morrison is dodging the values debates that he dismisses as distractions from bread-and-butter ones.

Result: he is too often caught flat-footed on the issues dominating the news. He failed to say that ABC chairman Justin Milne was finished as soon as it was revealed Milne tried to get staff sacked for offending the government.

He failed to see it was damaging to dismiss the Sydney Opera House as Sydney’s “biggest billboard”.

And it took him two painful days to finally say religious schools must not ban children just for being gay.

Morrison still has time, and is working hard on policies he’ll roll out closer to the election. But he’ll need to reveal them much sooner before voters conclude he’s all smiles and no substance.