When Scott Morrison muses about crossroads, he's really pondering his own prime ministership
Scott Morrison has been musing out loud about crossroads. The brief foray into symbolism was prompted by the cluster of coronavirus infections at the Crossroads hotel in Casula in New South Wales. So far, state authorities seem to be on top of that outbreak. Victoria continues to battle its second wave.
Morrison touched on the crossroads to contrast success (touch wood) in NSW and struggle in Victoria – a delicate exercise for a prime minister who wants that contrast squarely in the public domain, but not forcefully enough to blow up his relationship with the Victorian Labor premier, Daniel Andrews.
The prime minister noted somewhat whimsically at a press conference on Thursday the Crossroads hotel would “always be known both literally, and I think figuratively, by its name”. Given the prime minister is turning crossroads around in his mind, why don’t we situate him there, at his figurative junction, and map out what he sees.
On one side, there’s the pandemic, which persists. The second wave has prompted renewed public debate about whether the correct policy response should be suppression or elimination. Governments are sticking with suppression. The public health response – localised lockdowns and social distancing – will either flatten the curve a second time, or the virus will canter away.
The unknowns of the pandemic intersect with the economic response. Morrison and the treasurer, Josh Frydenberg, will shortly lay out the next steps, armed with updated economic forecasts from Treasury. Morrison and Frydenberg have been pretty clear this week that income support will continue in this next phase, but the programs will be overhauled.
Morrison says what’s coming next will be targeted, demand-driven, and will go to “those most in need”. Positioning ahead of the revamp, Anthony Albanese has established some terms of engagement: the overhaul of the jobkeeper wage subsidy should involve retesting businesses, better targeting, and tapering the support over a longer period. There is already debate, and that will intensify into next week, about whether the government is hitting the right note.
These are the pressing practical considerations bearing down on the government. And when Morrison imagines himself at a crossroads, he’s really talking about the crossroads of his own prime ministership. The Liberal leader will define his prime ministership, and likely determine whether or not the Coalition wins the next federal election, with his actions between now and the end of the year.
The pressure is huge. This week’s labour force data tells us close to a million Australians are now unemployed. Economic recovery hangs to a large degree on the trajectory of a virus that writes its own rules. It is clear the producers and consumers who inhabit the
economy are going to need support for some time, and making the wrong decisions now could easily crash any recovery.
The next run of decisions will need to be right, or at least right enough, but if you are standing at the crossroads of your own prime ministership you are focused on more than day-to-day calculations. Crises on the scale of this pandemic pick societies up and put them down in a different place. The global financial crisis reshaped politics and geopolitics, and Covid-19 is proving an accelerant to great power competition and regional instability.
Morrison is thinking about Australia’s place in the world. His musing asserts itself and retreats, but it was very obvious with the government’s recent defence update, which cautiously countenanced a middle power response when the century’s major powers are unreliable. Thinking about the world tracks us back to the nation. Periodically, with sufficient frequency to make the enterprise memorable, the prime minister frames the pandemic response through the lens of safeguarding national sovereignty.
Defence of the nation is stitched through Morrison’s storytelling about the pandemic for two main reasons. Implicitly, that narrative validates the scale of the government’s health and fiscal interventions. Morrison also wants to rally the country at a time of stress and anxiety. As he put it this week, he wants people to have their heads up. Political leaders engage in public confidence exercises because hopeful communities are much easier to govern than despairing communities. This is not an abstraction - instilling confidence is a core function of the job.
Morrison needs to think about Australia’s place in the world because that’s what events require. When public sentiment sours against globalisation and integration, when isolationism asserts itself, the inevitable reaction to that is a renewed debate about sovereign capability.
Morrison has been happy to set this debate in motion because it’s a zeitgeist conversation that any conservative prime minister in 2020 is comfortable countenancing, provided the debate doesn’t cartwheel off into unmanageable territory. To try to prevent that, he’s set some guard rails: Australia must remain an open trading nation, we can’t lurch into protectionism and isolationism.
But if Morrison wants to have the debate about nationhood, if he’s serious about it, this conversation really needs broader parameters. It needs to be more multifaceted than whether some manufacturing comes back onshore, or whether the fossil fuel industry is given the subsidies it wants on a redux rationale of quickie nation-building, or whether our defence strategy plots a course towards greater independence.
It needs to go deeper. It needs to encompass who we are as a country in 2020.
I say that with a certain level of trepidation, because at one level I respect the fact that Morrison has so far kept questions of identity muted in the conversation. His rally around the flag has a practical tone rather than an aggressively nationalistic one. Once you inject national identity into the discussion, insanity often follows.
But if we are going there, and the prime minister is absolutely going there, we do need to broaden the scope. National security is a multifaceted concept. Securing the nation includes ensuring we have the tools to prosper in this century. If you care about security, you should not allow universities to lurch into a crisis triggered by the loss of revenue from overseas students. If this government cared about buttressing the nation, about fortifying and strengthening our collective defences in challenging times, Morrison would not be passive, right now, at this particular moment in history, about the risk of a brain drain.
Being able to rise to the challenges of our age means safeguarding and expanding the national intellectual firepower to prosper and thrive in an age of ferocious competition. Those jobs matter, but the government expresses little enthusiasm for defending them, because defending them is not only costly, it could be seen as a transgression in an ever more deranged culture war that pits faux everymen against alleged elites. Safer to talk about sparkies.
As well as defending intellectuals, researchers, innovators and teachers, any serious debate about nationhood brings culture into play. It is welcome news that the government has thrown a lifeline to Australia’s cultural sector, an important industry hit for six by the pandemic.
But the terms of the rescue are revealing. Take one example. Morrison has been happy to expand the location incentive to help persuade Marvel or Disney to shoot its next blockbuster here, happy to allocate $400m to that aspiration, but local productions – the creative endeavours that tell the story of Australia to itself and the world – have been given a $50m fund.
Creating professional opportunities for Australian creatives and technicians to be employed is obviously better than the alternative. But decisions like this have a practical effect: Australia is subsidising the cultural exports of other nations at the expense of our own – which is a new iteration of the cultural cringe.
Morrison also wants to rally the country at a time of stress and anxiety. As he put it this week, he wants people to have their heads up