It’s been a source of bafflement and frustration for Labor and Greens voters for months: How could the Morrison government make so many blunders in plague management yet still be a pretty good bet to win the next election?
For these people, there is some satisfaction across all the opinion polls in recent weeks. The reckoning has arrived.
Prime Minister Scott Morrison is losing skin as the vaccine rollout fails to deliver.Credit:Alex Ellinghausen
All the published polls are showing a clear movement away from the Morrison government. On every measure of pandemic performance, the Coalition’s approval rating has fallen significantly.
And we know why. The pollster for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, Jim Reed, says that “the No. 1 issue for people in recent focus groups has been the vaccine rollout”.
“A year ago people were talking about strong national leadership, with Scott Morrison, Greg Hunt and Brendan Murphy updating them daily, closing the border, making more ventilators, financial supports, with four vaccines on order, proactive and innovative,” says Reed, founder of Resolve Strategic polling.
“Now they talk about the distracting conflict between governments, vaccines not delivered and quarantine facilities not built.”
The pollster for Essential Vision, published by The Guardian, Peter Lewis, says the graph of voter approval for Morrison’s pandemic performance “looks like the back end of the Big Dipper”, where the famous rollercoaster takes its terminal plunge. On Essential’s measure, approval of Morrison’s handling of COVID has plummeted from 70 per cent to 46 since April.
The premiers also have taken a hit in the polls, but none has been marked down as hard as Morrison.
On the critical election-winning question of people’s voting intentions, the poll shifts are much smaller but the three main published surveys put Labor slightly ahead federally. Newspoll, Essential and Resolve all put Labor in an election-winning position.
Australia learned a salutary lesson about polls at the last federal election. But while they don’t predict outcomes, they do indicate trend directions. For Morrison, all the trends are in the wrong direction.
Illustration: John ShakespeareCredit:SMH
Says Lewis: “The government was setting itself up for a very strong incumbent campaign, but incumbency is no longer a huge advantage. I think Labor has got itself to the starting line.”
Is Morrison finished? He’s not going to oblige Labor by resigning and quietly retiring to the Shire to sing along to old Tina Arena hits on YouTube. He can recover. And he controls the timing of the election. He can wait till May next year if he likes.
That gives him up to 10 months. And he knows what he has to do. At the moment the country is shrouded in a thick cloud of fog, confused about just about everything that’s going on. Morrison’s overarching responsibility is to show Australians the way out of the fog.
Two of the elements of a fightback were on display this week. On Thursday he managed to pronounce the word “sorry” for the delays in vaccine supply. He promised that “we’re turning this around”.
Neither even begins to be adequate, but he’s on the right track. If he hopes to win, Morrison needs to do three things.
First, he needs to discover empathy and how to show it. He sent one of his wayward backbenchers, Andrew Laming, on an “empathy training course” earlier this year, but the evidence suggests he should ask for his money back and find a better way.
“Scott looks terribly defensive,” says one of the wise heads of the Liberal Party. “He’s not an empathy politician. There’s no one in the government who can touch Australians. That’s fine if you’re talking about the economy or immigration. This is different. The government needs a bit more emotional intelligence.”
It’s necessary but insufficient for the government to lift its pandemic performance. Morrison should know this from his experience as a human being – if people are resentful and angry at you, they’ve already blocked you out. You need to soothe their hurt before they will even look at you again.
A grudging “sorry, but...” doesn’t cut it. A key reason that Paul Keating lost to John Howard was Keating’s towering indifference – “the recession we had to have”, for instance – while Howard tried to show some empathy. “There was a sense that the concerns of many people had been ignored,” Howard said recently.
Howard, in turn, couldn’t bring himself to show enough empathy for the Stolen Generation to say “sorry”. Kevin Rudd won promising to do just that.
Morrison needs to be seen to understand the anxiety and frustration of the millions of people who were expecting to be vaccinated by now and living freely. “He should have learnt from his Brittany Higgins experience that you can’t leave your humanity at the door,” the Liberal grey beard told me.
Barnaby Joyce said this week that “the greater purpose” of vaccine “is so the vast majority of people are in a position where they don’t die. That is the goal”. He may be speaking the truth, but it’s not enough to tell a disgruntled people to be grateful that they’re not dead. Morrison might do better learning empathy elsewhere.
Second, the Prime Minister needs to have a clear plan and tell a clear story about how Australia will get to herd immunity so society can move back to a stable state. This is the “turning it around” part.
Again, Morrison has touched on this. Three weeks ago he floated his four-phase plan for “a pathway out of the COVID-19 pandemic”. The national cabinet adopted it. Which is fine except for the fact that it is devoid of detail, like a train schedule with no arrival or departure times. Meaningless, in other words.
The national cabinet has tasked the Peter Doherty Institute with providing the critical details. When it’s ready, Morrison needs to use this as the basis for a major policy and political relaunch. To bring the country together to meet the plan and follow the pathway out of the pandemic and out of the fog.
This will demand something the government lacks – unerringly competent execution. If the Prime Minister can’t execute the plan, the electorate will execute him.
Finally, Morrison needs to work out a new deal with the states over lockdown conditions and payments – an arrangement to allow Australia to “live with the virus” without the maddening stop-start of abrupt lockdowns.
Phase two of the incomplete national four-part plan anticipates that lockdowns would only occur “in extreme circumstances”. Morrison said this phase might be reached next year some time, but will defer to the Doherty Institute for specifics. Phase three calls for no more lockdowns at all.
But as things stand, the states have too many incentives to resort to lockdowns at the first hint of an infection. The premiers of the most parochial states – notably those of Western Australia, Tasmania and Queensland - have discovered that shutting the state border is an easy route to popularity. And they can always blame the other states or Canberra for any problems that ensue.
Playing the parochialism card is not only successful politically – it’s also the way to more federal cash. The federal government pays subsidies to a state government when it imposes a lockdown, but nothing when it opens up again. In finance this is called moral hazard – by providing a guarantee of support, you’re actually encouraging reckless behaviour.
Morrison needs to cut a new deal that removes the incentives for premiers to declare unnecessary lockdowns. That will involve painstaking negotiations with the states, as any successful federal-state deal always does.
“The thing that will make the difference in the end,” says the Liberal wise head, “is whether people feel Scott has recognised their sacrifice, and that it was worth it. If we have a fourth wave, and it turns out it wasn’t worth it, he’s finished.”
Morrison can yet redeem himself. Most of the voters who have switched their support away from the Coalition in the polls haven’t given their vote to Labor. They’ve parked it with minor parties or independents. This is classic protest vote behaviour. They remain available to Morrison. But he’ll have to earn them back.
Peter Hartcher is political editor.
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Peter Hartcher is political editor and international editor of The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.
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