It is difficult to know how to begin a column on politics after a week when national debate ended at the high-water mark of our Attorney-General – the first law officer of a government with pretensions to seriousness – discussing which toilets schoolchildren should be able to use.
Scott Morrison, the man who accidentally fell into the prime ministership (whoops!), just as he accidentally fell into preselection following a smear campaign against his opponent (whoops!), staked his leadership on the high ideal of protecting people of faith from discrimination.
Down the drain: Prime Minister Scott Morrison was forced into a humiliating dumping of his Religious Discrimination Bill.Credit:Alex Ellinghausen
Never mind that religious discrimination was declared an absolute non-problem by the review the Coalition commissioned as a sop to its conservative wing after the latter’s loss in the same-sex marriage vote. Never mind that no one in the Middle Australia Morrison claims to know and love is exercised over the issue, preoccupied as they are with the bare-knuckle crawl of two years of a pandemic.
Never mind that this is the same Prime Minister who reckons people want the government to get out of their lives. His government is literally in the business, now, of policing the toilets our kids use.
Such was the government’s justification for its humiliating dumping of its religious discrimination legislation.
Labor, crossbenchers and the Greens ganged up with five floor-crossing Liberal MPs to amend the legislation to protect transgender children from discrimination in the name of religious freedom.
All of a sudden, the religious lobby groups, which have spent years obsessively insisting upon the need for these laws, decided they didn’t want them, not like this. The right to exclude trans kids from their schools is apparently a non-negotiable article of faith for them.
If religious schools lost their exemption to discriminate against students based on their gender identity, all sorts of things could be threatened, said Attorney-General Michaelia Cash. For example, if a kid enrolled at a religious school transitioned genders, “matters such as uniforms, bathrooms, as well as the wishes of other parents to send their children to a single-sex school would need to be addressed”.
Craven, contemptible stuff. Schools, including religious schools, already navigate these issues quietly, without the interference of government.
Even NSW Premier Dominic Perrottet, a man of faith and avowed conservative, said the legislation was unnecessary and could “end up creating more problems than it solves”.
But in a Morrisonian Australia, no loo queue is too small for its purview.
Remember when Morrison confected a mini-culture war on the gender-inclusive toilets in the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet? After two ensuing years of agenda-impoverished government, now that’s being rolled that out on a national scale. How good is Australia?
After this week in Parliament, it has never been clearer how scared the government is of the future and how ill-equipped it is to lead Australia into it.
On Wednesday, two women under 30 stormed the National Press Club and although Morrison wasn’t present, he was much discussed.
The Prime Minister is now spending much of his media capital in fending off innuendo that he is a liar whose real behaviour puts the lie to his crafted image as a hapless daggy Dad, floating above the Canberra bubble he claims to despise.
Sharing the podium with the poised Brittany Higgins – who reminded us of our scepticism of Morrison’s claims that he was unaware of the alleged rape until the media reported it – was former Australian of the Year Grace Tame. She is the government’s biggest bogie right now, a firebomb from the future, come to tell the political establishment that her generation doesn’t respect the protocols of its elders.
Tame said she had received a “threatening” phone call from a senior member of a government-funded organisation asking her to play nice with the Prime Minister on the eve of this year’s Australia Day awards ceremony. Morrison denied having anything to do with the call.
It is common for journalists to receive angry phone calls from ministerial staff, and politicians themselves. The pretext is always fairness/accuracy of coverage (and the cause may be legitimate), but the subtext is often intimidation, which can cause journos to self-censor in future.
For the Prime Minister’s Office under Morrison, no nit is too small to pick. And for a man who declares contempt for the insular elitism of the Twitterati, his office sure keeps close track of it.
In April 2019 The Australian’s Greg Bearup was at the Easter Show with his kids when he saw Morrison, Morrison’s daughters and then-Deputy Prime Minister Michael McCormack enjoying a fairground ride for the cameras (they were on the campaign trail). Bearup tweeted a joke about “Sideshow Mo and the poultry judge” pushing into the line. He received two angry phone calls from the PMO demanding he delete the tweet. Bearup has about 2000 Twitter followers.
Illustration: Reg LynchCredit:
Georgie Dent, the executive director of not-for-profit The Parenthood, which lobbies for quality childcare and flexible workplaces, received an angry phone call from the PMO in October 2020. She had written that the 2020 budget, just handed down, had failed women. The man who called her (who she declined to name) told her that “no one credible” was saying such a thing.
These are just a couple of examples, but they paint a picture of how closely the PMO monitors criticism of Morrison, and not just from press gallery journos.
This petty control may explain the smallness of the government, which has neglected any forward-looking policy on climate or the economy, and which ends its term with the failure of ill-considered legislation that disgusted even its own members.
Twitter: @JacquelineMaley
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2022-02-12 18:30:00Z
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