How do we get rid of SloMo?

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I alway thought SloMo was a babbling fool, able to talk under wet cement without saying anything. The bushfires crisis showed that he is worse than that: a kind of banal psychopath capable of acting like his countrymen but unable to empathise with them in person. Worse still, recently I heard from a very serious Coalition-aligned source that he is as “thick as a brick”.

Whichever way you cut it, he’s the wrong bloke in the wrong place at the wrong time and it is very likely going to cost Australian lives in the months ahead.

So, how can we rid ourselves of him? Crikey investigates:

Who can sack a prime minister? Well, not us. The Australian constitution makes no mention of the PM. It vests all of the powers of the executive government, the body which runs the country, in the governor-general as the Queen’s representative. Not at all anachronistic.

It’s the GG’s signature that makes laws real, and he or she appoints ministers to run the departments of government.

The convention is that the government in practice is run by the party which has the confidence of the House of Representatives, usually because it has the numbers (or sometimes with the help of cross-benchers). The governor-general always goes along with that.

Okay, not quite always (see Sir John Kerr, below).

The same convention says that, if the government loses a vote of no confidence on the floor of the House, it is finished. Its leader goes out with the bathwater. So that’s one way to remove Morrison: dislodge a couple of grumpy Coalition backbenchers and get the numbers in the Reps to roll him on a no confidence motion.

Problem: parliament, or the collective of gutless, irresponsible time-servers we call parliament, has called time on itself and will be on holiday (on full pay) until at least August.

The second option is that the prime minister ceases to be the leader of his own party, necessitating (again, by convention, not law) that he heads to Yarralumla and resigns his commission. Achieving that used to be easy; you just needed Niki Savva to drop some hints in her column about leadership rumblings, and it’d be over by the next day.

The Liberals, like Labor, have now entrenched their leaders more firmly with rules about leadership coups, but the rules can be changed. If, hypothetically, a sufficient number of Liberal MPs have also noticed how good a job Morrison has been doing and occasionally think about the national interest (yes, big ask), then they could do him in a heartbeat.

Problem: we could easily get someone even worse. Looking around the Liberal party room, there is no obvious candidate capable of exercising serious and authentic leadership, at least not one with a chance of getting the numbers.

Which brings us to the nuclear option: back to the governor-general (presently a he). I mentioned that, if you just read the constitution, you’d think he was as powerful as Putin. But convention (that word again) promises that he’s not. He follows the advice of the prime minister, in practice.

Sir John Kerr did not. He sacked Gough Whitlam, installed Malcolm Fraser, and then dissolved both houses of parliament altogether. To do so, he used his explicit constitutional power to remove ministers (under section 64, ministers serve at his pleasure), as well as his more controversial “reserve powers”.

The reserve powers are undefined and their extent is anything but certain. The underpinning theory of the constitutional arrangement is that the governor-general is our backstop; if he doesn’t like what’s going on, he can step in and fix it. Including by removing the prime minister, and perhaps (in extremis) governing alone.

The present crisis would not justify that. It does justify parliament, the people we pay to mind our national interest, coming together, acknowledging collectively that it has not placed the best person in the job to lead us through this emergency, and replacing him with someone who can. Even better, with a government of national unity behind them.

The politics of that are their problem. This is about their responsibility.

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The GG isn’t going to do squat.

That only leaves Chief of Defence Forces, General Angus Campbell, to drive his tank up from Russell and run it over SloMo’s office.

I can’t endorse that given the good General may never give the power back (and his tank’s next port of call might be my office!) So, instead, we’ll just have to hang on and watch Australians die uneccessarily to protect our freedoms.

And when that system delivers us the chance at the ballot box, send SloMo straight to hell on the express elevator.

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About the author
David Llewellyn-Smith is Chief Strategist at the MB Fund and MB Super. David is the founding publisher and editor of MacroBusiness and was the founding publisher and global economy editor of The Diplomat, the Asia Pacific’s leading geo-politics and economics portal. He is also a former gold trader and economic commentator at The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, the ABC and Business Spectator. He is the co-author of The Great Crash of 2008 with Ross Garnaut and was the editor of the second Garnaut Climate Change Review.