It is almost sad to watch the slow dawning in conservative media that its leader is not up to the job. Prime Minister Scott Morrison is quickly sliding from electoral saviour to damaging and disordered human being. At the AFR:
- Anger at the treatment of women is rising amid the “quiet Australians”.
- The Coalition knows this but is stuck with Morrison who “means well” but “things tend to come out arse about”.
This point is picked up by Liberal insider Nikki Sava:
- Morrison’s brand is now synonymous with dodging responsibility, hiding in tough times and blame-shifting.
- He did the right thing avoiding the demonstrations because his “interactions with people” always end badly.
- But not even that could save him when his speech enraged everybody with reference to bullets for protestors.
- Porter’s conflicts are absurd. Reynolds has to go.
Morrison is not going to change. He can’t. He is afflicted with a dissociative disorder that makes him incapable of empathy. Moreover, it means he will act out his hostility towards interlocutors whenever he is off the teleprompter. Hence, his appalling passive-aggressive comments about bullets for the protesters. This means that whenever he is confronted with real people over the next year of intensifying politics leading into the election, Morrison is capable of saying anything.
In effect, the PM is now a walking, talking Coalition timebomb so long as this scandal persists. And how can it do anything else given his inability to address it?
To wit, in the progressive press, the heat is barely diminished at the ABC with youth leaders appalled. Nobody but a few equally tin-eared insiders think that a tax-payer funded defamation attack on the ABC by Christian Porter is a good idea. Crikey continues to pound away.
The ground for the ongoing scandal is incredibly fertile. There is no resolution in the offing for any of the eleven alleged victims. There is no project for reform. Reynolds should long ago have been sacked. It is inevitable or disastrous if not. Porter has now outflanked his disconnected PM and made the Coalition situation far worse politically, whatever the truth of his circumstances. This is a pustular, flesh-eating sore that will consume the Government as it violates half of the electorate and sickens the other half.
We could say that Morrison has been unlucky to have been caught up in a scandal so specifically designed to expose his shortcoming as a human being. But that’s not quite right. In the long run, dissociated personalities are self-sabotaging. They create the circumstances of their own demise by their abusive and divisive behaviour.
To put it bluntly, from the point of view of organisational psychology, when a toxic personality is exposed in any team environment, it needs to be eliminated quickly or the team will disintegrate.
Sadly for the Coalition, that person is its leader and electoral saviour so it can’t happen. Division and disaster follow.
