Maeve McGregor of Crikey wrote a searing piece on Friday.
As the country tries to un-Morrison itself, Morrison tries to Morrison the world
In the last week or so, Scott Morrison has delivered a concentrated dose of contrived polarisation, outrage, hypocrisy and self-serving warmongering that surpasses his usual penchant for small-t Trumpian excess.
Addressing the Oxford Union thousands of miles away from his electorate, Australia’s first post-truth prime minister declared the easterly winds of autocracy were blowing while much of the Western world remained dangerously fixated on “self-loathing and Western guilt”.
“We are surrendering our optimism,” he told those gathered, “frightening our children and forfeiting confidence in our Western model of freedom, representative democracy and a market-based entrepreneurial economy to overcome the many challenges we face, including climate change.”
Nowhere in the deep trenches of this epistemic fog was the right’s forever culture war expressly mentioned. But scratch away at the convoluted prose in its pitch for Aristotelian profundity, and the implicit object of Morrison’s ire in this instance — the Voice to Parliament — was surely plain.
To sheet home the point, Morrison appeared to take inspiration from Trump’s infamous 1776 Report, noting, by reference to slavery and its abolition, that it would be a modern conceit to judge the wrongs of history by the moral standards of today.
“Let us also be careful how we judge those now in their graves”, he intoned, casting the systemic and intergenerational racism wrought by colonisation in Australia as a leftist fiction removed from reality.
But as it happens, neither Indigenous peoples in Australia nor their concerns about entrenched disadvantage and the blood-stained prisons of today were the true focal point of his speech. On the contrary, they were merely the frail reed upon which Morrison executed his larger argument, which was that not only should the West instead celebrate its defining attributes of liberalism and democracy, it ought to go to war for them. And soon.
You can imagine how the piece rolls on. It is high-dudgeon at its finest, tearing ScoMo limb from limb.
What a shame it is diametrically wrong.
Australia is not de-Morrisonising. Nor is the world. Both are going his way and fast.
And thank god for it.
I doubt our Maeve is smart enough to read MB, but those who do know well that we led the charge to get Morrison sacked.
In the twelve years of this blog throwing poop at pollies, no MP was buried deeper than “Psycho” Morrison.
However, one should never confuse sentiment with truth, as so many culture warriors do these days.
As such, Scott Morrison will be remembered as a great Australian PM, and in the very terms that he outlined in his speech.
As a global champion of liberalism, ScoMo may even be recalled by history as the greatest Australian of all.
How can this be for a guy governed by totalitarian evangelicalism, responsible for autocratic politics such as burying deviant sexual behaviour in parliament, abandoning the nation during natural disasters, and secretly seizing power in multiple portfolios?
It is simple. History will not regard these features of his rule as important. But one thing that he did will be.
ScoMo ripped the mask off the Communist Party of China and illustrated for all to see what an infantile, power-thirsty force of evil it is.
It is funny, and probably, maddening, for the likes of Ms MacGregor to realise that he did not even do it on purpose.
ScoMo had shown plenty of willingness to grovel to Beijing early in his tenure.
He was very slow to fund Malcolm Turnbull’s Dastayari Affair foreign influence pushback plan. He was very happy to decry as racist anybody that challenged Gladys Liu, the Beijing stooge MP in his ranks. He was entirely happy to see Australia sold down the Chinese river with a “gas-led recovery”.
But, ScoMo was made for a different moment, a turn of events that put him in a cage fight with Xi Jinping himself. When global anger at China was spilling over COVID-19. Not that he intended that, either.
ScoMo is a kind of political borderline personality disorder. His genius is gaslighting. When the moment came, he provoked Beijing by demanding independent virus inspectors be allowed to determine the virus’s origins.
The rest is history.
Beijing declared rhetorical and economic war on Australia, producing the 14 conditions to end democracy, the greatest soft power blunder since “peace in our time”.
Goaded by “Psycho” Morrison, CCP China was flushed from cover, and its real hegemonic intentions were made crystal clear.
By the time Beijing realised its error, the document so perfectly encapsulated Xi Jinping’s bellicose China that it had gone global, and ScoMo was invited to the G7 to present it personally as some kind of reverse Magna Carta.
It was the pebble that began a landslide of post-COVID action against China that today includes AUKUS, the Quad, the US chip war, and Chinese economic decoupling.
Of course, ScoMo is not responsible for these. But he was the tipping point at which liberal leaders discerned what China was really up to and heretofore condemned it.
This is a far greater service to liberal democracy than any local culture war can ever hope to challenge.
