Paul D. Williams

Flash back to that election night in May 2019, when Australians, depending on their party affiliation, were either overjoyed or appalled at the Coalition’s return despite the opinion polls. That evening, Scott Morrison – a man little known to Australians until assuming the prime ministership just nine months before after an ugly leadership coup – summed up Coalition sentiment and his own Christian faith: ‘I have always believed in miracles,’ Morrison said, before asking, rhetorically, ‘How good is Australia?’

Wayne Errington and Peter van Onselen pose that same question, literally: how good is the man many believe to be the most image-driven prime minister in Australian history? Just what will be Morrison’s legacy? Their answer, threaded with jaw-dropping ‘insider’ detail across fourteen chapters, is an often harsh, even scathing, account of Morrison as a leader obsessed with style rather than substance, activity rather than achievement. We see evidence of ‘ScoMo’ as a manufactured entity produced from a cynical marketing recipe. Open a packet of ‘faux-masculine’ blokeyness, add a generous helping of ‘daggy dad’, mix in some family references, and top it off with curry cooking, pool playing, and beer drinking. Best served in rolled-up sleeves in regional Queensland.

The real Scott Morrison is far from the knockabout ‘ScoMo’ regional and blue-collar Australia came to love in 2019. Yet how does one sell a wealthy marketing executive who practises a religion shared by one per cent of Australians and lives in a wealthy Sydney suburb? It’s not easy. That’s why, the authors argue, Morrison remains ‘Scotty from marketing’, a man who has dedicated his professional and political life to image-making.

Critically, that argument does not subtract from Morrison’s admirable ambition and work ethic, which saw him climb the greasy Canberra pole in just eleven years (he was elected to parliament in 2007). Nor does it ignore the political antennae – often on point, too often not – that allow him to seduce a cynical electorate with an ‘ordinary Australian’ persona while wedging a hapless Labor opposition.

Book-length accounts of current political events and actors are now the norm. As a genre of long-form journalism, such ‘insider’ accounts are essential so that ‘outsider’ audiences, often lost in the fog of political ‘spin’, can make sense of their politics. But strictly journalistic accounts, without the buttress of theoretical context, suffer short shelf lives. Errington and van Onselen, authors of a number of books on Australian politics and leaders, have avoided this pitfall by offering up not just a forensic account of Morrison’s operational leadership as prime minister but, importantly, a remarkably accessible study of leadership, together with a useful discussion of an evolving Australian federalism reinvented by the forces of Covid-19. Who would have thought the states could exercise Commonwealth quarantine powers so effectively? The result is a first-rate book, written in breezy prose punctuated with the odd profanity, that unpacks Morrison’s place in Australian politics.

The authors’ key theme is that Morrison has scored too few prime ministerial runs when it mattered. Obsessed with the short-term superficialities of politics, Morrison risks becoming another Malcolm Fraser: a Liberal prime minister endowed with a mandate who sat on his hands and achieved little. It’s a difficult proposition to refute: ask anyone what Morrison has achieved in his three years as prime minister and she is likely to mention only winning an unwinnable election and managing the pandemic.

To be sure, capping Australia’s Covid infections at below 0.02 per cent of the global total was a remarkable feat, even if state premiers must share the credit. But prime ministers are only as good as their last election, and voters’ appreciation of crisis management evaporates quickly. Look no further than the 2010 federal election: little gratitude was extended to Labor despite Kevin Rudd’s generous stimulus packages – pilloried by the Liberals at the time – which saved Australia from recession during the Global Financial Crisis. As slow vaccination rollouts, long-term unemployment, and record debt and deficits hit home, the fact Australia did not become another United States or India will hardly be enough.

That’s why a key strength of this book is the attendant discussion of leadership theory. ‘Leadership matters,’ the authors argue – even in big-ticket policy elections like the GST in 1998 or Labor’s tax reforms in 2019. ‘You vote for me and you get me,’ Morrison crowed during the 2019 campaign. ‘You vote for Bill Shorten and you get Bill Shorten.’ Yes, leadership matters very much.

If success pivots on leadership, it might be tempting to cut Morrison some slack: the man was new to the job when the 2019 bushfires erupted, and those flames were barely extinguished by the time Covid reached Australia. But Errington and van Onselen argue that Morrison must assume at least some responsibility for the public-relations quagmire in which he so often finds himself.

One failing is obvious: Morrison’s transactional style, PR-dependent even by modern standards, is insufficient for great leadership. Of course, all political leaders engage in the politics of transaction – pandering for votes, negotiating with stakeholders, trading party preferences – but Morrison to date has given no hint of the transformational leadership characteristic of impressive leaders. There has been no inkling of a long-term vision for Australia, only short-term budget sweeteners to court enough voters to win the next election. Even the establishment of the National Cabinet – the one genuinely meaningful federalist reform likely to outlive the Morrison government – was ultimately transactional. Locked into the cabinet convention of confidentiality and public unity, state premiers are honour-bound not to undermine the prime minister. It’s clever politics but hardly nation-building.

‘I don’t hold a hose, mate’

The luck and swagger of Scott Morrison

Paul D. Williams

How Good Is Scott Morrison?

by Wayne Errington and Peter van Onselen

Hachette $34.99 pb, 329 pp