Scomo an absent father figure

It angers common people (and at first angered this uncommon columnist) that Scott Morrison should have so many tickets on himself as to believe he is so vital to the nation's state of emotional composure.

The rubbed-up people have been fuming at him and no doubt some of them who know their Shakespeare have been fuming at him for being a "Pribbling, beetle-headed, beef-witted, clay-brained flap-dragon!"

"It's not at all that you made us anxious," these sorts of Australians have been seething. "It's that you made us angry by being such an insensitive, clodhopping, crook-pated, sheep-biting, folly-fallen canker-blossom as to take a vacation on an idyllic magical island (eerily like the magical island depicted in our favourite Shakespeare play The Tempest) while the nation that employs you to lead it is so embattled! Wake up to thyself, thou plume-plucked mumble-news!"

But my diagnosis is that the people, though their scholarly familiarity with Shakespeare's insults and plays does them credit, are not good at examining their true feelings and have got this wrong. My diagnosis is that the prime minister was right, in his clapper-clawed way, and that it was anxiety over his holidaying desertion of us that has played a part in knotting the nation's psychological knickers.

I say this because as a student of the symptoms of TAD (Trump Anxiety Disorder), I have come to understand some of the hitherto poorly understood expectations we the people have of our leaders.

Elisabeth LaMotte, a therapist and founder of the DC Counselling and Therapy Centre in Washington, has told Newsweek that TAD sufferers exhibit behaviour similar to patients who have a parent with a personality disorder.

"Whether it's conscious or not, I think we look to the president of the United States as a psychological parent," LaMotte is sure.

Trump, erratic, angry, unpredictable and vile (when what we look for in a parent is stability, calmness and goodness, a life navigated using a flawlessly reliable moral compass) is the zombie parent from hell.

Scott Morrison is not quite in Trump's class of human awfulness but to the extent LaMotte is correct in believing that we look for idealised parentalism in our nation's leaders our prime minister's recent desertion of us felt (subconsciously) unnervingly like a parent's desertion of us.

A few more Shakespeareanisms in this paragraph as I conclude that this, Morrison's disappointingly poor ''parenting'' of us, is the real reason why his milk-livered, toad-spotted decision to flit away to Hawaii has caused the nation such extreme and otherwise inexplicable angst. It made the worried nation's heart knock at its ribs just as anxious Macbeth's heart does in Shakespeare's Scottish play. Our fathers are supposed to protect us in times of danger but our nation's psychological father deserted us during the fires instead of standing with us. Australians, will we ever forgive Morrison for being such a moldwarp?

The leaders-as-our-parents thesis explains so much, including of course the nation's rejection of Bill Shorten. He always seemed so insecure and needy, and as our prime minister he would have been a high-maintenance dependent we the people would have had to emotionally support when what we want in a leader is a pillar of strength who, dad-like, will understand and meet OUR needs.

It is an intellectual challenge to fit the leaders-as-our-parents thesis to today's Finland where the five political parties that are represented in Finland's current coalition government are all headed by women, four of them daughterly young women under 35, with the newly appointed prime minister Sanna Marin just 34 years old.

How one would love to have someone like the dashing, left-leaning Ms Marin, a Social Democrat brought up in a same-sex "rainbow family", for our prime minister. And yet, is it conceivable that seasoned Australians (I am a wizened 74) could find someone young enough to be their daughter a sufficiently reassuringly parental leader?

Meanwhile, of course, the most parental prime minister imaginable is enviable New Zealand's Jacinda Ardern.

Capable, compassionate, sensible, stable, steely when needed, with a superabundance of sisu, she is the sterling parent we are all (subconsciously) hankering for when (deluding ourselves) we imagine we are only voting for a political leader.