Our national interest is in a robust press

Change the prime minister and you change the country, Paul Keating used to say.

But the sharpest changes show up first not in the country but in the party, where preferment follows sycophancy like a bad smell.

Of course in some countries, country and party are construed as the same thing.

Happily Australia's not there yet, largely because we have a free, robust, and mostly independent press - a foundational element of liberal democracy.

But Simon Birmingham's attempt on Friday morning to blame journalists for Scott Morrison's awful week would ring alarm bells on this score - if it wasn't so risible.

Birmingham, who leads the government in the Senate, should have known better than to succumb to the cheap allures of conflating the national interest with his leader's political fortunes.

The mild-mannered South Australian suggested that journalists travelling with the PM to the G20 in Rome and COP26 in Glasgow had somehow corralled French President Emmanuel Macron into his famously withering critique of Morrison's integrity, and that their questioning was somehow anti-Australian.

While it all seemed decidedly un-Birmo-like, it was peak Morrison.

Macron had said "I don't think, I know," when asked if he'd been lied to by the Australian PM.

Skewered, the beleaguered Morrison operation dumped protocol, revealing private SMS messages from Macron which purported to show Morrison had not lied.

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Asked on ABC radio if breaching leader-to-leader confidences was acceptable behaviour, Birmingham said "People could ask questions as to whether it was wise for journalists to pressure the French President." Pressure?

Shortly after that he told Sky News "Each journalist can question themselves whether all they pursue is in the national interest or otherwise."

Really? Where are we now, China?

Voters will forget these details soon enough, and Morrison's unshakeable boosters in the not-so-independent press will go on depicting the French reaction as theatre.

Strategically, Labor doesn't quibble with the AUKUS nuclear subs move, nor even with Morrison's refusal to sign up to phasing out coal and cutting methane.

Yet somehow, from this supine position, it keeps having wins anyway.

That's because Morrison insists on bringing attention back to his own "truthiness" - his reflexive blame-shifting and dissembling.

Just months out from an election, voters won't need too many more anti-Morrison booster shots to realise a bigger change is required.