How Scott Morrison is trashing the Liberal brand

It's not going to happen of course, especially if the so-called incumbency rule, by which a popularly elected prime minister cannot be deposed other than by a two-thirds caucus vote, is treated as the formal requirement. There are party constitutionalists doubtful whether the parliamentary party can bind future meetings of the party, and who observe that a prime minister determined to carry on after losing a majority in caucus would be in an impossible position out in the electorate.

Be that as it may, there are no obvious challengers on the horizon, even if a significant number of members, possibly a majority, have little faith in the capacity of Morrison to pull off another election win, with or without the direct intervention of God. Their problem is the fear that any replacement, perhaps Peter Dutton or Josh Frydenberg, would be unlikely to be able to retrieve the party's position, and might well make it worse. Particularly if the deposed Morrison rump - bound to insist even after any sort of defeat - both that they had a winning strategy, and were robbed - were in full-scale revolt, leaking and undermining, and doing their best, in tried and true modern Liberal fashion, to fail to turn the other cheek.

It's not simply a matter of now being too late for anything in the nature of a revolt. The party, as much as Morrison himself, committed itself to the sorts of strategies it is now following, even if some now regret it. The personality and style of Morrison has infected the whole government - including most ministers. The sclerosis and the lack of flexibility on general positions is now built-in. Morrison and a number of other ministers are more than ruthless enough to be able to ditch whole areas of policy or practice, and without regard to anything they have said or done in the past about the folly of going by the new path. They have been trashing a perfectly serviceable brand for far too long to be able to simply deploy it again.

Scott Morrison, who pitched himself as a salesman, and who seems to be able to convince himself of anything, can't seem to sell a thing anymore. His retainers may have little choice but to nod wisely at whatever he says, but they are finding it increasingly difficult to display conviction, faith, or personal endorsement of what's on offer.

They retreat to their constituencies gloomy of the government's chances of galvanising the community, or half of it, around any campaign idea. It may be that Morrison has, with some policies, or recent policy shifts, neutralised some issues which might have actively gone against the government. Let's imagine, for example, that he has done this in vital constituencies with his efforts to establish freedom of religion in legislation - perhaps whether or not he can get the support of parliament and the measures put into law. But his proposals were in any event watered down, and if they received some endorsement from some religious lobbies, they created no great enthusiasm. They may well have mobilised some fresh enemies, particularly among those who - though not hostile to religion - simply do not understand what the threat to it was, where it was coming from, and how freedom of thought is likely to be enhanced by the proposed measures.

It has, after all, been the Liberal Party which has long counselled suspicion of entrenched rights, or of legislative efforts to put a hand on the scales when it has come time to balance different rights. It has, after all, been the party which has characterised Labor enthusiasm for the declaration, definition and weaponising of new rights and duties as proof of its addiction to coercion, controls, legislative solutions and intrinsic bossiness.

The skirmishes of the past few weeks are not the campaign proper, nor do they necessarily point at the issues around which the electorate will divide. Morrison is rehearsing a few approaches, and a few areas in which, he or his strategists believe, ground could be gained. But he is carefully watching the media, and the public response, and one can be sure that he will drop ideas that do not seem to take. A good example might be with his new-found fondness for electric cars, his initiatives to establish charging points, and his insistence that technological developments in only the past two years had completely transformed the economic equations about the use of the car and the truck. It didn't work. Partly because Morrison is incapable of taking a backward step, or of ever admitting that he was once wrong.

Instead, in the usual Morrison style he begins by denying that he ever said anything negative about electric vehicles at all, then, when confronted with clear records showing that he had, he attempts to redefine what he said, to change the emphasis, and to insist that circumstances had radically changed. A bigger man presiding over a U-turn - a John Howard perhaps - might say, "I used to think that. But I have had a closer look at it and changed my mind." And he might even win some professional admiration, either for his willingness to cut and run, or flexibility, or even ruthlessness once it was clear circumstances had changed. He often did, if never with the style or panache of Peter Beattie, then premier of Queensland.

Not Morrison. By now, as ever, he has convinced himself that there is no contradiction whatever with anything he has said before, and that anyone who suggests otherwise is calumniating, petty, nit-picking, and seeking to disguise her own moral infirmities. This capacity to examine his own conscience and to acquit himself of misleading conduct because he believed in all of his statements at the time he made them might, in his own mind, persuade him of the purity of his intentions. That does not stop its being a self-delusion, and its exposition a deceit. Here in this vale of tears, it would be called perjury in a court of law, at the very least for not being "the whole truth, and nothing but the truth;" as well as for being calculated to deceive.

Labor spent a good deal of the parliamentary week seeming to demonstrate that for Morrison, the lie is not the exception but the rule, a practice, presumably learnt from what he would call the Evil One, which is entirely ingrained in his character, particularly when in a campaigning mode with pretences both about where he is coming from and where his opponents are going. The examples Labor chose were well known ones - for example about the staff in Morrison's office lying and misleading about Morrison's whereabouts and presence in Hawaii during the 2019 bushfire crisis. If Morrison stumbled here - and he did, big time, simply because he has not "adjusted" his story to explain facts now generally known - one might have thought him on notice about the tactic, and re-briefing himself for the cases that the opposition was certain to bowl up. Perhaps he is so certain of, and so adamant about his own honesty that his staff were scared. Perhaps he had convinced himself, as he had with other parts of his explanations, that his explanations were credible, and had been accepted as such, at the time they had come to notice. In any event, his performance was cringeworthy. He tried to recover ground, or turn the tables, by purporting to see in the attack Labor's general absence of policies, and its determination to go the low route by tiny semantic quibbles. One only had to see the agony and embarrassment on the faces of his ministers and colleagues that he was doing himself further political self-harm.

Scott Morrison is by no means the only chronic liar in politics. He may not even be the worst. There are quite a number, and on the Labor side of politics as well. But what distinguishes his line of bullshit is the way his refusal to admit error, to look back, or to see matters as others see them, is that he insists on digging himself further in, even as he is doing himself further damage. Journalist Sean Kelly, in his book A portrait of Scott Morrison, does a masterly job of attempting to explain this from Morrison's point of view.

Twenty years ago, John Howard began to acquire a serious reputation for misleading the public, not least by the exposure of his prevarications in the children overboard affair. His capacity to do it was much enhanced by the immunity of his private office from any external accountability, and by the way Howard so organised his office and style of management that it was almost always impossible to prove that he knew of anything, or had been (orally) briefed. By 2004, opinion polls indicated that the general attack on his credibility - even his honesty - was working. Put bluntly, many people did not believe a word he was saying.

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It was thus quite a surprise when Howard announced the 2004 election that he declared that it was about "trust" - about whom the electorate trusted during the term ahead. Surely, some thought, this put his credibility, his honesty with the facts, and the record of his misleading the public right to the fore.

But while Labor continued to hammer Howard as an unreliable witness to anything, it did not seem to see the difference between "trust" and "truth-telling". The public had decided that it did not much believe anything Howard said. (They did not much trust most Labor spokespeople either). But they felt that they "knew" Howard. He was a "known quantity" - both in his virtues and his deficits. By contrast the Howard attack on Latham over "trust" was that Latham was an unknown quantity - even, on the basis of what was known, a somewhat broody, unsettled and erratic figure. People had no instinct for what he might do. They should not trust him to do the right thing.

The campaign worked, in the sense that Howard won the election with an increased majority.

With Scott Morrison this time, Labor is trying not to make the same mistake. They are using evidence of misleading conduct, followed by general slipperiness with the facts and the truth, not only as evidence that he is a chronic liar, but as evidence that he cannot be trusted. That his instincts - and, often, his motives - are wrong. Many of his lies are not so much about objective facts - facts independent of Morrison's existence - but about Morrison spin, explanation, or account of what has occurred. They go, in short, to his moral character, his personality, and a certain narcissistic desire to be at the centre of everything. When his lies unravel, he becomes agitated, not so much as a salesman ruefully recognising that his pitch did not work, but as someone forced to confront some blemish or imperfection.

Morrison's weaknesses are by now ingrained, but Labor will ignore, at its peril, his opportunism, his willingness to seize on some sudden Labor stumble - or lie of its own. So far, however, he is searching for a theme. He still has time, unless Labor overwhelms his defences. It is not doing so yet.

The opportunity for Labor comes from continued working on the trust angle. This is because Morrison's trust problem is a function of his studied refusal to have an agenda, a vision, a general strategy, or a comprehensive explanation of how things are happening and how events fit in with each other. It's a hole Labor can fill.

Morrison has described his political approach as transactional. But he only rarely relates his style of government to broad philosophies of government, unless by reference to simplistic slogans. By contrast, Howard was an explainer, with a generally coherent program. He was agile enough to drop policies which became unpopular; he was often frank about that. But he would immediately attempt to create a fresh narrative that incorporated his new itinerary, still, he would insist, going in the same direction.

Morrison's seeming incapacity to describe his favoured destination, his plans, or even his aims - other than in vague terms suggesting that all he wants is the restoration of things to the way they were, mean that persistence with many of his deceptions lacks any point. It bolsters his compulsive secrecy, general refusal to explain, or gives any account. It adds to the perception some have that he believes himself anointed rather than elected, responsible to his deity rather than voters at large. It also reinforces views that he is more about announcements than actual performance, and that his interventions in the body politic are generally late and in reaction to circumstances, rather than in taking charge of events.

Down the track, indeed, some will trace the Morrison malaise not to his general untrustworthiness but to his letting events take charge of him, rather than the other way around. Increasingly, the salesman has nothing much to sell but himself, and that, it is becoming evident, is nothing much at all.