For want of a plan, Morrison lurches from 'Oh, Macron' to Omicron

Unlike in several comparable democracies, federal parliamentary terms in Australia are not fixed, meaning that once due, elections are specifically timed to optimise the electoral conditions for whoever's in power.

Amid Australia's summer of discontent, Scott Morrison must be glad he holds this prerogative, because an enforced date with voters anytime soon would be unpleasant after his past few months.

The term "train wreck" springs to mind.

Presumably, his plan heading into summer had been to neutralise nagging problems and maximise the public dividend of a smooth post-pandemic recovery.

Step one would have been the eleventh-hour "triumph" of dragging his party room into the light by pledging to reach net-zero carbon emissions, albeit three decades from now.

This shift was vastly overblown by tame media, given that this putative revolution in Coalition positioning entailed no new money, no facilitating legislation, and no additional short-term sacrifice.

We were already going there, the government skited, making a mockery of its raucous years of principled resistance. It's not about the when, it's about the how, Morrison was wont to moralise when dismissing targets as bad policy.

Now the target is all we have.

Such shallowness not only made a joke of media who had paraded his strong leadership, it cast voters as dupes who could be relied upon to forgive a tawdry decade-long negation even when it turned out to be about pure politics.

In any event, it was fast overshadowed by his brazen deceit of the French, just as he travelled to COP26 in Scotland, stopping in Rome first for a G20 meeting.

Once in the eternal city, French President Emmanuel Macron declared emphatically that he had been wilfully deceived by the self-styled straight-shooting Australian PM.

"I don't think, I know," the French centrist snapped when asked if he thought he'd been lied to about the $90 billion contract to both supply French submarines and share France's top-secret naval technology.

The incident crystallised a miasma of constructive deceit around the Australian PM since his miracle win in 2019 on the tissue-thin mandate of not being Bill Shorten.

Step two would have been to use the final two parliamentary sitting weeks concluding on December 2 last year, to trumpet the government's visionary management, once the public opprobrium over the bungled vaccine supply had begun dying down.

Instead the session turned into another directionless melee, with government MPs - some mad and others just fed up - crossing the floor, and ministers resigning.

It was during this chaotic fortnight that the first Omicron case showed up in NSW - not that this dented the fervour for economy-wide glasnost in Liberal-land.

Nor, apparently, did the stories the rest of us had been reading for weeks about the greater transmissibility of the Omicron strain in South Africa and global fears of a deadly new wave.

Unperturbed, the Morrison government worked enthusiastically with the newly installed Perrottet operation, leading a laissez-faire, storm-has-passed duet aimed at maximising business confidence and hastening the economic recovery.

Prime conditions, they judged, for a post-holiday federal election - ideally without the need, or risk, of another pre-election parliamentary sitting.

We must learn to live with the virus, to push through and get on with it, Morrison would tell voters, the talking points tumbling from the his mouth as quickly as the focus group sessions could vet them.

Thursday's jobs figures date back to this very period, underpinning why this thinking carried such attraction for a government that could claim no significant reform legacy and which knew it had bungled earlier stages of the pandemic.

"Jobless rate hits 13-year low" splashed a national broadsheet on Friday, noting that unemployment had not been down to 4.2 per cent since just before the 2008 global financial crisis hit.

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In other words, not since the last big shock forced a major stimulus spend, in response to which the Coalition - then in opposition - cynically made as much political hay as possible.

Yet even before the December jobs figures had dropped, it was obvious to all that the economy in December had been like the town in the eye of a cyclone - apparently safe and surprisingly intact, save for what was coming.

On Friday, the day after the jobless rate was posted, NSW posted a fatality number of 46 in one 24-hour period.

A new high, that horrendous death toll is testament to the Coalition's triumph of optimism over planning since well before NSW reported its first recorded Omicron death on Boxing Day.

Meanwhile, WA's widely pilloried Premier, Mark McGowan, has delayed indefinitely his state's planned February 5 border reopening day.

Desperate for WA votes, federal ministers were noticeably muted on Friday morning, acknowledging McGowan's success in protecting his largely COVID-free population. But they couldn't resist a dig, asking "if not now, when?"

Surely the timing of WA's reopening deserves a deeper consideration of risk factors than the glib binary such a morally vacant question offers?

It suggests that even as the Omicron wave washes their early election hopes from view, senior ministers struggle to conceptualise COVID-19 in primarily public health terms, wanting instead to apply an economic and ideological test to policy.

If it has done nothing else - and sadly, it has - the Omicron variant has reminded us of what we knew in the first months of 2020 - that there is no economy nor predictability without addressing the health challenge first. Not economically, nor politically.

A looming election won't change.

Macron was too polite to punch Morrison in the mouth. Omicron hasn't hesitated.