Morrison’s most fatal flaw on show in flood response

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Opinion

Morrison’s most fatal flaw on show in flood response

“I think it is just an obvious fact,” declared the Prime Minister this week as he toured flood-ravaged Lismore, that “Australia is getting hard to live in because of these disasters”.

What a frankly astonishing admission that is. How unvarnished. It isn’t relative or euphemistic. It isn’t “Australia is being affected by climate change”, or “we’re facing more natural disasters”. It’s absolute. “Getting hard to live in” has a ring of resignation about it. It’s like given the choice, humans would really rather live somewhere else.

“Australia is getting hard to live in because of these disasters,” Scott Morrison said earlier this week.

“Australia is getting hard to live in because of these disasters,” Scott Morrison said earlier this week.Credit:Illustration by Simon Letch

I know Scott Morrison didn’t mean it like that. Indeed, he prefaced it with the familiar kind of statement that makes it seem like a long-acknowledged matter of consensus: “I’ve said as much in the past…” and so on.

But the attempt to play this down is also instructive. It glosses over the decades we’ve wasted in this country disputing the reality of climate change. Here, Morrison is speaking an important truth. It’s just that it has come a decade late, and only once political realities had nudged the Coalition sufficiently that it felt compelled to adopt a net zero target.

That, I think, captures the most confounding quirk of the Morrison government. It’s not, as its most trenchant critics charge, that it is almost always wrong. It’s that it is often right, but only after refusing to be for so long, and for no apparent reason. And nothing quite exposes that trait like the two years of rolling emergency we’re going through.

Back in our COVID-zero days, when it became clear that hotel quarantine was regularly leaking, the Morrison government dismissed the idea of building specialised quarantine facilities. Eventually, those quarantine leaks put cities into repeated lockdowns, and two things happened.

First, state governments requested federal money – some version of JobKeeper, perhaps – to assist their locked-down citizens. The Morrison government flatly refused, then finally relented and came up with various payment schemes.

Secondly, it relented on building new quarantine facilities. Now, one is finally built in Victoria, just as we’ve stopped using quarantine altogether. In both cases, the Morrison government raged in pursuit of lost causes, and contrived to get no political credit for what it finally did. I still can’t quite figure out why.

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Or take the vaccine rollout. The Morrison government forecast that every Australian would have had the chance to get two COVID vaccine jabs by October. And ultimately, that’s very close to what happened. But almost no one registers this fact because of the way we got there.

A home is inundated by floodwaters along the Hawkesbury River.

A home is inundated by floodwaters along the Hawkesbury River.Credit:Dean Sewell

First came the supply delays from Europe that meant the government was always going to miss its early milestones. Instead of accepting this unavoidable fact and communicating it to a public that may have understood, it pretended otherwise, sticking to targets it could never meet before inevitably capitulating and abandoning targets altogether.

It then busily procured vaccine doses from around the world, belatedly solving its supply issue, but again in a way that earned no real kudos because it looked like only public criticism had shocked it to life.

Now, Morrison’s big announcement is to declare the current floods in NSW and Queensland a national emergency, but to do it some nine days into the catastrophe. In Morrison’s own words, this “effectively remove[s] some red tape” to allow Commonwealth agencies to assist more easily. It therefore seems the right thing to do, but again raises the question of why it took so long.

Morrison’s explanation is that he can only do this in consultation with the relevant state premiers, who would then write to him requesting the declaration, and that they hadn’t done so. Perhaps the premiers really didn’t think it would help. Or perhaps they’ve simply not been as active as they could have been.

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But it also seems likely the federal government could have initiated that consultation in earnest sooner than it did, and made that plain to whole country. To say now that the hold-up is effectively paperwork between different levels of government when the whole point of the declaration is to remove red tape seems bleakly ironic.

It really matters in this case because we’re hearing just so many similar stories of government absence; of people receiving insufficient warning of the floods’ imminence, ending up stranded on roofs for hours or isolated for days, and seeing no evidence of the ADF they’d been told had been deployed.

The hero of these stories is almost always the community, not any level of government. It’s volunteers in their own boats rescuing screaming strangers, sometimes in defiance of official advice. We’re seeing leaders like Dominic Perrottet and Scott Morrison strike such contrite, apologetic tones this week because they know they face a uniquely grave charge: having abandoned their people in a time of need.

That would be a problem for any government in any country. But it’s especially so in Australia because government has always been at the heart of Australian settlement. We are not the United Kingdom where “little platoons” of community association precede government. We are not the United States, which is founded on the idea that government is something to be escaped.

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No, our governors arrived with the First Fleet. Government created our settler nation, not the other way around. Our cities didn’t evolve our governments; our governments built our cities. That’s why we are comfortable with government intervention in a way Americans could never be. The Australian assumption is that when something’s important, government will be there to do what’s necessary. And what could be more important than a natural disaster?

In a country like that, and in a moment like this, the things a government cannot be is sluggish or absent. That’s especially true where people see the ghost of a pattern; where the inevitable is often ignored until finally, it overwhelms. I suspect that impression, rather than any single issue, is Morrison’s greatest political danger. And as the examples pile up for him, Morrison might find it’s getting hard to live in the environment Australian politics provides.

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