8 LISTENER JUNE 1 2019
BULLETIN FROM ABROAD
A
s Australia’s tourism tsar 13
years ago, Scott Morrison
oversaw the rollicking “So
where the bloody hell are
you?’’ ad campaign in which a lightly
clad woman beckoned foreigners to
the wide, brown land.
Had the Labor Party strategists
asked that question of the former
marketing man – returned as Aus-
tralia’s prime minister – ahead of
last week’s election, they might have
learnt he was everywhere. And much
closer than they thought.
Morrison wasn’t supposed to win,
at least not according to opinion polls
that tracked his fractured, crotch-
ety and tired centre-right
coalition as trailing Labor
into and during the five-week
campaign.
Instead, Morrison, the
51-year-old master reinven-
tor, switched to Energizer
Bunny mode and launched a
lean, solo, presidential-style
campaign that criss-crossed
his country’s 4000km width,
defying the gravity of Labor’s
25,000 volunteers and its
younger, sharper front bench,
unified by six disciplined
years in opposition.
He was a one-man frenzy
who convinced enough
voters in the right seats that if
Labor’s Bill Shorten was shifty,
then so were his party and
policies. Morrison, threadbareGreat Scott!
New Zealander Bernard Lagan is
the Australian correspondent for
the Times, London.on his own policies – save for tax cuts – ensured
voter attention was on Shorten’s elaborate and risky
manifesto that sought to redistribute wealth.
At its core, Labor’s policy was designed to move
money from the rich to the poorer; the well-off,
including the comfortably retired, would pay more
tax.
The proceeds would then be used to hike Gov-
ernment spending on education, health, childcare,
combating climate change and more – the things
voters for years have said they want.
Labor’s spending plans were ambitious: there was
an extra A$22 billion for nationwide infrastructure,
A$16 billion for climate change and renewable
energy and A$8 billion for health. It all added up
to at least A$60 billion. To fund it, Labor planned
to curb tax breaks for shareholders and property
investors and for superannuation. It would tax pro-
liferating family trusts and hit high-income earners
by taxing them more.
It amounted to the redistribution of money from
the wealthier to Australia’s low- and middle-income
earners on a scale not seen in the lifetime of most
voters.
And, of course, it created legions of losers – quiteBERNARD
LAGAN
IN SYDNEY
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No Australian
political leader
will any timesoon go to the
people with a
detailed plan.of few them loaded. Morrison simply
had to storm the country with one
killer line: “Labor can’t manage
money, so they’ll come after yours.”
Many believed him. Worse for
Shorten, in working-class regions- especially across Queensland and
New South Wales coal country – the
Labor vote leached away amid per-
ceptions that green left city folk had
captured the party’s climate-change
policy and turned the party against
coal miners and blue-collar workers.
S
ince his teens in Melbourne, the
52-year-old earnest former union
lawyer has been burning to be
a Labor prime minister. He is more
reticent, less revealing, than ebul-
lient reinventor Morrison. Shorten
is an avowed republican who chose
a governor-general’s daughter as his
vivacious second wife. The back-
room operator also had large roles in
removing two Labor prime ministers.
It seems that in Shorten,
voters were unsure the man
they were seeing was the one
they would get.
That could not be said of
his policies. They were writ
large, long and loud. But their
rejection – for reasons right or
wrong – must mean no Aus-
tralian political leader will any
time soon go to the people
with a detailed plan. That is
too easy a target for a canny
opponent with no real plan of
his or her own.
That’s a loss for democ-
racy. Now Labor needs a new
leader. Or a casting director. lHow a “doomed”
PM stormed the
country with one
killer line.