Published: 16 May 2019
Last updated: 4 March 2024
Assuming the Nationals are prepared to form a coalition government with Morrison as Prime Minister, he would then become PM. The millions of Australian who voted in this election will not have voted for Morrison.
It has been a lie, the Morrison mantra that this election was all about a choice between him and Bill Shorten, about which of them Australians wanted to be prime minister, as if the winner would single-handedly rule and decide our future, as if he were a popularly elected American president.
Morrison repeated the lie over and over again for two reasons: the government he leads could not go to the people on its record given the political assassination of Malcolm Turnbull and because half the front bench is either retiring, mediocre or like Peter Dutton and Greg Hunt – not to mention Tony Abbott – so politically wounded that they are fighting to hang on to their seats.
Whenever Morrison was asked about the Liberals politically chopping off the heads of their past two first term prime ministers, he answered that he had made sure the rules were changed so the party room, even if they wanted to, couldn’t get rid of him that easily. It would take a two-thirds majority of Liberal MPs to vote for a spill motion. That would never happen. Problem fixed. No successful challenge to Morrison was possible, not even if more than half of the Liberal Party Caucus wanted to get rid of him.
Given that Labor, too, at Kevin Rudd’s instigation, had changed the way the Party elected its leader after the Gillard-Rudd years, so that even if a majority of the Labor Caucus wanted to change leaders it couldn’t happen without the substantial support of Labor Party members, the days and months and years of madness were over, Morrison said.
There was no need for either the Liberal Party or the Labor Party to examine just why they had put Australia through a decade of revolving door prime ministers. Problem fixed.
As a result of the changes, Morrison argued, this election has really been an election for prime minister, a contest simply between him and Shorten. “Who do you want,” was his most repeated mantra, “Scott Morrison or Bill Shorten?”
This is nonsense. If it has been successful, Morrison has managed to obscure the fact that in policy terms, in ideological terms, Australians have a real choice. This is basically because for the first time in a couple of decades, an opposition has laid out, over a period of years, a detailed program of reform were it to win government.
As a consequence, this is an election about what sort of government Australians want, with what sort of vision and what policies that might best meet the challenges of the present and the future. It is not a popularity contest between Morrison and Shorten. This is not a US presidential style election. We do not elect our prime minister.
Indeed, the changes made by both the Liberal Party and the Labor Party that made it harder to change leaders and therefore change prime ministers do not, in reality, fix the problem of revolving door prime ministers. What’s more, they are not compatible with the workings of a representative democracy.
The changes make it possible for a prime minister of either the Liberal Party or the Labor Party to continue in the role despite the fact that a majority of his or her parliamentary colleagues want to get rid of the prime minister. How would that work? How would that not inevitably lead to – at best – instability and mediocre government?
We need to look no further than the UK to see what happens when in a representative democracy a parliamentary party is virtually powerless to change its leader.
Twice, Jeremy Corbyn has been comfortably elected Leader of the Labour Party despite the fact that he has never had anywhere near majority support in the parliamentary party. In a 2015 leadership challenge, less than a third of MPs supported him and yet he was elected in a landslide – a landslide of Labour Party members and trade unionists who paid their union dues and were therefore able to vote in the poll for the parliamentary leader of the Party.
How has that worked out? The extreme Left of the Labour Party has run very successful membership drives, signing up tens of thousands of new members, which has given it virtual control of the parliamentary party. Corbyn, despised by many of his parliamentary colleagues and supported by a minority, is unassailable.
Those who despise him, those who would vote against him, nevertheless, have to work with him, accept him as their leader.
The changes that Rudd made to the way Labor leaders are elected and the changes that Morrison pushed through after he took over after the defeat in the party room of Turnbull will not solve whatever were the underlying issues that created the political instability of the past decade. They might actually make things worse.
And Morrison’s attempt to make this election a popularity contest between him and Shorten deserves to fail. Australians elect governments, not prime ministers. Tony Abbott was not exactly the most popular politician in the world when he led the Liberal Party to what was an almost landslide victory in 2013. Shorten according to the polls, is less popular than Morrison, who is not exactly Mr. Popularity.
Neither of them would win a US presidential election with their approval ratings. Luckily for them, the poll is not about which of them Australians like more.
Photo credit: AAP/Lukas Coch
