Bulldozing
When you have been bulldozing for so long, it is hard to imagine building anything, that’s usually someone else’s job.
So, all of a sudden, as the election campaign draws to a close, our Prime Minister swings the bulldozer around and honks the horn at a beleaguered public — he says he will change if we re-elect him.
At the tail end of this brutal election campaign, after weeks of telling us we knew who he was, in light of all the cosplay, the reactive about-faces, the transphobic ‘captains pick’, the scare campaigns, the digs at the reinvention of the opposition leaders look, and the irresponsible rhetoric around national security; “I’m a bit of a bulldozer”, he said. “I know there are things that are going to have to change with the way I do things”, he said.
Shortly into his job, the man who chose not to hold the hose, made a call, and was drinking cocktails in Hawaii, watching the sun setting in a hazy western Pacific Sky. After a period of consideration, he chose to pack up his flip-flops and came home over the same burning eastern seaboard he flew over on the way out. Fast forward a couple of years, and the butterfly effect of his heavy handed personality has imposed itself like a whirlwind upon our national psyche.
The bushfires were followed up with the pandemic and the quartering of our Federation over contrarian National Cabinet meetings. Morrison’s penchant for heavy earthmoving fed into political leveraging over a medical issue that was tearing through the country. Once again, Morrison abrogated his responsibility as the leader of the country, choosing to play state against state, causing psychological duress to the millions in lockdown.
Vaccine procurement, billions in jobkeeper payouts to the big end of town, the staggering amounts of government expenditure, private contracts left right and centre like Aspen Medical, Insta couples-cum-medical-procurement-magnates getting multi-million dollar government contracts for RATs, Julie Bishop's partner, car-parks falling out the back pocket, sporting grants and the general shit-blizzard, incredible to behold in all its surface area. Throughout all of this, for most of the rest of us, you have the bulldozer, grinning into the impact, collecting all the nice old furniture in the halls of our nation’s capital, before scraping the topsoil out of the country’s solidarity as he careens over the grass.
In the parliament, this man has broken with conventional protocol and general manners with ritual glee, at times making Tony Abbott, an actual hose holder, a leader of fury and persistent ugliness, seem like Franklin Delano Roosevelt in comparison. Add to this, the lack of value to the Australian public when “the member will no longer be heard” rings out more than an answer at question time, where “Manchurian Candidate” is now barked across the chamber, cracking the integral shell of bipartisanship on fundamental issues of national security. Scott Morrison’s leadership style has trickled down into the Parliament of Australia for short term political gain. All for the sake of being nasty.
The Morrison-men demo-job has also taken place between the isles and pews inside the broad church, causing irreparable structural damage to the LNP. His method has been said to be “bullying” by party faithful like Concetta Fierravanti-Wells, some going even further to describe it as “ruthless”. His gold standard Premier called him “horrible”, his Deputy PM made him out to be a “liar”, and former Liberal leader John Hewson says he is “seen as toxic by many of his colleagues, who do not want him to campaign for them”.
Some of these colleagues, a couple of them aspiring opposition leaders, have seen their reputations tarnished and their political futures put in doubt. Some moderates have even been abandoned in the rubble of juxtaposing beliefs that are strewn throughout heartland blue ribbon seats once held by people like Robert Menzies. All have been impacted by the indelible mark of this one-of-a-kind PM.
Outside the parliament, “the campaigner”, as he is affectionally known by our press, has the media working to accommodate his personality and his incompetent government via a self-perpetuating mythos of LNP economic prowess, providing substantial cover for lukewarm, counterintuitive and vapid policies toward key national imperatives. It is in this environment that the bulldozer has cleared the most old growth, confidently running through the soft and malleable press entity, all with the knowledge that their bosses are trying to get him over the line once again, in one of the most skewed home ground media advantages in the developed world.
Many of us have had way too much news over the last few years, some of us are doing it tough being pushed around by a bulldozer. We are distressed by the way it is accepted and celebrated as a virtue by those in big business and corporate media, how it is engineered to benefit a class of wealthy small-minded big interests, and eagerly fed to us from all angles by a synchronised 24 hour press cycle.
Over the last few years, this sensory bombardment has taken its toll on all of us. We express it in forms of mild depression, or in some instances, broader social unrest. A bulldozer usually has one job — to bulldoze. It is built for one purpose, and to carry out a similar range of work, and turning into an e-bike all of a sudden is as unlikely as it is preposterous. Wherever we fall on the political spectrum, we know who our PM is as a leader and as a person, and if he really wants to change, he can do so as a private citizen, and not as the leader of an OECD nation state.
The PM has inflicted some kind of direct or indirect earthworks on every sub group in this society: pensioners, aged care, vets, first home buyers, the uni sector, small owner/operator businesses who missed out on JobKeeper, the nation’s disadvantaged, the people left homeless by a series of environmental catastrophes, the indigenous population for whom the gap has not been closed, the thousands of vulnerable women in situations of isolation and domestic terror, and the youth who have seen a government take the piss out of climate change and a dump on their future.
Now the Prime Minister says he can change, and with all the stubborn momentum, he spins the ‘dozer around on a tiny turning circle, but it's too late. When you have been bulldozing for so long, it is hard to imagine building anything, that’s usually someone else’s job. His comments on the eleventh hour of election day are themselves an act of bulldozing, clearing all the rubble he has piled up over three years, but only shifting the same material to another place, for he has not changed on climate, on ICAC, on Deves, or an indigenous voice to parliament, or anything else for that matter. He really hasn’t been listening, at least to us, anyway.
Changing from union to league, from advertising to politics, from church to church is different to changing from a shit bloke to a nice guy. It’s not impossible, the Road to Damascus is available to us all, but it takes time, and in the case of our national leader, we can’t wait for that. He has expected so much of us and delivered so little as a consequence of his instinctive selfishness, bulldozing through our collective anguish to place himself on the hill while the floodwaters rise in the low lying areas of our changing environment.
Brilliant and insightful analysis. Great work.
Change also involves a degree of huimility, a quality Morrison simply does not possess.