Like Jack Lemmon (bottom left) in Glengarry Glen Ross, Scott Morrison is trying to sell a ‘bill of goods’ – in the PM’s case, the re-election of his government through fear. Images (clockwise from top left): The Bulletin, Ingram Pinn (Financial Times), The Monthly, New Line Cinema

Oh Scott, if only that were true. Your own Parliamentary Education Office describes the Prime Minister’s job as chairing meetings, hiring and firing ministers, representing Australia overseas, advising the Governor General, election responsibilities and, yes, “acting as the chief government spokesman”.

But “Prime Minister mode” doesn’t mean devoting almost all your time to the last of these duties – the spokesman part, especially before an election is called – and spending that time ginning up a fake, 1950s-style red scare or cosplaying as a welder who skipped OH&S training.

Far from looking Prime Ministerial, a desperate Morrison – trailing his Labor opposition by 10 points in the latest poll –seems more like wretched salesman Shelley Levene, Jack Lemmon’s character in the movie Glengarry Glen Ross (above, bottom left).

Like Levene, the PM is tasked with selling a sub-standard product (namely, his government) to voters at a likely May election, and seems happy to bend a few rules to get there.

Wildly cycling between scare campaigns in the hope of finding one that works, Morrison can be expected to traverse hoary old chestnuts like his opponent Anthony Albanese (Albo’s) “weakness” on law-and-order, his being “beholden to unions”, his 30-year-old, since-reversed support for death duties, a mythical “Labor-Greens coalition” or defence spending cuts during the last Labor government which, to put things in perspective, happened around a decade ago in very different global circumstances.

It’s all part of machinations on Morrison’s part which author Sean Kelly calls “the game”.

Morrison’s voice is given ill-deserved volume (and his enthusiasm for “the game” is thus bolstered) by enablers in the corporate media. Like Shelley Levene, Morrison says “to Hell with reality, I’ve got a bill of goods to sell these suckers; surely I can con them one more time, surely I can pull it off”.

Who knows? Maybe Gladys Berejiklian was right when she described Morrison as a “horrible, horrible person”.


Exhuming the ghosts of the 1850s and 1950s, Scott Morrison has hyped the “threat” posed by Communist-in-name-only China in his latest pre-election scare campaign. Images: HaulOfHistory, World History Archive, Miray Matar.

“Beware the heathen Chinee”; “better dead than red”. All-of-a-sudden, the dormant dreads of 1951 (or 1851, if Goldfields racism is more your thing) have come alive like long-buried carcasses, exhumed and reanimated by a PM who’ll make use of their scariness until, oh I don’t know, May’s expected election.

Cold War cultural references were all the rage in Parliament last week. “(China) will not find a fellow traveller when it comes to threats and coercion against Australia in my government,” Morrison told the House of Representatives.

Of course, the PM’s target wasn’t actually China, but Labor. “Fellow traveller” is a term straight out of the ‘50s, literally meaning communist sympathiser; like Menzies before him, Morrison implied the ALP has a secret cadre of “commies” in the ranks.

Who, specifically, was the government referring to? Defence Minister Peter Dutton said China had “made a decision about who they’re going to back in the next federal election … and they have picked (Albo) as that candidate”, while Morrison himself baselessly accused Labor’s deputy leader, Richard Marles, of being a “Manchurian candidate” for Beijing (he later withdrew the remark).

Tony Wright from “The Age” is already calling it a “reds under the bed” scare campaign: a crusade based on a litany of lies, among them implied references to “Red China”, which hasn’t been strictly communist for more than 40 years.

What’s more, China’s “threat” to Australia is over-hyped. In a modest muscle flexing, Beijing built a few military facilities in the South China Sea (more than 3000 kilometres from Darwin) and probed airspace around Taiwan, an island we’ve acknowledged as Chinese territory for half a century.

While mindful of China’s eventual strength in the region, independent think tank the Lowy Institute concludes that “Australia’s defence interests and territorial integrity will remain largely unthreatened” during our lifetimes, and that in the meantime, “the prospect of Chinese military action against Australia remains remote”.

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But, of course, this has nothing to do with military threats or communist plots. It’s all about politics to Morrison; another facet of “the game” he plays.

Whether or not this “Yellow Peril” push turns out to be the scare campaign that resonates with voters (remember, he has plenty of other chestnuts to deploy if it doesn’t) last week’s red scare dovetails into narratives Morrison will rely on in the weeks ahead. One such narrative was given a test run on Friday: Albo is “the most left-leaning Labor leader that we have seen since Gough Whitlam”, the PM said.

Implied message: ‘he’s got to be one of those scary “fellow travellers”’. There’s just one problem with that: the Albo we’ve seen as Opposition Leader these past three years is so far removed from the caricature of “radical reformer” that he might as well join the milquetoast Fabian Society.

Then there’s the coded racism in all this China talk. Australians don’t need much prodding to be alarmed by one Asian “threat” or another; it’s an electoral well the LNP and its forebears have returned to time and again, most recently during the Tampa affair of 2001.

Here’s hoping it doesn’t work this time.


Who’s the “fellow traveller”? Scott Morrison shows his close personal affinity with the LNP’s Chisholm MP, Gladys Liu, who later admitted to having been a member of a Chinese government propaganda unit. Photo: ABC.

Morrison’s latest scare campaign against Labor is a game all right; a dangerous game for Australia, its security and its cohesion as a nation. Many Australians of Chinese heritage – already frightened by attacks against their community over COVID-19 after Morrison questioned the pandemic’s origins – are unhappy about the PM’s latest outbursts.

“It could affect my personal safety here in Australia,” Annie, a voter in the marginal Victorian electorate of Chisholm, told the ABC. Australians of Chinese heritage form a substantial voting bloc in Chisholm, along with the NSW seats of North Sydney, Bennelong, Mackellar, Banks and Reid.

The LNP holds all these seats, some of them by wafer-thin margins.

Meanwhile, our stand against Beijing, formalised in the AUKUS pact with America and Britain, further jeopardises trade with China, renders us technologically dependent on the US for decades and makes us a nuclear target. On the flip side, we’ll wind up with some outdated nuclear submarines in about 20 years, so there’s that.
So dangerous is Morrison’s China/Labor scare campaign that ASIO – in a rare foray into controversy – weighed in on the matter, saying it was important not to politicise the organisation by leaking its intelligence, as the government, in recent weeks, has been accused of doing.

It was equally important that MPs kept engaging with Australians of Chinese heritage, despite fears that a Morrison or a Dutton would label them “China’s pick”, ASIO Director General Mike Burgess said. Were politicians to shun this engagement, it would have a “corrosive impact on our democracy” and security.

Did Morrison heed any of this? Of course not: Burgess’s comments last Monday were immediately followed by the PM pointing across at Albanese during Parliamentary Question Time, declaring the Chinese government has “picked their horse, and he’s sitting right there”.

In a recent look at Morrison’s personality, I pointed out at least 14 traits the PM displays (out of a possible 20) that suggest he might be a psychopath (or “psycho”, as one senior Cabinet minister called him in a leaked text). Two of those traits involve (i) reckless behaviour, and (ii) the absence of a conscience.

Antagonising China – our largest trading partner and an emerging superpower – for short-term political gain, is utterly reckless on Morrison’s part. Failing to heed common sense warnings about that, no matter the cost to fellow Australians, shows his absolute lack of a conscience.

Remember, to Morrison it’s all part of “the game”.

Scott Morrison believes that ginning up fear about one confected threat or another will erase the tsunami of corruption and incompetence that engulfed Australia on his watch. That, with a wave of his magic Cronulla scarf, he can make us forget sports rorts, Jobkeeper graft, carpark capers, jobs for the boys, the Robodebt debacle, his dragging the chain on a Federal ICAC, his utter incompetence on the vaccine rollout, his lack of action over the systemic abuse of women inside Parliament House, his erosion of Medicare, a procession of ministerial scandals, more than 700 aged care deaths from COVID-19 this year alone and, finally, the fact that he can’t operate an arc welder without making a complete fool of himself (above).

Prove him wrong, Australia.