Prime Minister Scott Morrison driving an electric car earlier this week. Photo: Getty Images.

“The most important part of your campaign is to bring hope to people and a feeling of goodwill toward you,” – Quintus Cicero giving his brother Marcus advice on running for office in 64BC.

And so here we are more than 2000 years later, and the Prime Minister Scott Morrison is in Melbourne for a visit. He’s in the kitchen of a cafe, stirring the pot, he’s making gnocchi, he’s making spring rolls at a Chinese restaurant, he’s giving a hairdresser work by letting him cut his hair, he’s driving a car at a factory, he’s looking at a truck.

Before Melbourne he was in Newcastle, the former coal capital of the country, saying a few words about hydrogen, meeting kids, saying g’day. Didn’t say much about coal, curiously. One of his favourite words right now is hydrogen. Get used to it.

The element once only much known as being two parts of water to one part oxygen, is going to be heard a lot in the next few months. If Morrison could pull it out of his pocket and show it around, like he did with good old lump of coal, he would. Even more than lump o’coal’s cameo in Parliament, he could say this is hydrogen, it won’t hurt you. But alas, we’d have to trust him.

And that’s all he asks. Trust him. These past few days Morrison is showing he’s a man of the people. Really, truly. He’s also a man who, just quietly, has started campaigning, for the next election, which has to be held by May.

It can only get worse. WB Yeats also comes to mind: “The worst are full of passionate intensity.” When Yeats wrote those lines in 1919 as part of his poem The Second Coming, as the world began rising from the destruction of WWI, of course he wasn’t thinking of Australian politics. But, as in the best lines, they can be applied universally. Across the planet, across a century.

Now back from his foreign misadventures, Morrison is showing he can hit the ground running. Doing it the Australian way. He’s in his element, and he’s in the moment. Glasgow, Macron, Biden? Distant memories.

Indeed, everything seems to be a distant memory to the Prime Minister. During the last election campaign, Morrison lambasted Labor’s strategy on fostering the use of electric cars. “What about all these charging stations, how much is that going to cost? I mean if you have an electric car and you live in an apartment, are you going to run the extension cord down from your fourth-floor window?”

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And forget about your weekends away, he said. Electric cars won’t get you far. And camping? Forget that, too.

But that was then, and this is now. There’s a place for electric vehicles, it seems. Why he’s going to throw some money at them, just like he threw money before the last election at those poor railway stations that didn’t have proper carparks in those poor critical Coalition seats, and just like those poor sports facilities…

Why had the PM buckled his seatbelt in an electric vehicle? There had been a “massive change in the technology”. He explained this week: “Technology is moving. It will continue to move forward.”

It is in his language that you’ll find a subtext, an ulterior motive. He went on: “Australians will make those decisions. What I’m opposed to is forcing Australians to do things, forcing them out of their jobs. I want to let Australians make their own choices and have policies to support them.”

This, of course, crosses over into mandate territory, and from that the laying of blame for the woes of hardworking Australians. That is, the culprits for all of these woes is not him. Never him. Someone else.

A handful of quotes reinforces the point. The black summer bushfires, a holiday in Hawaii. “I don’t hold a hose, mate.” The race to get vaccines onto our shores. “It’s not a race.” There are many others. But it seems they all point to one thing, whatever it is, it’s not his job.

As to the climate, the market has decided it can’t wait for him, and is initiating its own plans, because as any sensible person would realise, it is a race. Which makes this rather embarrassing. Australia’s response to climate change was ranked last among 60 countries, among the factors were one of the highest greenhouse gas emissions rates in the world per capita and a policy deficiency.

There’s six months, at most, to the election. It’s quite likely this one will be presented as the last one was: The Morrison Show. We saw a first run this week. The overriding impression will be to instil in people that the only thing that matters is the here and now, and gee isn’t it great. Hope resides in the present. Don’t look back. If nothing else the PM is an artist of flimflam. He can con the present into thinking it never had a past.

And you can be sure, he will say it with passionate intensity.