Images: The Guardian (top right), ABC (bottom right).
Scott Morrison isn’t usually one to pull an utterance out of his proverbial without at least workshopping it with his communications team. His tenure as Prime Minister has been marked (some say littered) with well-honed if low-brow oratory such as: “If you have a go, you get a go”, “shaking and baking” the economy and my personal favourite: “How good is Australia?”
Of course, you don’t always have time to brainstorm your rhetoric amid the frenzy of an election campaign, and when you’re at least eight points down in the polls, desperation can get the better of you. So it likely was with Morrison’s latest, botched epithet for Anthony Albanese: “loose unit”.
Once upon a time, “loose unit” was the term for an uncouth, unreliable and/or unconventional character. An old-fashioned conservative at the best of times, that’s likely how Morrison saw the epithet: “wacky old Albo, he’s a bit of ‘loose unit’, if you know what I mean”.
What the PM and his army of spin doctors seem to have forgotten is that we’re now more than two decades into the 21st century. Nowadays, “loose unit” is used in a playful sense: the knockabout ‘daredevil’ type beloved in Australian culture. Cue Brisbane artist James (‘Nordacious’) Hillier, who lampooned the ScoMo sledge:
Artwork: James Hillier
‘Nordacious’ really hit the funny bone with his caricature (above) of “Albo”, a man who – let’s face it – has so far shown he’s no Bob Hawke in the “man of the people” department. The Labor leader’s team have struggled to remedy that (think “Bluesfest” visit to Byron Bay) only for Morrison to unwittingly help them out, adding the “loose unit” bouquet to a public image that, until recently, was as well-hidden as Labor’s policies.
Better still for Albanese, the PM’s ill-fated insult was a result of the former’s backing a 5.1 per cent increase to the minimum wage, a rise which would merely keep up with inflation.
The PM’s ill-considered Tory knee-jerk to this news (that such a pay rise would turbo-charge inflation, drive up interest rates and put us – per hyperbolic Morrison media ally Phil Coorey – on “a one-way ticket to the Weimar republic”) was in stark contrast to his silence on CEO wage rises and bonuses well in excess of inflation, and flew in the face of conventional fiscal logic: “if you have wage increases no more than inflation plus productivity, then that isn’t inflationary,” Albanese pointed out.
It was an opportune alignment of the stars for “Albo”, who was able to emerge with a win on policy (minimum wage earners outnumber CEOs last time I checked) and add some charisma (mythical or not) to his image with voters at a pivotal moment in the campaign.
Most deliciously for Labor, this fillip was driven largely by Morrison and his army of media enablers. Thanks, PM, for the free kick on minimum wages, and the ensuing 50-metre penalty: “loose unit Albo, man of the people” (see below).
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Who can blame Scott Morrison for seeing “loose unit” only as a term for malcontents? His Cabinet and backbench are positively teeming with them, from crackpots and extremists to coal-obsessed dinosaurs who seem positively nostalgic about the carbon-belching Industrial Revolution.
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Take Peter Dutton, who boycotted Kevin Rudd’s apology to the stolen generations, thought rising sea levels threatening low-lying Pacific Island nations was fair game for a joke, said Victorians were “scared to go out to restaurants” because of ‘African gang’ violence, cancelled a special ‘rainbow clothing’ morning tea at the ADF on the grounds it was “woke” and, in his maiden speech to Parliament, spoke – in terms eerily reminiscent of Germany in the 1930s – of “people who barely justify their existence.” Most recently, Dutton has been stoking tensions with a regional superpower, China, which begs the rhetorical question: “what could possibly go wrong”?
Then there’s the National Party throwbacks: the florid Barnaby Joyce – who said of Melbourne’s pandemic woes last year: “you can almost smell the burning flesh from here” before adding that country people “couldn’t really give a shit” – and coal-faced cosplayer Matt Canavan, who upset Morrison mid-campaign by insisting the goal of net zero carbon emissions by 2050 was “dead”, and “all over bar the shouting”. Their presence in coalition ranks ensures that, for the foreseeable future, the LNP will never seriously combat carbon emissions.
There’s a legion of such cranks throughout the coalition, including the LNP’s candidate for Warringah, Katherine Deves, whose archive of outrage includes calling transgender people “surgically mutilated and sterilised”, claiming half of trans men are sex offenders and likening anti-trans activism to opposing the Holocaust.
Pentecostals, pious hypocrites and bigots like Deves helped take over the Liberal and National parties in recent years, marginalising more moderate elements and driving many into the arms of the ‘teal’ independents.
Finally, we come to Morrison himself, a man whose flaws go well beyond any outdated, pejorative definition of “loose unit”. The PM was described by close colleagues as a “complete psycho”, a “fraud” and a “horrible, horrible person” in text messages leaked early this year.
A recently-published biography of Morrison described a PM who prefers the political fix over decision-making designed to help the country, is obsessed with messaging and narrative, is ruthless with those who stand in his way and who treats government as nothing more than a means to power. According to psychologists, such traits are consistent with those of a psychopath (or “psycho”, to quote from the abovementioned texts).
Then there’s the company he keeps: people like 30-year friend Tim Stewart, a QAnon conspiracy theorist who believes Satan-worshiping paedophiles secretly rule the world and mounted a “Deep State” plot against former US president Donald Trump. Stewart – a Pentecostal fellow traveller of Morrison’s – boasts of holding considerable sway over the PM, and appears to have influenced the wording of at least one of the speeches he’s made in Parliament.
Cartoon: David Rowe, Financial Review
I don’t know about you, but I’d take “Albo the loose unit” over “ScoMo the complete psycho” any day of the week. Perhaps the PM was assigning his own flaws to Albanese – a practice psychologists call projection – and, in the heat and confusion of an election campaign, got a little confused about what “loose unit” actually means.
We may look back on that blunder as the moment Morrison, the so-called master campaigner, sealed an ignominious fate with voters.
