Despite claiming to be a family man who cares about women, Morrison has done little to effect change. Photo: BLOOMBERG

Prime Minister Scott Morrison had the chance to show he’s serious about equality and justice for women when he reshuffled his ministry on Monday. To friends of the women on the wrong end of sexual misconduct by Liberal Party insiders, he failed miserably.

Christian Porter, who was warned by former Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull about questionable public behaviour with a young female staffer, who was accused of repeated unwanted advances to women during his time in politics and beforehand, who strenuously denies a rape allegation from 1988, has been retained on the government front bench. So too has Linda Reynolds, who called former staffer Brittany Higgins a “lying cow” after the latter went public with allegations she was raped by a colleague in 2019.

Rather than being banished to the back benches, as friends of both alleged victims had demanded, Porter and Reynolds stayed on in new portfolios, as ministers for Industry, Science and Technology and Government Services respectively. It was a scornful slap in the victims’ faces.

On the plus side, a new cabinet taskforce on women’s equality, safety, economic security, health and wellbeing will be headed up by Marise Payne. One wonders whether Foreign Minister Payne, who Morrison embarrassingly described as the new “Prime Minister for Women”, will be in the country often enough to have a real impact on the blokey corridors of power.

Replacing Reynolds, a moderate, as Defence Minister is none other than the far right’s Peter Dutton, who once said refugee women were “trying it on” in claiming they were raped as part of a ploy to get to Australia. More recently, just moments after Morrison had called for a greater “culture of respect” in parliament during an International Women’s Day event earlier this month, Dutton described Higgins’ allegations as a “he said, she said” situation.

Despite tearfully citing his credentials as a family man who cares about women at a recent media conference, Morrison has done precious little to effect meaningful change, rejecting an inquiry into the Porter rape allegations and putting accused cyber stalker Andrew Laming in an “empathy course” before announcing a cabinet reshuffle that amounts to a slap on the wrist for Porter and Reynolds. Far from bringing to account perpetrators or enablers of misogyny and sexual misconduct, it seems that – at least in Dutton’s case – Morrison is promoting them.

While some observers believe Morrison’s failure to take meaningful action shows (yet again) that he can’t discipline Dutton and Porter’s powerful right-wing faction, others say it shows who he is: a member of the Pentecostal mega-church which invited to its Australian conference a controversial US preacher who once compared women to “penis-houses”.

“We want to see women rise. But we don’t want to see women rise only on the basis of (men) doing worse,” Morrison said on International Women’s Day 2019.

Before his dubious epiphany on quotas last week, Morrison told the 2019 NSW Liberal conference: “I want to see more women in our parliament and I want … to deliver that on merit, on merit, that’s the key.”

That’s two ‘merits’ in one sentence about women, in case you missed the point. We get it: no matter what the PR demands of the current crisis, Morrison doesn’t want quotas.

Morrison’s conservative world view fits hand-in-glove with the vast majority of today’s parliamentary Liberal Party and its massive cheer squad in the corporate and Murdoch media. An Age survey of Liberal MPs last month found that two thirds of respondents belonged to Dutton and Porter’s National Right faction or Morrison’s fellow travellers in the “Centre Right”, whose adherence to the right wing dogma of free-market economics and conservative social values is tempered only by the need to market it effectively.

As a result, in the unlikely event Morrison seriously considered banishing Porter to the backbench (or extending actual, meaningful Christian kindness to women) Andrew Bolt, Miranda Devine, Piers Akerman, Alan Jones, Peta Credlin, Chris Kenny, Janet Albrechtsen, Tim Blair, Gerard Henderson and other commentators too numerous to mention would roast him over a slow spit of scorn. The factions would then swoop in like vultures and exact a terrible price.

Notwithstanding the many and varied reasons for Morrison’s conservatism (spoiler alert: it’s who he is) he’s acutely aware that large chunks of the Australian electorate disapprove of an ideology that deprives some of the proverbial “fair go” and demeans others (women, LGBTQ+, ethnic minorities) because division enables that deprivation. Enter “Scotty from Marketing”, man of the people, to accentuate the positive and add, where possible, a patriotic jingo.

Everyone knows Scotty from Marketing. He’s the guy who poses in airplane cockpits with ill-fitting pilot’s hats, or delivers Gatorade to thirsty cricketers, always with a crooked grin that says “I’m one of you” (with a net worth of $38.8 million, he’s probably not).

Of course, if the Sutherland Shire shtick doesn’t work, maybe some word games or policy obfuscation will. Thus, during an interview with 3AW’s Neil Mitchell, Morrison reduced the “fair go” to “a fair go for those who have a go”, a group primarily comprised of small businesspeople, it turned out. Australians were thus divided into the deserving and the undeserving, all in a folksy manner of course.

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Things get a little awkward when the shtick doesn’t stick.

As state director of the NSW Liberals during the 2003 state election campaign, The Australian reported that Morrison “displayed an almost paranoid concern about answering even basic questions” from hardnosed, sceptical reporters. Often as not, he’ll proceed to attack those with the temerity not to accept him at face value: it turns out the “Messiah from the Shire” has the thinnest of skins.

In the space of a few moments last Tuesday, we witnessed Scott Morrison’s full, P T Barnum-meets-Donald Trump repertoire as he was reduced – for the first time as Prime Minister – from tearful ‘husband and father’ to snarling attack dog. “Criticise me if you like for speaking about my daughters, but they are the centre of my life … and to them I say to you girls, ‘I will not let you down’. There has never been a more important time for women to stand in this place”, he croaked.

For once, the media weren’t buying it. Sky News Australia (of all outlets) accused Morrison of losing control of his staff, at which the Prime Minister launched an attack on its parent company, News Corp, over the workplace bullying of a female employee.

“So let’s not all of us who sit in glass houses here start getting into that,” he warned. Within hours, Morrison was on the bottom of a pile-on the likes of which he’d never experienced: upset over his attack on them, even normally friendly News Corp outlets joined in.

Scott Morrison has been Prime Minister for two years, but it took until this moment last week to glimpse the small man behind the curtain. As with the Wizard of Oz, all of Morrison’s smoke and mirrors sophistry collapses like a house of cards once you peel back the curtain and take a good look at him, or in Morrison’s case, his record.

It’s an old adage with politicians: “Look at what they do, not what they say.”

All the crocodile tears in the world won’t wash away the fact that in last October’s budget, the Morrison government brought forward income tax cuts which benefit men over women by a ratio of around two to one. Rather than addressing the wage imbalance between men and women, he just made it worse.

Likewise, “I’ll look at quotas” hasn’t ended his or the Liberal Party’s devotion to ‘selection on merit’ (see Morrison’s earlier quote, above) despite women only making up 23 per cent of the Liberal House of Representatives contingent, and “I listen to Jenny” didn’t stop Morrison from treating both Porter and Reynolds with kid gloves. Maybe Jenny didn’t point out that a couple of minor demotions while moving Peter “He Said, She Said” Dutton up the pecking order looks suspiciously like window dressing.

A new hashtag made its Twitter debut last Wednesday, marking the worst week in the Prime Minister’s political life: #MorrisonsLostControl.

Whoever penned it is wrong: despite briefly losing control of the media narrative on the Christian Porter-Brittany Higgins scandal after his silly attack on his News Corp protectors last Tuesday, Morrison can expect the Murdoch outlets (representing 73 per cent of Australia’s newsprint circulation, Sky News and a robust online presence) to be back on board before long. So too will any wavering members of the Liberal backbench if, as they expect, the scandal blows over and Morrison – master of the 24-hour news cycle – is back in control.

The backbenchers’ calculations may be right: after some tears, a cabinet reshuffle and an empathy course for Andrew Laming, business-as-usual may be just around the corner.

That is, if the public’s short memories and capacity for distraction play out as usual. There are signs this scandal might be different: an estimated 110,000 protesters gathered outside Parliament House in Canberra (and other locations across the country) earlier this month to demand an end to misogyny, masturbation and alleged rape behind its walls and equality and justice for women in wider society.

Speaking at the Hobart March 4 Justice rally, sexual assault survivor and Australian of the Year Grace Tame spelled out why this movement might be a keeper: “I was afraid of doing something until a different kind of fear usurped that fear, and that was the fear of doing nothing.”

“The fear of doing nothing should outweigh your fear of doing something.” If that kind of determination persists, women won’t allow Scott Morrison to ‘move on’ from this.

Hopefully, they’ll persist until they get meaningful action. Well, action that’s as meaningful as it can be from a man whose heart just isn’t in it.