“These aren’t the droids you’re looking for”: Australians face gaslighting, misdirection and distraction on a scale they’ve rarely encountered in the lead-up to a Federal election. Image: 20th Century Fox.

There’s an election in the air. The smell of gaslighting is a dead giveaway.

A kind of misdirection beloved of two-bit grifters, Jedi Knights, abusive spouses and perfidious politicians, gaslighting discombobulates the weak-minded about what’s really going on in the world.

Gaslighting, Scott Morrison-style, goes something like this: “Ignore the evidence of your own eyes that we screwed up the vaccine rollout; it was ATAGI’s fault, and you can blame Dan Andrews for the lockdown. Now check out this shiny new submarine.”

Short version: “These aren’t the droids you’re looking for.”

At some level you know the speaker’s full of shit, but it’s just so hard to put your finger on it as images dance in your head of Australian-flagged, nuclear-powered Virginia class subs holding off the People’s Liberation (Chinese) Navy.

“Australia’s playing with the big boys now! Maybe I’m wrong about the guy!”

While by no means certain, an election could come as soon as November, according to respected commentator Paul Bongiorno of The Saturday Paper. Morrison has the LNP seriously planning for an election affected by COVID-19 lockdowns, with the PM quoted as warning it will come “sooner than we think.”

Still doubting an election due in mid-2022 could come so soon? Check out this tell-tale sign:

Like all elections, a late 2021 poll would take in a cacophony of issues, from the environment to the need for a Federal ICAC to the treatment of women, both within the walls of Parliament and without. But its result would almost certainly swing on the prevalence of COVID-19 – who’s to blame for this year’s lockdowns, and when do the restrictions end? – versus a newcomer, the AUKUS security pact and nuclear-powered submarines, which was added to the debate with commodious timing last week.

Readers who haven’t been asleep for 18 months know all about COVID-19 and its virulent Delta strain, which has paralysed Australia’s south-east for months. It’s largely agreed that this year’s lockdowns, restrictions and economic malaise in NSW, Victoria and the ACT are squarely on Morrison, who left us vulnerable to Delta by botching the vaccine rollout, and his NSW counterpart, Gladys Berejiklian, who allowed the relatively free movement of Sydneysiders (and the virus) in the critical month of June.

An existential threat both to Australians and their economic wellbeing, it should come as no surprise that COVID-19 has cost Morrison dearly in the polls this year. His government’s six-point two-party-preferred Newspoll deficit, published on Monday, was typical for the months since June.

Cue the gaslighting and misdirection. “Morrison will declare (a UK-style) ‘Freedom Day’ against more cautious states that will be depicted as the enemy within,” former Labor PM Kevin Rudd warned.

As anyone who reads News Corp content can attest, the campaign to recast Morrison as our ‘liberator’ from COVID-19 restrictions – and to paint Labor premiers as lockdown-happy ‘cave dwellers’ – is already underway. Morrison hopes to ‘flip the script’ by pushing Australia’s ‘opening up’ when we reach 70 per cent double-dose vaccination among adults, confident that COVID-weary Australians will come around to his position by election day.

Rudd calls it “step one of the cunning, Morrison-Murdoch plan”:


‘Freedom Day’ might tempt exhausted Victorians, but it’s hard to see voters in WA and Queensland – states with almost no internal COVID restrictions – wanting their state Labor governments to open borders to Australia’s COVID-affected south east. WA Premier Mark McGowan called Morrison’s re-opening zeal “complete madness”, safe in the knowledge WA voters are on-side.


Cartoon: Matt Golding, WA Today

The LNP is defending a glut of seats in WA and Queensland, so ‘flipping the script’ could backfire disastrously on Morrison there. Cue ‘step two’ of the cunning plan, an attempt to remove Morrison’s COVID-19 stuff-ups from the forefront of our collective consciousness in favour of something shinier and friendlier to the Prime Ministerial narrative.

A kind of subtle, Men In Black memory erasure, ‘step two’ relies not on a flashy “neuralyzer”, but on the next best thing: News Corp media outlets galvanized into action by nuclear submarines and the threat of war with China, the so-called ‘yellow peril’. Cue Friday’s News Corp front pages:

Readers will by now be familiar with AUKUS, the awkward acronym for an agreement giving Australia access to much-coveted nuclear-powered submarines, at least eight of which will be built in Adelaide. The US, UK and Australia will also work together on missile technology, cyber and artificial intelligence in an effort to push back on China’s growing influence in the Indo-Pacific region.

The submarine component of AUKUS supersedes the troubled partnership with France for conventionally-powered subs, giving us a bigger, faster, longer-range vessel which is harder to detect as it doesn’t need to “snorkel”.

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On the agreement’s wider significance, Morrison told assembled media on Thursday that the “relatively benign security environment” of the Indo-Pacific region is a thing of the past, so we have joined what he calls “a forever partnership (for) peace and stability and security in our region.”

It is, indeed, a “forever partnership”, PM … but is that a good thing? AUKUS shackles Australia to the US via greater technology dependence on Washington; “its future submarine capability is now a ward of the alliance,” wrote Euan Graham of the International Institute for Strategic Studies.

“The move to nuclear propulsion means accepting complete reliance on the US and/or UK for fuel and other support, as the Morrison government has no plans to develop a civil nuclear-energy program,” Graham wrote. “Such dependence inevitably comes at the price of Australia’s reduced autonomy.”

Or does it? Australian Greens leader Adam Bandt is worried the deal could in fact be a Trojan horse for building a series of nuclear reactors here, a move we have eschewed for more than 50 years.

The submarine deal puts “floating Chernobyls in the heart of Australia’s cities,” and “leaves Australia less safe,” he added. The Chinese themselves echoed the latter point, claiming AUKUS “will potentially make Australia the target of a nuclear strike … because it’s easy for the US to equip Australia with nuclear weapons and submarine-launched ballistic missiles when Australia has the (right) submarines.”

There’s an economic downside, too. France, which was well and truly shafted over the sub deal, could suspend military co-operation and complicate a pending free trade deal with the European Union, while China – our biggest trading partner – could impose sanctions on international tourism and students, while weaning itself off our iron ore at a faster rate than it already plans.

All this so we can involve ourselves in geopolitical (maybe even military) conflicts in far-flung places like the Taiwan Strait, with an emerging superpower which – until now, at least – posed no direct threat to us whatsoever.

As Deakin University senior international relations lecturer Scott Burchill points out, the threat China posed was not to Australia directly, but “to US hegemony in East Asia” and Washington’s “full spectrum dominance.”


Cartoon: John Shakespeare, Sydney Morning Herald

In short, AUKUS gives Scott Morrison some shiny, fast, efficient new toys (at A$4.73 billion a pop, they’d want to be) and a seat at the big boys’ table. But, on the flip side, it further confirms that we’re America’s lapdog in the eyes of the world, and drags us into yet another unnecessary, US-driven conflict fraught with dangers – military and economic. New toys or not, we’re out of our depth (yes, that pun was intended); the costs clearly outweigh the benefits.

Why did we do it? With apologies to Bill Clinton, “it’s the politics, stupid.”

Here’s Kevin Rudd again, summarising “step two of the cunning, Morrison-Murdoch plan” which, to his credit, he saw coming well before anyone knew anything about AUKUS and subs:

Reminder: we’re about to have an election. Our current Prime Minister’s every waking moment is currently consumed with how each word, deed or press conference mannerism will play on election day; he’ll be (electorally) damned if he lets us stay focused on COVID-19 and his role in its spread.

Even Sky News political editor Andrew Clenell agrees: “a khaki election … is better than a vaccination-focused election” in Morrison’s eyes. “Colour me cynical … but there’s always political interest at play with Scott Morrison, and I think he can see that opportunity here, muscling up to China, he can see some political advantage in that.”

A coalition of the world’s three English-speaking, Anglo-centric, News Corp-consuming nations against the so-called ‘yellow hordes’ to our north (in which we get a seat at the table, but very much as the junior partner) is a dream come true for the PM of a country that has struggled to stand on its own two feet as a truly independent nation since Federation (check out our flag and Head of State, still the Queen’s representative, if you don’t believe me).

We’ll stay that way ad infinitum if we keep shackling ourselves to the whims of larger powers.

Expect Defence Minister Peter Dutton to keep beating the drums of war at the slightest opportunity between now and election day: ‘Peace through strength’ might well be his Nixonian catch cry, an appalling irony given that this government is actually making Australia less secure, not more.

“By routinely labelling China as public enemy No.1, he runs the grave risk of turning China into one,” Rudd told The Age.

If China wants a change of government in this country, it would be well advised to hold its collective tongue (at least until the election) and not rise to Dutton’s bait. Likewise Anthony Albanese: AUKUS and the subs aren’t grist for shock jocks like the Tampa Affair (which doomed your predecessor, Kim Beazley, to defeat in 2001) but they will be if you give them oxygen.

Pick your battles, Albo. Try and get the focus back on COVID-19.

As for the rest of us, let’s enjoy this Saturday’s AFL Grand Final, and may the better team win. Revel in the respite, but remember: there’s gaslighting, misdirection, distraction and discombobulation to come.

With apologies to Obi Wan Kenobi, “this isn’t the government we’re looking for.”