In his gauche handling of the coronavirus situation, Morrison has once again proven himself incapable of understanding the task of leadership in a democracy.
The speech Menzies didn’t deliver
From a neglected file in the Commonwealth Archives, a draft speech for Prime Minister Menzies:
Fellow Australians, it is my melancholy duty to inform you officially that there has been an outbreak of war between Britain and Germany.
That means my government will be unable to deliver its promised fiscal surplus for 1939-40.
As the war progresses there will be a long period – perhaps years – of tough economic times, but my government will make sure we attend to the interests of small businesses and provide investment allowances to incentivise military production.
Don’t let this event distract you from your normal lives: on Saturday I will be at the MCG to enjoy the cricket.
God save the King!
That is the broadcast Prime Minister Menzies didn’t deliver on 3 September 1939 when Australia entered the conflict to be known as the “Second World War”. (OK, I made it up.)
His actual speech, replete with imperialist flourishes (he probably wrote it himself), is on the Australian War Memorial website. Apart from a reference to “supplies, foodstuffs, money” it does not mention the coming war’s likely economic consequences
By way of contrast, last Thursday, as most of the world came to appreciate the scale of the coronavirus threat, the Morrison Government’s clear priority, conveyed in its press release, was its “$17.6 billion economic plan to keep Australians in jobs, keep businesses in business and support households and the Australian economy as the world deals with the significant challenges posed by the spread of the coronavirus.” (Emphasis mine.)
On the following evening, as the extent of the virus became more evident, Morrison went on air with a different, but only slightly different, tone. The 97 second video clip is worth watching, not only because it conveys his usual insecurity and insincerity (evident in his familiar high-pitched and clipped speech) but also because it exposes his points of emphasis when he says “While this is a global health crisis [light tone], there are very real and significant economic impacts [serious tone].”
No doubt, when Menzies made his speech on the outbreak of war, economic issues were very much on his mind: he held the dual portfolios of Prime Minister and Treasurer. His department would have been working on crucial issues to do with manpower, trade isolation, industrial capacity and all the necessary adjustments to a war economy. This was not the time to talk about such matters, however.
He understood one of the founding principles of government – that the first duty of government is the protection of its citizens. That’s a principle stated 3800 years ago in the Code of Hammurabi, a principle spelled out in national constitutions, a principle acknowledged as a foundation of democracy, and a principle articulated by Morrison’s predecessor, Malcolm Turnbull.
But Morrison’s message was not about that duty of protection. He stressed that while the virus might be tough for older people and those with compromised immune systems (fatal for some) most will experience only a “mild” inconvenience. His emphasis was not the lives of the few, but the “jobs and livelihood” of the many, and he intended to “set Australia up to bounce back stronger, when the crisis is over”. That same evening he urged Australians to follow his example and to go off to watch the “footy”.
A moral choice
There are many ways countries can approach the coronavirus crisis. Their chosen approach should be guided by moral principles.
The approach at one extreme is to let the virus rip, accepting as collateral damage a surge of deaths and associated distress as overloaded health systems apply a brutal triage regime. The priority, for the good of ninety-something per cent of the population, is to get back to business-as-usual once herd immunity is quickly established. This is the path Italy seems to have taken, through neglect rather than through design. It’s fast, efficient and brutal.
It is what moral philosophers call a “consequentialist” or “utilitarian” approach: accept the collateral damage, trading off some people’s interests for the benefit of the many, without regard for human rights. Consequentialism lay behind the brutality of revolutionary communist regimes; those who stood in the way were to be eliminated for the collective good of realising the party’s utopian vision.
The approach at the other extreme is to contain, isolate and possibly eliminate the virus, essentially as has been achieved with infections such as smallpox and polio. This has been the approach in Singapore and some other prosperous east Asian countries, and, if we are to believe it can be scaled up to a population of 1.4 billion, it has been the approach in China, applied with strong controls. It may work, it may not. (If Australia could replicate China’s claimed performance, scaled by population, the virus would be well on the way out once we suffer 1 500 cases and 50 deaths.)
Most countries are adopting polices between these extremes, hoping to “flatten the curve” to ensure health systems are not overloaded, to attend to those needing the most concentrated care, and to buy time for curative therapies to be developed (and possibly a vaccine further down the track). Such approaches have regard for the rights of the most needy and those at highest risk, and would be classified by moral philosophers by the adjective “deontological”, or the more-commonly-stated principle that desirable ends do not justify unjust means – a principle articulated or implicit in the moral codes of most religions and humanitarian philosophies.
In his early moves, with his emphasis on treating the virus as an economic problem, Morrison was putting his government towards the consequentialist end (the means justify the ends) of this spectrum.
Political commentators such as Ian Verrender and David Speers suggest that Morrison misjudged the nation’s political mood. Indeed, there has been little resistance to extreme measures taken in other countries, and there is no reason Australians would object to them. Public opinion seems to be shifting more to Singapore than to Italy. It’s plausible that Morrison simply got it wrong: he seems to flounder in any situation that isn’t covered in the Marketing 101 textbook.
Or possibly Morrison believes that a prolonged economic downturn associated with a “flattened curve” would do him more political damage than a severe crisis in 2020 followed by a quick recovery (albeit off a dismal base) over 2021, in time for the next election. Marketing relies on short memories.
Either way – a utilitarian disregard for people’s rights, or a cynical political calculation, morality doesn’t seem to have been a strong consideration in Morrison’s political tactics.
What Australians need now, rather than political spin (such as attempts to draw invidious comparisons between Morrison’s economic interventions in 2020 and Rudd’s in 2008) is a clear statement of where the government’s approach lies along this spectrum. This should be followed by politicians’ withdrawal from the stage, with the task of administration left to the guidance of trusted experts such as Chief Medical Officer Brendan Murphy and his state counterparts, who would treat communication with the public as an task of giving advice and clear information, rather than a political exercise in marketing spin.
In 1939 Menzies was able to call Australians to come together to confront a national emergency. Curtin was able to do so again in 1941 when the Pacific War broke out. These were both tough political warriors, from different sides of an ideological fence. But they both understood that the first duty of government concerns something on a higher moral plane than protecting the cash flow of small business.
Ian McAuley is a retired lecturer in public sector finance at the University of Canberra.
Ian McAuley is a retired lecturer in public finance at the University of Canberra. He can be contacted at “ian” at the domain “ianmcauley.com” .
Comments
10 responses to “IAN McAULEY. We should be thankful that Morrison wasn’t our PM in 1939.”
Ian, like a fine wine you have aged well, and your pen is as sharp as ever. Well said!
A very apt article, unfortunately.
Put the pressure on and there’s much reverting to type, hogging of the microphone, rather than get out of the way for professionals knowing why/ how and what.
Even positioning of the lecterns outside the PM’s office seems to place the pollyTIC closer to the media than the professional.
All messaging efforts, rather than ensuring outcomes.
Oh dear.
Prioritisation of cash flow over lives.
Assets over people?
(Well given the average wage is something like $70K, and Newstart at $280 a week would be below $15K …)
Be it virus, flooding or fires, the pattern seems to be snoozing, skiving off, bumbling and stumbling, all the while the denials, distractions – of the argue about painting the kitchen with a tsunami incoming – and delays – such as the most recent weekend gatherings of up to 500 PAX, now 100 PAX – continue?
Off with the fairies.
For example, footage of testing sites seems to have people in queues out the door, in Autumn, rather than under some temporary ADF cover to take care of the rain or heat (30+C in Sydney NSW today) …
We shall fight in supermarket aisles?
Except many shelves are empty!
Historical side note:
Here’s something they rarely gets bought up. In 1940 there was a federal election due. The ‘United Australia Party’/’Country Party’ coalition govt. with Menzies as the so-called ‘prime minister’ realised that its dithering and general ‘do nothingness’ regarding the conduct of the war had become an electoral liability.
It is fairly well known that at this time Menzies tried to coax Labor to join a ‘national’ govt. along the lines as that set up in the U.K. (https://en.wikipedia.org
/wiki/Churchill_war_ministry), without success.
What is less known, is that Menzies asked the Imperial Parliament at Westminster to amend the ‘Commonwealth of Australia, Constitution Act 1900’ to remove the 3-year limit on federal parliaments. This was agreed to with the proviso that all parties in the Australian federal parliament agreed. The Country and Labor parties wouldn’t have a ‘bar of it’ and the matter was dropped. (Menzies didn’t consider putting it to the Australian people in a referendum.)
In 1942* the Curtin Labor Government ended the Imperial Parliament’s ability to amend the ‘Australian Constitution’ by adopting the the ‘Statute of Westminster 1931’ ( back-dating it to September 1939 to remove doubts about the legality of Australia’s war with Germany).
* The english language version of the old ‘Soviet Encyclopaedia’ used to list ‘1942’ as the date of Australian independence from the U.K.
A priority is to keep an eye on next week’s “limited” sitting of Parliament and ensure it is indeed limited to the corona virus economic package and not used to sneak through other measures such as the cash ban bill.
Excellent article. We certainly have to find a balance, but ethics and morality have been totally absent from national decision-making for far too long. We need them back post haste, for coronavirus, climate change, immigration and everything else.
Ian makes his point well and I agree that everything this government does (it is not just the PM) is filtered through a political sense.
However I don’t believe it is easy to decide where the line is drawn. We could conceivably stop the disease in its tracks if we restricted everyone to their homes and had the Army deliver basic food parcels…but in doing so we would destroy our economy and the means by which we fund ourselves. If we did that the ensuing catastrophe would be many times worse than what we face now…picture a complete breakdown of society with a “survival of the fittest” mentality taking over.
As usual we have to find a balance…minimise deaths but maintain a basic society by maintaining a functioning economy. Not easy to get right …I certainly not suggesting that the current governments have…but it is not an easy decision to make.
Thanks Ian a well written piece. Lets hope more politicians across the political divide listen to the voice of reason.
“Consequentialism lay behind the brutality of revolutionary communist regimes; those who stood in the way were to be eliminated for the collective good of realising the party’s utopian vision.”
Was it also consequentialism in Franco’s Spain, Nazi Germany, Argentina, Chile, The Phillipines (present day), Indonesia, The Shah’s Iran etc, etc?
Regimes often justify repression by the greater good – they are targetting a minority of discontents in the interests of the majority. What would happen if the discontents weren’t controlled? Yes, it’s consequentialism too.
Thanks Ian, I’m glad someone is talking intelligently about the ethics of this.