Normally Scott Morrison’s announcements are idiot-proof: the media is carefully managed, journalists fall into line, and the evening news bulletins provide the right images. It’s only months later that people start to realise the announcement was literally all there was. The arts funding never gets provided. Bushfire funding never makes it to people in burnt-out homes. Boldly asserted vaccine priority turns out to mean nothing.
But last week’s Qantas and Virgin handout, masquerading as a tourism package to offset the dumping of JobKeeper, fell apart almost in real time. And it turns out that no matter how idiot-proof you make something, it won’t be enough for an idiot like Michael McCormack.
The package — media managed in the usual way, with leaks to select journalists to get positive morning coverage, then a Morrison photo op in a cockpit — was poorly designed in the first place, with two vulnerabilities: being a handout to airlines, the actual tourism industry per se was left wondering exactly what it was going to get; and being tightly targeted at a handful of regional destinations, the other 90% of the tourism sector, especially in capital cities, immediately demanded to know why it was being excluded. Nationals MPs, nostrils flaring as pork passed them by just out of reach, jacked up as well and clamoured for access.
Within a day, Townsville (an inexplicable omission in the first place), Darwin and Adelaide had been added to the initial list of destinations, with no explanation. Yesterday Hobart made it on.
Cleverly, the government had managed to make an alleged $1.2 billion package all about people missing out.
Having added several capitals onto the package, it raised the question of whether funding would be adjusted so that the smaller centres originally on the list wouldn’t miss out. That was the question David Speers put to McCormack yesterday on Insiders.
“Well, it is demand driven, David. What we will do is spend the money that is needed,” McCormack replied.
Speers pointed out the program is capped at 800,000 flights.
“Yep,” replied McCormack.
See, programs are either capped or demand driven. “Demand driven” means governments commit to paying an open-ended amount depending on how much a program is used. There’s no cap, for example, on many health programs. Demand-driven programs are costed based on assessments of how much people will use a program. Capped means the opposite — the government will pay up to a certain level and then that’s it. That’s why government budgetary documents ask questions like “is funding for the policy to be demand driven or a capped amount?”
Speers persisted. “Is it demand driven or capped?” “Well it’s demand driven, of course,” McCormack said. “It is obviously going to be capped at the higher end but it is demand driven.”
Well, it can’t be. Hello? McFly? It can’t be both.
McCormack eventually decided it was capped, but the cap would be re-examined. “Once that 800,000 is used up, we will revisit it, as we’ve done the whole way through because we want planes in the air, David. It is tragic to go to an airport to see planes banked up one after the other outside the hangar.”
About as tragic as this man being deputy prime minister.
Speers moved on to the wage support elements of the package in relation to aviation workers, inquiring how much would actually be going into workers’ wages. McCormack couldn’t answer that at all. The unanswered questions were banking up like, well, sort of like planes outside a hangar. No wonder the Insiders panellists were openly laughing at McCormack afterwards.
McCormack is there, of course, because he’s leader of the Nationals, a party paralysed between a faction loyal to accused sexual harasser Barnaby Joyce and a faction either vehemently opposed to Joyce or disinclined to allow him to return to the leadership.
But he’s also emblematic of a deeper malaise within the Morrison government — a profound dearth of ministerial talent. Without Mathias Cormann, Julie Bishop and Christopher Pyne, this is a government alarmingly thin on talent and experience. Now it can’t even put Morrison’s own stunt announcements together without bungling them.
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I read Amy Remeikis’s blog on TGA when parliament is sitting. I know what Amy writes about McCormack but I had never watched him before.
I have never seen a worse interview than McCormack on Insiders yesterday. Even allowing for his language mangling capacities I could make no sense of what he was saying – just words falling in a meaningless flow.
And this man is Deputy PM of Australia? I almost felt a tinge of sympathy for Barnaby Joyce – but then I remembered that Joyce preferred McCormack to be leader rather than Darren Chester because Chester has some ability.
If we continue to vote for fools such as this, we get what we deserve.
I can never bring myself to watch more than about five seconds of McCormack. Though I do love Amy’s work and her preferred moniker for McCormack: Tip Top, as in, the very epitome of white bread.
“I have never seen a worse interview than McCormack on Insiders yesterday. Even allowing for his language mangling capacities I could make no sense of what he was saying – just words falling in a meaningless flow” …..and he was once a country newspaper editor!
You obviously missed the one last year. It was indeed worse and it was indeed like John Clarke Redux. A natural talent for political sarcasm wasted in actual political office
McCormack’s appearance on ‘Insiders’ sounded like he had read page one of Scott Morrison’s ‘guide to dealing with media’ – all bluster and bluff, upbeat but dismissive of nit-picking questions. It was embarrassingly awful.
Unfortunately, this sort of response is written into Morrison’s DNA, but McCormack lacks that natural aptitude. He was precisely the wrong person to sell this scheme, which was always going to be tough to sell in any case.
Probably a shame for Morrison, that his stunts are no longer idiot proof, as stunts are really the only thing that he brings to the table. Perhaps a fitting epitaph for his career, would be: Morrison what a cunning stunt.
BK lost me with the last paragraph – if Cormann, Pyne and Bishop represent the cream of the LNP’s lost talent, then the talent problem is much worse than the bleak picture BK has painted.
Yes, I doubt if anyone is thinking, “If only Christopher Pyne was still here, he’d fix things”.
hahahahahaha
Hahahahaha. That’s gold.
Were is Erasmus??
Exquisite article, Bernard. Where does one begin with this government? You bemoan their lack of talent. But I’d much rather Stuart Robert’s ramshackle meanderings through the wreck of his portfolio, than whipsmart Tudge and Porter and their finely tuned acts of ministerial malice. They come as close to ‘evil’ as you can get in a Westminster democracy. Don’t feel like releasing a detainee from jail, despite repeated Court orders to do so? Well, I know better than the Court. Telling the whistleblower defendant you are prosecuting in a secret trial who he can have as his lawyer? Well, you realise I’m the Attorney-General with power to do anything. Integrity Commission that can only investigate politicians who report themselves as corrupt? Yes, it took me twelve months to come up with that world-beater. Give me two and three more Michael McCormacks and bring back Melissa Price as Environment Minister. They are so ineffectual as to be relatively harmless.
Speaking of Ministers, I’ve just come back from the March4Women rally in Melbourne, where the prize for the best placard surely goes to the crisply understated ‘Sack the f***cker’.
Il loved the one that said “The problem is not fixed, it is f*cked. I am going to fix it, get out of my way”
Love it, just love it. I would only add… sack the entire Coalition f***ckers. Most especially Peter spudface Dutton. Ditto Erica Betz! Ditto, ditto Scott Morrison and ditto times six, Michael McCormack.
Watching McCormack on Insiders was like watching the legendary John Clarke in the Clarke and Dawe episode from the 90s, “The Front Fell Off”.
RIP John. Greatly missed. C & D would have absolutely skewered McCormack for that hopeless performance.