And let’s not forget Lara Bingle in “that ad” – the one where she asked people around the world: “So where the bloody hell are you?” She was bikini-clad, brown and beckoning from a dreamy beach. “She’s a very nice young woman, isn’t she, Fran?” prime minister John Howard is said to have remarked to the tourism minister, Fran Bailey, after a preview. Morrison was running Tourism Australia at the time of the $180 million campaign. Howard’s enthusiasm for Bingle did not save Morrison’s job.
Lara Bingle in the $180 million “Where the bloody hell are you?” Tourism Australia campaign.
Beaches, of course, have their darker side: the Cronulla riots in 2005 centred on control of the beach. And social historians have pointed out that the fabled beach holiday usually depended on mum merely shifting the site of her onerous daily round of domestic chores from home to caravan, cabin, shack or tent.
Morrison’s ideal citizen is more interested in beaches than politics. At Shoalhaven in 2019, he reported: “There was no sign of the angry mob on social and in other media, shouting at each other and telling us all what we’re supposed to do, think and say.”
There is nothing wrong with enjoying a beach holiday. Morrison’s problem is that, after his “miracle” election, his prime ministership was spectacularly mugged by what the British prime minister Harold Macmillan called “events”. Politics, moreover, has a habit of finding even those who do their best to avoid it, especially in a crisis.
The first of those events was the Black Summer bushfires. They produced beach images as memorable as Dupain’s Sunbaker and Morrison’s Bingle in her Bikini. They were photos of terrified people escaping bushfires. And there were accompanying photos of Morrison enjoying himself at a beach – in Hawaii.
When Morrison returned, he seemed unable to detach himself from the rituals of the Australian summer, despite the extraordinary circumstances of the moment. He hosted the Australian Test cricket team at Kirribilli House, posing with them for a photograph. And he predicted Australians would be “inspired by the great feats of our cricketers”.
In the two summers since, Australians’ summers have been stalked by the pandemic. In 2020-21, there were lockdowns in Sydney, which prevented families from gathering and celebrating for Christmas. This time round, it’s been a mess of serpentine testing queues, mounting rates of infection, and disruptions to travel plans. And for some, there has been illness, hospitalisation and death.
My own experience of the pandemic in Canberra has been a light one. But I received news mid-afternoon Christmas Day that I had been in a meeting earlier in the week with someone who had been infected, so it was off to a Canberra suburb to stand in a queue for a couple of hours waiting to be tested, then isolation in a bedroom at home on Boxing Day until getting the all-clear.
Most Australians probably now accept that we cannot continue to live this way. But Morrison has gone much further, presenting himself as The Liberator, the man who will be at our side as we learn to “live with the virus”. We have been told that the pandemic response will now rely on “personal responsibility”.
The idea of people having personal responsibility for their own health is far from absurd. It will appeal to the common sense of many of us. It also has its precedents. The Hawke government’s response to the AIDS virus in the 1980s relied to a great extent on the personal responsibility of gay men. That was what all the talk of safe sex was about. The whole effort assumed that, given the right information and circumstances, men could alter their sexual behaviour to increase their own safety and halt the spread of a deadly virus.
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But that effort depended on government education, on advertising – yes, the famous Grim Reaper ad in there among it all – and on working closely with gay organisations in spreading the word about how to protect health and save lives.
This is not where we are with COVID-19 right now. Morrison again went missing in action over this Christmas as the country descended into chaos. Anyone inclined to either conspiracy theory or deep irony might have suspected he was in Hawaii.
He then popped up at a media conference on Wednesday to announce a national cabinet meeting for the next day. Part of his mission was to remind people of the role of the states in creating that chaos, and the matters in which it is not the federal government’s responsibility to hold hoses. Winning the next election remains the first item on his every agenda.
This is business as usual, the game of perpetual blame-shifting. It is striking that Morrison is not campaigning vigorously for the use of masks. There is no expensive government advertising campaign telling people how they can best remain safe. Morrison’s messaging is carefully calibrated to exploit people’s weariness with the restrictions on their lives.
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He did his best, for as long as he could, to avoid getting down into the weeds that dominate the daily lives of state and territory governments – the world of testing, QR codes, quarantine, isolation and all the rest of it. Until events meant he had no choice. Again.
“We know that Australia is not perfect, but we’d rather be here than anywhere else in the world,” Morrison told readers in January 2019. “Sure there are things we could have done better and must do better in the future. But there is no place like Australia and we’d like to keep it that way.”
It is a powerful impulse, this desire to restore rather than to renovate. Scott Morrison is counting on its enduring appeal. The Shoalhaven Heads Hotel, which saw the Prime Minister again last summer, would do well to prepare for a return visit.
Frank Bongiorno is a professor of history at the Australian National University. Peter Hartcher is on leave.
Morrison banks on the resurgence of a cheerier, quieter Australia
Source: Philippines Alive
