Mark Riley: Scott Morrison needs to take care trekking through the political jungle

Scott Morrison felt the need to invoke the spirit of Kokoda twice this week. The second time was in relation to helping a friend, Papua New Guinea, now on the verge of a COVID catastrophe. The first was all about self-preservation. At the Coalition party room meeting on Tuesday, Morrison recalled his experience on Kokoda’s lesser-known partner trail, the Black Cat Track, as part of a charity walk in 2013. About 700 Australian soldiers died along the dangerous trail while holding back the Japanese advance during World War II. The leech-infested track snakes through some of the most inaccessible terrain in the country’s north-eastern corner, traversing narrow paths hewn by machetes along perilous jungle escarpments. Morrison told his colleagues how he’d fallen several times, once having to be saved by a guide. He saw that as a metaphor for his Government’s current position. “We’ve been on narrow paths before, colleagues, and we’ve walked them together,” he said, alluding to the “miraculously” narrow path they found to victory at the 2019 election. “Sometimes the path is wide and the walking is gentle, but the path is now narrow so we must watch out for each other and we must support each other.” Morrison was seeking to deliver two messages through this rather florid political soliloquy. The first was that even though a convergence of controversies, missteps and polls had narrowed the path before them, they still had a clear passage to victory. The other was the common lament of a Prime Minister beset by acts of individual exuberance and ill-discipline and worse among the ranks — a cry for unity. This column cautioned last December that though the Government’s lead appeared to many to be insurmountable, things change in politics — and they can change very quickly. Morrison is now experiencing that. And it is only the beginning. The alleged rape of Brittany Higgins in the office of Defence Minister Linda Reynolds and the allegations against Christian Porter, which Porter strenuously denies, have sparked a passionate national campaign by women fighting back against a largely patriarchal power structure. The women who converged on Parliament House in Canberra on Monday made clear that their protest wasn’t simply a “moment”. It was the beginning of a “movement” intent on expressing its outrage at the ballot box at the next Federal election. A similar message was delivered by those at the mass rally through the streets of Perth on Sunday. Labor is no cleanskin here. It has its own issues. The allegations by former staffers against its male MPs prove this is not a matter that stains just one side of politics. But at times of social upheaval, people rightly look to the government to effect change. And the WA election result has delivered another thunderous jolt to the Government’s electoral confidence. If just half of the swing earned by the McGowan Government were to go against Morrison at the next Federal poll, he and his Government would lose enough seats in WA alone to be thrown out on their ears. As if that wasn’t bad enough, the problems with the vaccine rollout along the east coast threaten to explode into another political crisis. The Government has done a good job of encouraging people to get the vaccine — now it needs to deliver it in sufficient quantities so they can. And that is not happening. The online booking system was swamped when it opened on Wednesday. Patients were largely turned away by the designated GP clinics either because they didn’t have the vaccine at all or what little supply they did have had been promised to other patients. On top of that, Treasurer Josh Frydenberg warned colleagues at Tuesday’s party room meeting to brace themselves for “a rough couple of months” after JobKeeper ends in about two weeks. He assured them the Government would respond with “targeted programs where appropriate”, but that came as cold comfort to many after how badly the recent tourism industry package was botched. The political landscape is becoming increasingly challenging for the Government. Its position is certainly retrievable, particularly facing such a lacklustre Opposition. But Morrison won’t want to experience too many more slips along the way, or he might find that narrow track closing dangerously.