Pumped by his recent rabid attention-seeking overseas, Prime Minister Abbot has wasted no time in getting down to business at home. The big picture is not pretty. Abbott knows we need to rescue ourselves from Howard and Costello’s economic mess.  Experts would have told him.

 The Liberals squandered the mining boom on buying votes. They missed a golden opportunity for structural reform. They helped increase economic disparity and social division in the process. In turn, they helped prepare for Abbott’s unlikely rise. Tear up any social contract. Every man for himself. Do whatever it takes to get and keep power. Enable the rise of the right wing.

 Like a rat up a drain pipe, Abbott has bolted up the track on his party’s inside right. Moderates are marginalised. Ministers are gagged and bound. The Office of Prime Minister runs the show. Forget consensus. Just follow the leader. Team Abbott is defined by coercion and control.

 In public, debate is dumbed down to numbing mindlessness. Threats, scaremongering, spin, petty recrimination and blame are this government’s dominant discourse. That discourse can be hard to follow. Talk up the economic crisis today. Talk it down tomorrow. Reversals of direction reflect its pragmatism and betray its lack of a coherent set of principles or plan.

 This week, we are told to fear terrorists. Secondly we are to be bullied into accepting the mess of inconsistencies, lies and sheer incompetence that characterise his government’s first budget. Team Abbott has quickly fallen in step with their leader’s hectoring, scare-mongering style.

 Warning that we could see beheadings in the streets of Australia, Abbott is happy to frighten us into submission and to distract us from the mess that is his government’s first budget. He shamelessly beats up our fear of terrorists. In the process, he continues his astonishing, redefinition of the office of prime minister.  The tone is increasingly high handed and dictatorial . Do as you are told. Don’t disagree or you will be punished. If we don’t get the  budget through, we will  have to raise taxes. 

How long will he last? It is well to remember Abbott’s rise to power. Who thought this weedy, brash, ex-seminarian would claw his way to such exalted heights? Few in his own party. ‘Not yet,’ was Howard’s understated doubt. ‘God help us all’, were Paul Keating’s words. Long dismissed as another clown from the loony right, Tea Pot Tony’s startling rise took many Liberals by surprise. The surprise has abated only slightly, to be supplanted by mounting anxiety. What will Abbott do next? What won’t he do? He’s a skyrocket without a stick.  

There were warning signs, it is true. Abbott  would do anything, he said, to be PM. Except, as he sensitively and tastefully put it, sell his arse. Yet if Abbott’s naked ambition was on the public record. So, too, was a lot of other embarrassing, underwhelming stuff. He freely confessed to saying whatever came into his head. You needed it in writing if you wanted to hold him to account, he said. His parliamentary antics, plumbed new depths of decorum. His behaviour seemed more symptomatic of oppositional defiance disorder than any rational plan of action. 

 The next two weeks will be critical as the government tries in two weeks what it has failed to do since the budget was brought down. Don’t expect any change of tack, any new spirit of compromise or negotiation. Instead, get ready for a meaner, narrower Team Abbott to fight tooth and claw. To do whatever it takes to stay in the game. To do over whoever gets in the way.

Scott Morrison’s performances on television are disturbing, disgraceful and delusional. Even for a member of the Abbott Cabinet, his performances exceed all reasonable standards of propriety. Granted, he has yet to follow the barking Christopher Pyne in the use of the “grub” word but as a Minister of the Crown, he is an alarming spectacle. Is he mad? Is he a deluded, paranoid megalomaniac? Does he suffer an extreme narcissistic personality disorder? The jury is still out. It could be all of these. And more. This week, however, Morrison revealed a vital clue. He has a great moral burden.

Now a great moral burden in itself would cripple many of our best-adjusted. But tip this into the mix of other the other toxic ingredients in the noxious brew that is Morrison’s peculiar psychopathology and you can expect a monstrous horror show to result.    

A great moral burden. What does Morrison’s latest utterance signify? Let’s unpack the phrase a little. What he’s saying is that stopping the boats is a moral crusade. His moral crusade. By putting the fear of God into would be asylum seekers, he is sparing their lives. If they don’t try to cross the water, they won’t drown. If they know they could be moved to Cambodia, refugees will never darken our shores again. Let one or two be beaten to death in camp. It’s all part of the same humanitarian plan. Morrison’s sword of moral righteousness protects desperate refugees from themselves. Asylum seekers’ feckless desire to flee persecution, starvation and death will no longer lead to their drowning. They will stay at home and safely face torture, rape, genocide and starvation.

Morrison’s oafish intransigence, his obduracy, his sophistry, his captious reasoning all make sense now. He is taking it all upon himself.  Worried that the cruel, wilful inhumanity of turning back the boats has made Australia an international pariah? Worried that we have overstepped the mark of decency? Concerned that our lack of charity is nothing more than a cynical attempt to win votes amongst the talkback electorate? Fussing over the diplomatic ruckus our antics have caused us? Fear no longer. Morrison has capered to our rescue. He is our scapegoat.

In Biblical times, a goat would be sacrificed to atone for the sins of the flock, giving rise to the word scapegoat. Surely this is a clue to the nature and function of Morrison’s moral burden. Little wonder that the man can’t think straight. In his mind, he’s under sentence of excommunication. No wonder he can’t answer a question. He’s saddled with the burden of his party’s moral turpitude.  That look he gets when he is ignoring the question, prevaricating or point blank shunning the responsible exercise of authority is the look of a goat about to have its neck severed by a righteous blade.

Morrison’s discourse can be baffling. He’s talks out the back of his neck. He froths at the mouth. He talks over the top of questioners. He lies. Or he refuses to say anything. But you get that when you take upon yourself the sins of the whole nation. You get that when you spend too long in the company of Abbott’s cabinet. Let Morrison keep his ear turned to talkback and Murdoch’s tabloids. Let him maintain that by making life hell for boat people, he is exercising his duty of care. His moral duty. If they don’t come to Australia, they won’t drown. Expect further rabid nonsense and similar messianic delusion.  Until one day when its purpose is served, Abbott inevitably eases Morrison’s burden. Puts him out of his misery in a flash as he kneels beside a busy road.

Tony Abbott is no fast talker. To fix this, he is slowing his speech down. Craftily, he’s turned his natural lack of fluency into a deliberate strategy.  He temporises. He repeats himself. He drags things out. Part of this is a running repair job. Abbott has developed a much slower speaking rate because its repetitions and its slower pace gives himself time to think up the next thing to say. It also puts the brakes on the meandering sentences that come naturally. A larger and more worrying part of it, however, is his determination to slow down debate.  On the one hand this could be seen as admirable almost heroic if it were not futile. Abbott is trying to slow the flow of information. Canute-like, hand upraised he steps into the path of the information age juggernaut. On the other hand he seems to enjoy the wilful obstruction of the public’s right to know what the government is up to.

 

Abbott is not gifted at persuasion. Instead, in his set pieces, he sounds like a tabloid headline. With perverse delight, it seems, in annoying the listener, he repeats the same slogans. He’ll wear you out rather than win you over. At base is a crafty evasiveness. Abbottspeak is not about sharing information. It’ s about power and control. It’s about withholding information and obstruction. And it defines his government’s style. Other senior members have quickly picked it up. The long-running surrealist soap opera of Border Security, starring Scott Morrison is a bravura performance of the Abbott government’s house style. Worried about the apparent cruelty, inhumanity or irresponsibility of stopping the boats? We have nothing we can tell you. The message is move along: nothing to see here. We will tell you only what we want you to know. On immigration that’s next to nothing. It’s a tactic that Goebbels would have been proud of. But for a contemporary Australian prime minister and his government it can only ultimately erode both authority and credibility.

 

Abbott clearly views communication as transmitting a signal. For him, communication is primarily about getting the message out. It’s not an attempt at dialogue. Dialogue entails listening. And mutual respect. And it leads to compromise, the quicksand of the weak-willed. Of course you may ask questions. But voice your question and we will make you sorry you ever asked. The hapless listener feels as if she’s been harangued by uncle at a family gathering .  Ear bashed, patronised and held prisoner.

 

Ultimately, Abbottspeak is less about changing minds than massaging the prejudices of those already converted. Abbott’s glib phrases, simplistic logic and his judgemental approach have more in common with the shock jocks of talkback radio than any more enlightened or elevated discourse. And more than any other prime minister, Abbott is side coaching our transformation from democracy to shock-jock-racy. The nation’s infatuation with echoes of its own popular prejudices and its affection for simplistic, reductive thinking is nurtured, fostered by those who know it yields them power. 

 

Enter Team Australia. A new phrase is not a bad thing in itself. With Abbott, there’s plenty of room for expansion. And a new idea would be welcome. But there’s nothing new about Team Australia. Don’t frighten the horses. Abbott does not in any way a resemble a deep or even an original thinker. Nor is this his intention. Like Howard he understands the need to keep us comfortable if not relaxed. In place of ideas we are given recycled, threadbare hobby horses and clapped out rhetorical clichés of talkback radio. The kindest thing you could say is that in some way the man is representative of the comfortable middle class, and he trots out familiar prejudices as he signals for allies amidst the great unthinking complacent public of his fan club. The most worrying thing is his dog-whistling to conformity and group think, the signal to his audience to exercise their prejudices, let them off the leash.

 

Is Team Australia a new nag in the race to the bottom? It doesn’t look or sound that new. It’s a cryptic phrase and you won’t find any definition offered by its creator. Nor is one needed. What does Team Australia mean? What does it stand for? The context is instructive. It lies in the demise of Brandis’ proposals for ‘reform’ of the Racial Discrimination Act. For a while, it looked as if bigots would be protected. In Brandis’ notorious phrase, a bigot has a right to be a bigot. Yet, the Abbott Government ultimately and one senses reluctantly backed down. No doubt at some cost of support from Abbott’s right wing power base, proposed changes to Section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act were shelved. Ironically, it came at the cost of support from the Muslim community.

 

With typically jerky timing and co-ordination, Abbott wheeled out a new horse, Team Australia. urging us all to jump aboard. Abbott said changes to 18C had become ‘complicated’. At the same time, however, he unveiled a new anti-terrorism package. Abbott said it was a “leadership call” that aimed to help in “preserving national unity on the essentials”. It was … ‘time for all of us to come together to be part of ‘Team Australia’ in order to combat the threat of terrorism.

 

The team sounds less like a call to unity than a shrewd attempt to further division and promote intolerance. It boosts fear and anxiety. When he followed up by saying that extremists could be carrying out beheadings here in Australia in future, Abbott clearly signalled that he intends to continue to frighten the electorate into giving increasing power and information to the state whilst at the same time reducing or constricting its citizens’ right to know what their government is up to. Their right to a government that is answerable for its actions and responsible in its conduct. Worthy of their trust.