‘Scott Morrison is empathetic – without the “em”.’ Those words, spoken on Friday by the Labor party frontbencher Jason Clare, on a national breakfast programme, perfectly encapsulated how Scott Morrison was defeated in the Australian election on Saturday.
Morrison wasn’t saved by his economic management (this Friday Australia’s unemployment rate was confirmed as 3.9 per cent, the lowest in 50 years). Nor by the fact that Australia’s post-Covid economic bounce-back was one of the biggest and quickest in the OECD. He wasn’t saved by his government’s management of the Covid pandemic either, which contained the threat, kept Covid-related death rates exceptionally low and achieved a national double vaccination rate of nearly 95 per cent. And he didn’t survive even though his Labor opponents barely had any constructive policies during these crises.
Instead, the Liberals lost the Australian election in the face of overwhelmingly vicious public opposition, led by Labor leader Anthony Albanese, and because of Morrison’s personal unpopularity with the electorate.
The opposition won by framing this election as a referendum not on Scott Morison the prime minister, but on Scott Morrison the man
After everything Australia has been through in the last three years – fire, flood and Covid – Morrison has been there.
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