HAS a new ScoMo been born?
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Given the rate of prime ministerial regeneration in recent times you could be forgiven for thinking a newborn could prevail in an inevitable leadership coup.
No, Scott Morrison, the man who once blithely brandished a lump of coal in parliament and told the house, the country, the world, it “won’t hurt you”, now admits climate change was a factor in pain caused by floods in Queensland and fires in Tasmania.
Turns out slinging rocks in a certain house might get someone hurt.
Or is it just a case of a prime minister in peril somehow seeing the light through the lashing rains and hellish fires?
A cynical take on it would suggest the genealogy of our newborn ScoMo could be traced to voter and internal party revolt.
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These are solipsistic times and as the ScoMo’s most senior minister, Christopher Pyne, surmised, Australian leadership is currently “trapped in a self-obsessed, panic-prone spiral.”
While baby steps might be taken on climate change, the newborn PM still bears a striking similar outline to ScoMo the elder.
Especially on the borders.
He railed against relaxing conditions of entry for sick refugees because of “what poorly thought-out changes can do to our borders”.
Behrouz Boochani, the most recent recipient of the country’s richest writing award, the Victorian Premier’s prize, tweeted this week “the sick people on Manus and Nauru became sick by keeping them in indefinite prison.”
At least an inanimate rock can’t hurt you.
Unfortunately, Mr Boochani couldn’t accept his award in person because he remains in detention on Manus.
Solipsism might preside, but the people are doing something else in practice.
A new survey found about more than a third of women under the age of 30 were having second thoughts about conceiving a child holding fears their potential offspring would face an “unsafe future from climate change”.
Perhaps this will leave the newborn ScoMo a tad lonely in the schoolyard, especially since the rest of his classmates will be on strike protesting the inaction on climate change.
With such a desire for the most sovereign borders in all the land, perhaps some alone time “won’t hurt you”.