It’s been a bad week for the government’s messaging —and shocking for accountability

For a while there, people seemed to forget that the Prime Minister’s nickname, “Scotty from Marketing”, had been an ironic one, created by the satirical team at the Betoota Advocate.

On the back of stratospheric approval ratings flowing from success in dealing with COVID-19, some commentators would gush at the PM’s marketing and political genius, rather than recall that “Scotty from Marketing” was a reflection of the view that Scott Morrison was all political spin and no substance.

This week has not been a good one for either version of “Scotty from Marketing”. His refusal to front thousands of people outside Parliament House appeared cowardly — consider John Howard fronting pro-gun demonstrators for a comparison.

Reminding everyone, from inside the safety of Parliament House, how lucky they were to be able to protest without getting shot, also probably didn’t really pass the marketing message test.

Space to play or pause, M to mute, left and right arrows to seek, up and down arrows for volume. Watch Duration: 2 minutes 41 seconds2m 41s Scott Morrison addresses March 4 Justice rallies during Question Time

But at the same time, the relentless unfurling of tales of parliamentary mismanagement, a ministry that seems to increasingly consist of members of the living dead, and a lack of accountability, meant the Morrison Government looked more Utopia than Hollow Men; more “Scotty from HR” (you know, the HR guy who is always on a course when you need urgent advice about a personnel matter) than “Scotty from Marketing”.

The thousands of women who marched around Australia on Monday had had enough in general of violence against women, of harassment and bad treatment at work, but were also just really angry that these issues were so often dismissed or swept under the carpet, in politics and beyond.

This is what the shocking story of what happened to Brittany Higgins crystallised: not just that a young woman could be allegedly raped in a minister’s office in the nation’s Parliament, but that it could be swept under the carpet as little more than a political embarrassment.

Yet there remains a low farce element to the way the government is dealing with the reverberations of the Higgins story. And they start at the very top: in the Prime Minister’s office.

A mystery within the Prime Minister’s office

You will recall that, in the first few days after the Higgins story broke, the focus was on trying to determine whether the Prime Minister had known what had happened.

The Prime Minister commissioned the head of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, Phil Gaetjens, to review who in his office knew what about the incident, in an environment where it rather astonishingly seemed to be the case that quite a lot of people knew something had happened, but no-one had bothered to mention it to anyone else, and particularly not to the PM.

It remains a mystery to most people who know how prime ministerial offices work (or any office, really) that you would have to get someone from outside to ask everyone inside what they knew, let alone act on that information.

Brittany Higgins made a surprise appearance at the March 4 Justice at Parliament House this week.(

ABC News: Luke Stephenson

)

But be that as it may, the Opposition was starting to get a little restive this week about how the Gaetjens review was going.

After all, it has been a month since Mr Gaetjens had been tasked with this job and, as Opposition Leader Anthony Albanese pointed out in Parliament on Thursday, Mr Gaetjens had only taken two weeks to report back on the so-called Sports Rorts matter.

(That was an inquiry — the report from which remains secret — to find out whether the then sports minister Bridget McKenzie had breached ministerial standards in allocating grants to sporting clubs, an episode in which it transpired that ministers claimed they hadn’t been told about decisions taken by their staff, or persons unknown, and had never seen an infamous spread sheet which set out grants by electoral margins and party representation. Gaetjens found there were “significant shortcomings” in the way grants were allocated which lacked “transparency”.)

But when Labor’s Tanya Plibersek asked the Prime Minister whether his chief of staff and principal private secretary had been interviewed by Gaetjens about their knowledge of the alleged assault, Scott Morrison answered that these were “matters for the secretary”.

“I don’t involve myself in the investigations or inquiries that the secretary is making independently of me or my office. Those are matters for him. In fact, if I were involved in that process, that would be highly inappropriate.”

That would be a question about the secretary of the PM’s Department, investigating the PM’s office. And it’s not a matter for the PM?

On other matters of accountability

It got better. When Albanese pushed the issue further, the acting Leader of the House Peter Dutton intervened, arguing the question was out of order because “under standing order 98, the Prime Minister does not have responsibility for answering a question that is outside of his responsibility”.

Manager of Opposition business Tony Burke responded that it was hard to know where to start with this intervention.

“[Dutton] referred to standing order 98, where the limitations on what you can be asked are found in subsection (c), where there’s a list of three things: public affairs, administration and proceedings,” Burke told the Speaker of the House of Representatives Tony Smith. He went on:

“Proceedings in the House is the first part of the question, because it references what the Prime Minister previously told the House. In terms of public affairs, I think it would be hard to argue that the government response to the reported sexual assault of Brittany Higgins has not become part of public affairs. In terms of administration, if there is any part of the administration of government that the Prime Minister should have a level of responsibility for, it is the head of the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet.”

Smith allowed the question, but the non-answer from the PM left us none the wiser.

In the Senate, meanwhile, the government was filibustering to try to avoid a debate on an industrial relations bill — which had been gutted because of the government’s failure to win any support for the majority of the bill — to avoid a vote on Jacquie Lambie’s push for a royal commission into veteran suicide, and to avoid debate on the report tabled by a Senate inquiry into the sports rorts saga.

Former sports minister Bridget McKenzie giving evidence at a sports grants Senate inquiry.(

ABC News: Ian Cutmore

)

Back in the House, the Opposition was methodically going through the list of issues in the Attorney-General’s portfolio, determining which ones he would have to excuse himself from, given his current legal action against the ABC.

There was also a question to the PM about why he had sought the advice of the Solicitor-General about the AG’s portfolio responsibilities (in the current circumstances) but did not ask the Solicitor-General about an independent investigation into the allegations of serious sexual assault.

It has not been a good week for the government’s marketing department. But more importantly, it has been a shocker for government accountability.

Laura Tingle is 7.30’s chief political correspondent.