Morrison government’s fall marks end of Howard-era ascendancy

By then, Howardism resembled a degenerative disease. What once had been merely cynical gestures to win votes or wedge opponents had transformed into a terminal cancer of mystical doctrine. They had come to believe their own baseless babble, and they did not get that harassment in the workplace was not part of the culture wars but lived experience. So too human-induced fires, floods and cyclones. They never realised that their ideology did not stand the test of reality: whether it be rain or flame or allegedly being raped metres away from the prime minister’s office.

Scott Morrison concedes defeat on election night.Credit:James Brickwood

It was widely noted that they didn’t get women, though, as Samantha Maiden noted, it was women who finally got them. At root, the problem was that they didn’t get people: not the old, who were left to die unnecessary, wretched deaths while they went to the cricket. Not anyone under 40 who would never own a home, nor the trans kids they damaged or the poor they may have driven to suicide with the illegal and evil “robodebt”, wasting nearly $2 billion of our money in the service of persecution.

They didn’t get kindness or decency, that the suffering in the theatres of cruelty they called border defence not only distressed but shamed many Australians. They didn’t get that their ceaseless rorting and corruption offended people who built lives around trust and honesty.

While our artists were loathed, our scientists belittled, and our journalists pursued by a politicised federal police for exposing alleged war crimes, party hacks and corporate drones were routinely rewarded with sinecures and board seats and the bling of yet another Order of Australia, a currency now more debased than the Iranian rial.

And as though it were the play within the play, Andrew Hastie, rising star of the Liberal Party, described a recognisable moral hell in recent testimony to the Ben Roberts-Smith trial.

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Confirming comments he had made to journalists about being a SAS soldier in Afghanistan, Hastie said: “There were days where I felt it was a closed universe, where you can make up your own morality on the grounds you wanted to and it was a dark and haunting and incredibly unnatural feeling”.

Invoking Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, famously about a man’s descent into murderous tyranny, he said, “some guys went up the Congo.” Hastie spoke of dreams he’d since had where “we have killed one of our own guys and covered it up”. He said it spoke to “moral trauma”.

Hastie’s dream strangely resonates with a larger, national moral trauma that has played out over decades, reaching in Morrison its feverish apotheosis. Australia was an increasingly illiberal democracy in which we were ever more unsafe and more unequal. We were both inured to and haunted by the idea that politics without a moral basis was the only politics possible.

On Saturday, that nightmare abruptly ended. It turned out politicians couldn’t make up their own morality to explain away their crimes without consequence. The historic significance of the election is that it was the people who put an end to not only the Morrison government but also the Howard ascendancy and with it, the two-party system.

Many weren’t voting for a party or a program. Many had lived the Armageddon of climate change as flood and fire and drought. They were not afraid of change for the better. Trusting in each other, in the idea that politicians should answer to them, they held to the principle that they no longer would be told who their member would be and what that member would stand for. They were standing up for a future they were brave enough to believe we should, and we can, address. They dared to hope.

A tearful Priya Murugappan celebrates with daughters Kopi and Tharni on hearing the news that they can return to Biloela.Credit:Home to Bilo campaign

That night, a post popped up on my phone showing a photo of two small girls, each with an arm around the other, smiling at a TV screen depicting the election result. It was the Murugappan children, Australians both, imprisoned with their asylum seeker parents for years at a cost of millions of our dollars.

A caption said it all: “Thank you, Australia. It is finally time to bring Priya, Nades, Kopi and Tharni home to Bilo.”

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The Murugappans were finally going home to Biloela and it felt that we were going home with them, that Australia was returning to its best instincts and away from its worst.

But those who had chosen to go up the Congo were not returning, not now, not for a very long time, and perhaps never.

Richard Flanagan is an Australian writer. He won the 2014 Man Booker Prize for his novel The Narrow Road to the Deep North.

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