Scott Morrison appearing unruffled at a podium isn't enough to bring calm to a crisis

Scott Morrison made two interesting observations this week that didn’t get much attention in the melee.

The first involved Australia’s relationship with China and the US. About a month ago, I wrote a column pointing to the prime minister’s careful efforts to articulate a more independent posture on defence in an era when the two great powers of the century are unreliable.

Let’s pick up this thread and transit to a national security forum in America this week – a gathering Morrison addressed via videolink. The prime minister delivered a keynote speech and then took questions.

During the Q&A, Morrison told attendees it would be a mistake to assume that Australia and the United States had “an identical outlook on China”. This might come as a surprise to people, because it cuts across some of the foghorn feelpinions and the fan fiction that can sometimes substitute for political coverage.

Related: Scott Morrison urges China and US to uphold common rules that promote global stability

Obviously I don’t conduct focus groups for a living, but I reckon if I asked a group of not very politically engaged people whether Australia had a measurably different position on China from the US, most people would think Morrison and Donald Trump had exactly the same view, because the political class both here and in America spends a lot of time being hawkish about Beijing. But there are differences.

Morrison traversed the nuances at the Aspen Security Forum. He said Australia and the US were “highly integrated, and aligned on our overall macro view”. But he also noted Australia saw China through a different lens from the Trump administration, because our economic relationship with Beijing was different. It was “mutually beneficial”.

“I think one of the errors that is made about analysing Australia’s position, and one of the criticisms that is made of Australia is that somehow that it’s tied inextricably to the precise rhetoric of what is done in the United States,” Morrison said. “Now, that is just simply not true, and to look at it in that way would be to misunderstand Australia and to miss out on the opportunity of working in Australia, with Australia, in a more constructive way.”

At one level this situation report from Morrison is what Malcolm Turnbull would call a penetrating glimpse of the obvious. Australia is a sovereign nation, not the 51st state of America. We will always pursue our own interests when it comes to international relations. But Morrison’s periodic reflections have both a purpose and a context.

The prime minister was pointing to an air gap between Australia and America on China for an elite American foreign policy audience. This air gap has been visible a few times in recent months. Australia successfully sidestepped being drawn into a hyperventilating Trumpian/Fox News diplomatic debacle about whether coronavirus was released from a Wuhan lab rather than originating in the city’s wet market. Australia also recently agreed to increase defence cooperation with the US in the South China Sea – but the government stopped short of making any specific new commitment on freedom of navigation operations, despite pressure from the Trump administration.

This is all pretty interesting, watching Morrison attempting to navigate the complexities of these two relationships. But charting nuance is out of fashion, and these days a lot of mainstream coverage of foreign affairs and defence is Le Carre or bust.

Morrison’s second interesting observation this week, entirely unrelated to the first, was about Covid-19. But it lodged in my brain because you don’t often hear leaders muse out loud about intangibles. Morrison got a question at the same American national security forum about Australia’s early success in flattening the curve of infections. What were the elements of that early success?

Morrison listed a number of practical factors – a quick public health response, closing the border, the discipline of the Chinese Australian community in not transmitting infections before compulsory quarantine was imposed. Then there was the creation of the national cabinet, the ad hoc governance mechanism invented on the fly in March. The prime minister said governments within the Australian federation chose to work together, “which provided a sense of national calm”.

“Calm has been critical,” he said.

Morrison is right about equanimity having a tangible value during a crisis. People have been reassured by governments working collaboratively, and largely competently, during the first six months of 2020, and reassured people are more likely to cooperate with instructions from authorities.

Morrison would dearly like things to remain calm, both practically and politically, which is why he assigned a specific value to that particular quality when he was asked to list what had worked in Australia during the first wave.

Perhaps the prime minister, in his rare quiet moments, is wondering how long calm can be preserved. Morrison knows the country is now in the most dangerous phase of the pandemic, as the West Australian premier, Mark McGowan, put it starkly on Friday. The resources of the federation are trained on efforts to contain the outbreak in Victoria, and trying to ensure that people and businesses have the support they need to endure through the coming weeks and months.

It took him a while to find his stride, but Morrison now prioritises the projection of calm in his public appearances, because that’s what leadership in a crisis demands.

But whether people remain calm in a pandemic flattening lives and livelihoods indiscriminately isn’t a function of whether the prime minister appears unruffled at a podium. It is a function of what governments do, and whether people maintain confidence in the strategies.

I said last weekend Daniel Andrews had significant questions to answer about the failures in hotel quarantine that sparked the second wave, and about deficiencies in the public health infrastructure in the state. Doubtless there are more serious issues to unpack in Victoria that are not as obvious to me from this distance.

But it is ridiculous to think Andrews is the only leader whose record requires interrogation, which is the self-serving drumbeat starting to emerge from some federal ministers, amplified by rolling News Corp commentary. Morrison also has questions to answer about why he was slow to respond to calls for paid pandemic leave, and why the commonwealth wasn’t sufficiently on the front foot about the risks in aged care facilities, which is a federal responsibility.

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Evidence emerged this week that Victoria was also culpable for failing to report infections in aged care. It is not just the federal government, but it seems deficient that we are now months into the pandemic, and the national cabinet is only now resolving a nationally coordinated rapid response protocol for the sector. That protocol is two weeks away.

It is also reasonable to ask whether Morrison moved too quickly in cutting income support. Only three weeks ago, Morrison extended but cut the jobseeker and jobkeeper payments on a rationale that people needed to be weaned off the income support provided for the crisis because these programs were, as the prime minister put it, “burning taxpayers’ cash” at an unsustainable rate.

Treasury advised the government to tread carefully in lowering the rate of the jobkeeper payment, particularly for casuals and part-time workers, saying it was “not clear that the net benefit of these changes would be positive for such a time-limited program”, and on Thursday night the government, to quote itself, resolved to burn more cash by broadening eligibility for the subsidy. Why? Because circumstances demanded it.

People serving up public lectures about accountability need to understand that imperative cuts all ways.