Morrison’s delivery failures pile up

Revenge, so the expression goes, is a dish best served cold. Six months after her “humiliation” by the prime minister and “bullying” by Australia Post’s chairman, Christine Holgate gave ice-cold vent to her fury. And while the former chief executive of the nation’s mail service came to the senate inquiry into her demise attired in the white livery of a suffragette, gender discrimination was far from the whole story.

What emerged was the government’s hidden agenda to dismantle Australia Post and privatise it. Holgate’s supporters now see her as something of a Joan of Arc: the heroine prepared to thwart the government’s secretive plan and to save their jobs. Almost 50 years after the word “Watergate” entered the political lexicon as shorthand for a scandal, we now have an Australian version: “Holgate”.

And there were no shortages of other applications in a week that produced even more evidence of “NDISgate”. The Saturday Paper in recent weeks has revealed a determined effort to significantly shrink the National Disability Insurance Scheme in its scope and purpose. Now there are reports of another furtive attack to cut costs and services.

Spectacularly, there was also “vaccinegate”, where the prime minister shut the gate on his promise to have everyone in the nation receiving at least their first Covid-19 jab by October.

In their different ways, all of these issues raise real questions about the values and the competence of the Morrison government. The prime minister is being caught out. The chair of the senate inquiry at which Holgate appeared this week, Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young, says Morrison’s handling of Holgate shows he “just doesn’t get it”.

It’s a hardball view, to be sure, but Holgate herself is convinced that had she been a man, the approach would have been very different. Hanson-Young isn’t the only one to compare and contrast Morrison’s summary execution of the former Australia Post chief on the floor of the parliament with the way Christian Porter was defended with an insistence of due process and a presumption of innocence.

Morrison midweek was still denying that he sacked Holgate from the bully pulpit of parliament. He has conveniently expunged from his memory the bellowed: “She can go.” It was a “willing day in parliament”, he concedes, but it wasn’t his intention “to cause distress”. The closest he got to an apology was saying, “I regret any distress that that strong language may have caused to her and indeed did cause to her.”

At his first news conference the day after Holgate’s excoriating evidence, the prime minister was not asked by the media pack in Perth about Holgate’s resistance to the dismantling and sale of Australia Post. The focus was on the misogynistic aspects of her predicament, which is of a piece with the mire the government has been in since Brittany Higgins’ allegation almost two months ago that she was raped in her parliamentary workplace by a senior colleague.

But if Morrison had any further regrets, it would be that his privatisation druthers had been revealed. Holgate tapped into a sentiment, certainly in regional Australia, when she described Australia Post as “an asset for all Australians” and said “we should stop having secret reviews” into it.

This was a reference to Boston Consulting Group analysis put together to facilitate a sale. The government was refusing to release it. The senate inquiry, and Holgate’s submission, has finally flushed it out. The report recommended cutting up to 8000 jobs, closing 190 post offices and reducing services.

Holgate’s supporters within Australia Post have little doubt the board and its chair, Lucio Di Bartolomeo, were aware of Morrison’s…