Scott Morrison is David Brent
Ever since his ascension to the throne, our finest professional journalists and trolls have attempted to define the shifting nonsense mass that is Scott Morrison’s leadership. It’s a rolling cringefest that we can’t stop watching. There’s the ScoMobile, there’s his galaxy of hats, he’s the dude discussing his first pash, he’s the man with the thumbs up and a coy wink to people’s mums.
Today, The Guardian suggested that he’s our own Billy Joel. Journalist Peter Lewis suggested that Joel, “wrote a mean melody but could only ever attach it to an existing musical trend. From Rat Pack to Motown, from Queen to REM, from a Vienna waltz to an Irish shanty; if you liked the genre, then Billy Joel would scratch your itch. But Joel never created anything that could move music forward; rather than an enduring legacy, the Piano Man is left to serve up his disjointed canon as the regular crowd shuffles in.”
Therefore, he’s Scott Morrison. I kind of see where he’s coming from. He’s been difficult to define, as each new day resets our thinking to zero, a new low. But allow me to add my stream to the urinal. Scott Morrison is David Brent.
You can tell in his pieces to camera. He has the same grandstanding dialect as Gervais’ Frankenstein, replete with pauses in his rhetoric to allow himself to think of the rest of the sentence he started. He speaks in long bursts, but he’s actually saying nothing. He’s buying time, and he’s doing it for the cameras.
We should have noticed this earlier when he brought a piece of coal into work as a punchline. He’ll point out how inappropriate your joke is if you don’t laugh at his. He’ll add innuendo where there’s no place for it. For instance, when Pamela Anderson asked him to use his diplomatic powers to bring Julian Assange home, he offered this reply, because hello.
Like Brent, he wants to be everything to everyone. Like Brent, he hates sexism while wilfully perpetuating it. Like Brent, he’s all about the same set of rules for everyone, but not for his mates. He’s the boss, but no one respects him. He hasn’t earned it. We want Neil from the Swindon branch. It was a mistake, a snag in management that put him up there. But, he’s going to milk it, because he holds the same Brent-level of managerial delusion. He’s there because he’s the only man for the job. He’s the Scott-Meister-General. He’ll sort it out, but only if everyone is watching.
Morrison, like Brent, is an unwelcome distraction. He’s stopping us from getting our done. He’s the orphan of broken bureaucracy and piss-poor management. We listen to him because we have to. He’s management. The bus that Morrison toured around Queensland may be empty, but it is a filling metaphor. He toured the region by jet, pretending that he’s one of the working class. He’s taken over the business meeting to talk about himself. He’s here to lead, to maximise our productivity, but he’s mostly just here for a bit of laugh. Of which he takes as a compliment.
I mean, let’s be honest. We’re not that far off the next election, and as The Guardian noted, he’s in desperate need of another lame reboot. With his brand of hackneyed folksy relatability, I can’t imagine he’ll try anything drastic. But we can dream. I hope he goes the full Brent, replete with a baseball hat perched upon the scalp and Tina Turner power ballad ringing in our ears.
He believes in us, and he wants us to believe in him because we’re simply the best.
