so Morrison has fronted the cameras almost 48 hours after the biggest budget spending cut in Australian history was announced by his government.

asked if the $60 billion cut to jobkeeper means employment is tracking better than expected, Morrison says “Treasury has already commented on that”. Treasury.

and that we live in uncertain times christ the mediocrity is as bad as the dishonesty and nastiness. Then he chucks in some campaign pitches because he is campaigning again today.

Morrison says there was no commitment to spend “that amount of money” which is not how the $130 billion was reported at the time. He tries on the weak irrelevant house building analogy again.

he then veers off to the economy re-opening, which Treasury also offered up as a reason for the $60 billion spending cut. And refers to other spending programs.

I think we can safely assume Morrison is going to re-purpose money that was initially allocated to business and branded as being for workers to regional grants-type pork barrel spending.

he says “Fiona and I are social distancing” and laughs. Nobody else laughs. And that the “other curve” is jobs. His tone takes a radical pitch and volume turn, he is sort of half-screaming, that his government is a jobmaker. Theres the new slogan. Jobkeeper out, jobmaker in.

“this is the government that brought the budget back into balance”, Morrison lies about the seven straight years of Coalition budget deficits and government debt that is off. The. Charts.

christ he is losing his cool really badly here. Up there with the Probyn moment. The misleading sloganeering is coming thick and fast now. He has picked up that the media are not going to toe the government line as compliantly as usual on this one.

bold move into community sport here. He applauds the work the AIS has done to get community sport back up. Wait did he just say “ARL and AFL”?

lots of emissions reduction nonsense, before he steps back to give the Liberal Party candidate a platform on the public broadcaster to campaign in a bye-election. She believes the climate is changing, she says. Really.

next Q is back to the PM on the arts sector. Does he have some support for the arts? Morrison says there have been some initiatives and there will be more. Sounds legit. Reverts to by-election campaigning.

Q: borders. Is September too long before re-opening the QLD border? No others mentioned.
A: border closures are not national cabinet decision. That was a “unilateral decision” taken by those states.

Does he not know what unilateral means?

“these next two years are incredibly important to the many people who live here on the ground in Eden Monaro” says the Prime Minister, jumbling political objectives of the federal Liberal Party - to leverage incumbent power to stay in government - with the task at hand.

and off he fucks. If anybody asked him where he has been since Friday afternoon when the Treasurer announced a $60 billion cut to federal government spending over 6 months, going into a recession, I missed it.

I should add: a pic of the PM was posted to FB at 11:30am, it hit twitter around midday and by 1:00pm Morrison was speaking to the press. And this was 44 hours after reports that his government is cutting $60 billion of proposed “stimulus” spending over 6 months from the budget.

in other words, Morrison is never not campaigning. Whatever the issue, the challenge, the agenda, he workshops a comms strategy on the fly and then executes it. And allocates billions in public money to these campaigns, while never, ever being straight with the public.

this is the overseas holiday writ small and I am not hearing any press gallery voices drawing the obvious comparisons. Presumably because they spent last week writing speculative fictions about Morrison having changed.