In June 1971, Sir John Bunting, secretary of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, observed that new prime minister Billy McMahon was ‘the most political of all politicians’: demanding, difficult, always reacting to new, feverish urgencies. The result, according to Bunting, was constant crisis. ‘In fact,’ he went on, ‘I have come to look forward to each new crisis because it is the only way I have discovered of being able to be rid of the existing one.’

Bunting could have been writing about Scott Morrison and the government he led in the last parliamentary term (2019–22). A drought was followed by bushfires and then by floods. A pandemic unleashed a public health emergency and unprecedented economic upheaval. The prime minister, a political animal who failed upward into high office, constantly and often ineptly sought to find some way to retain his supremacy.

The subtitle of this volume, then, is a fitting encapsulation of the 2019–22 period. It is also stinging, for the Morrison government also governed by crisis. As this book chronicles, the government’s tendency towards inaction, incrementalism, reactive politicking, and sheer blatant panic often bred fresh catastrophes. ‘Every day a crisis,’ wrote Bunting in 1971, and it was as true for Morrison’s government as it was for McMahon’s.