For those still wondering if empathy matters in leadership, I present the following fails by prominent leaders who should have learned the lesson by now.
The opportunity to show empathy is rarely greater than in the aftermath of a major crisis, like what we’ve seen across flood-devastated areas in NSW and Queensland. Acting immediately can even be a chance to show you’ve listened and learned from previous mistakes.
It wasn’t to be for Prime Minister Scott Morrison, who you’d think would be desperate for an empathy win given his disappearance during the bushfire crisis and then inability to connect with victims in a meaningful way.
One day out of COVID isolation, he visited Lismore on Wednesday for a staged media visit, meeting a chosen number of residents. He promised more money, yes. But his belated response and days of inaction proved he’d learnt nothing from previous mistakes. There were no daily press conferences or updates in that past week. It took until Morrison was actually on the ground before a national emergency was called, and then more time again for the emergency to extend into Queensland. Morrison shared very few social media posts or even official acknowledgements during the height of the disaster.
To be fair, he had been sick. But that didn’t stop his $9 billion submarines base announcement going ahead during a virtual address, nor should it have prevented him from sending his Deputy or another representative in. He also showed up on camera for comment following Shane Warne’s death. True, there was no IWD address this week from Morrison, which may be a good thing — given his ‘women can’t be lifted at the expense of men’ comments from 2019.
This brings us to Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce. The man dedicated to rural and regional Australia, who you’d assume would make an effort to step up the empathy for those in Northern NSW and regional Queensland.
That also wasn’t to be. Joyce made a mess of a non-apology on 7:30 during an interview with Leigh Sales on Wednesday night when asked if a national emergency should have been declared sooner.
“If people say, well, it should’ve happened last week, well, if we made that mistake, we made that mistake, and we’re sorry for it.”
Perhaps, National Recovery and Resilience Agency coordinator-general Shane Stone, may have some better ideas about empathy, given the name of his agency and its overarching mission in support of Australians?
But Stone instead took the victim-blaming approach, telling the Sydney Morning Herald: ‘‘You’ve got people who want to live among the gum trees – what do you think is going to happen? Their house falls in the river, and they say it’s the government’s fault.’’
Now back to national security, which became much of the focus of this week politically, despite the need for more domestic security as we witnessed in the rising waters what we can expect to see more of: intense weather events.
The most notable absence of empathy must surely come from Peter Dutton, the Minister for Defence.
Leaving aside the fact he’s clearly out campaigning for the top job while the man in that top job has been sick, Dutton’s been leveraging both domestic and international crisises to push his own profile. He does this while at the same time avoiding any sense of accountability for what’s gone wrong, including the delayed arrival of Australian military personnel for those who desperately needed help.
On Thursday, in the midst of the ongoing response and recovery efforts occurring throughout NSW and Queensland, Dutton took the opportunity to make a massive defence announcement: to increase the Defence’s permanent workforce to over 100,000 by 2040, at a cost of $38 billion.
The timing of this announcement is staggering.
In the week of IWD, when safety and women’s groups are desperately calling for more funding to prevent violence against women and children. During a week of extreme weather events where the vulnerability of Australia now and into the future is very much on full display and pleas for more work on climate action are growing louder. In a week that very much proved the big security threats are on our front door – we need extra personnel on the ground, but the current ADF format of how they operate, and how they are deployed (given, even Dutton concedes, it can take many days), simply does not work when it comes to immediately responding to disasters.
To say he used this announcement to turn the spotlight on himself would be an understatement, just look at the tweet that followed the press conference, blurring his colleagues (including the PM) into the background.
Dutton, read the room.
Empathy requires showing accountability. Action must then follow accountability.