It’s as if Prime Minister Scott Morrison barely got to enjoy a moment’s relief as the litany of public figures willing to explicitly call him a liar tailed off before they were replaced by an even longer list of people willing to call him a bully.
Crikey has been keeping a list of politicians and prominent figures who have launched scathing attacks on the PM’s character, on and off the record, and today we have a new name to add.
Joining Concetta Fierravanti-Wells, Pauline Hanson, Jacqui Lambie, Julia Banks and others is departing NSW MLC Catherine Cusack. In an excoriating op-ed titled “I’m a Liberal MP and I cannot vote for the re-election of a Scott Morrison government”, she says the Liberal Party has been trashed under Morrison’s watch.
With friends like these…
Look it makes some fairly dubious claims — the idea that the Liberal Party has “no interest group like trade unions (Labor) or environmentalists (Greens)” to overlook a LOT of, say, Fair Work Commission appointments. But all is forgiven for content reasons. Come on, we wouldn’t be without passages like:
I thought forcing moderates to vote for Craig Kelly in Hughes prior to the last election was the worst. But [Morrison] has outdone himself engineering a federal intervention to jump over the organisation altogether … And in the process, our president, Philip Ruddock, who used to be a highly respected party warrior, looks like a complete tool.
Cusack isn’t a stranger to publicly calling out behaviour she doesn’t like. Indeed she resigned two weeks ago amid her disgust for the lack of government support for flood victims in south-east Queensland and northern NSW — and you can see that this instance was a big inspiration behind her claims of Morrison being a bully.
To see the self-serving ruthless bullying that has increased inside the Liberal Party spill over into public policy and the poorest most vulnerable Australians who lost everything in the floods are the targets of this outrageous abuse of morality and power is simply intolerable.
Now if someone would pen one of these pieces when they hadn’t already decided to pack it in …
