Once considered the Liberal party’s Messiah, Scott Morrison leaves behind a complicated and controversial legacy.
Australia’s 30th prime minister announced on Tuesday that he will quit parliament to “take on new challenges in the global corporate sector and spend more time with my family”.
From the “miracle” election win in 2019 to a devastating election loss in 2022, Morrison helmed the nation through the pandemic and inked the Aukus military pact. His career may be looked back on in future as having irreversibly changed the Liberal party itself – but perhaps not in ways he would necessarily like to remembered for.
Here are some of the defining moments of Morrison’s leadership.
Aukus
The trilateral security pact with the US and UK, giving Australia rare access to nuclear-powered submarines, may be Morrison’s most immediate legacy – destined to reshape Australia’s military, diplomatic and economic fortunes. The current Coalition leader, Peter Dutton, called Aukus the “standout achievement of [Morrison’s] Government”. Anthony Albanese’s decision to only dig in deeper behind it means the bipartisan policy might outlast anything else Morrison touched in his four years as prime minister.
Of course, the decision was far from a perfect triumph. The unbridled fury of Emmanuel “I don’t think, I know” Macron accusing Morrison of lying over the contract for French-made submarines, and the subsequent leaking of text messages between the leaders, raised questions about Morrison’s honesty.
The Covid response
Covid became the defining issue of Morrison’s government, with a dichotomy between Australia’s world-leading early response to the pandemic, and later outrage over vaccine supplies, aged care deaths and bitter feuds with state premiers.
Dutton praised Morrison as navigating “some of the most difficult challenges an Australian Prime Minister has known since the Second World War”.
Decisions made by Morrison and state leaders at national cabinet doubtless saved countless lives. Australia’s Covid vaccination rate ended as one of the highest in the world, overcoming early outrage over jab allocations or delays.
The eye-watering cost of jobkeeper payments, jobseeker boosts, free vaccines and bespoke support packages for various industries redefined how Australians thought about the economy and what governments actually did. Australia, put into effective economic hibernation, avoided major financial shocks and death tolls seen in other parts of the world – but still has to deal with the failures and many deaths in aged care and the as-yet-unknown future toll of long Covid.
Morrison’s secret ministries
The other legacy from the pandemic was Morrison’s side-hustle gigs as minister for health, resources, home affairs, finance and treasury – mostly without the knowledge of the ministers actually sworn into those roles. The mind-boggling revelations of Morrison’s secret ministries, only exposed when mentioned in passing inside a book on the government’s pandemic response, came tumbling out in the early days of the Albanese government.
Albanese commissioned an inquiry to investigate Morrison’s appointments, with legal advice they had been lawful – although highly irregular. Morrison defended the decision as “safeguards” in case ministers had fallen ill, but it was later found he used his power as resources minister to block a gas project. He initially admitted three extra ministerial positions before the Bell inquiry found another two Morrison claimed he had overlooked.
Morrison was officially censured in the House of Representatives. The saga was the most unvarnished reminder of his penchant for secrecy in office, from the refusal to comment on “on-water matters” while immigration minister, to the secrecy and maladministration exposed through the robodebt royal commission.
Hawaii
The family holiday that arguably changed a government. Morrison’s 2019 trip to Hawaii, which he said was a way to make it up to his young daughters for cancelling a previous holiday, started the member for Cook’s slide. From secretly nipping out while the country battled the black summer bushfires without notifying the public, to his office telling journalists that they were wrong with their information that he had been seen departing for Hawaii, the entire saga remains one of the more scandalous in recent Australian political history.
It continued even after he returned, with Morrison being heckled by exhausted fire victims in the New South Wales town of Cobargo and being rejected for handshakes. Viral footage showed a volunteer firefighter telling media “tell the prime minister to go and get fucked from Nelligen”. And then there was Morrison’s “I don’t hold a hose, mate” comment on 2GB radio – the radio grab that inspired a thousand attack ads and billboards from Labor and the unions.
‘Not far from here, such marches, even now, are being met with bullets’
Morrison’s response to allegations about sexual misconduct and culture inside parliament further turned public opinion against him. His fumbling response to Brittany Higgins’ allegations, his seeming inability to appreciate the gravity of the situation until he spoke to his wife (“Jenny has a way of clarifying things; she always has”), and his reluctance to engage with thousands of demonstrators who gathered outside Parliament House for the March4Justice soon saw pundits declare Morrison had a problem with women voters.
His declaration that it was a “triumph of democracy” that the campaigners for women’s justice were able to rally without being “met with bullets” caused outrage.
Quick action against Liberal staffers who filmed themselves engaging in lewd acts at work in separate incidents and the creation of the Jenkins review into parliament’s workplace culture were seemingly not enough to paper over the inadequacies of the initial response.
The former Australian of the Year Grace Tame’s side-eye at Morrison, in official photos at the Lodge in January 2022, further fuelled such discussion.
Strawberries
Morrison’s reliance on photo opportunities and action shots was initially seen by some as a smart media play, reinforcing his initial “daggy dad” persona.
The overreliance on staged stunts later saw him branded “Scotty from marketing” by his critics, which turned his keen eye for photo ops into a hindrance.
An early indication of Morrison’s aptitude in this respect was how he managed a spate of needles being planted in punnets of strawberries. Just weeks after becoming prime minister, Morrison elevated the issue to a national crisis and rushed emergency laws through parliament to further criminalise such needle contamination.
He shot walk-and-talk videos through parliament imploring Aussies to keep buying the berries (“I’m making a curry, Jen’s making a pav”), vowed harsh crackdowns on perpetrators and undertook road trips through strawberry country. It later emerged Morrison didn’t actually travel on the campaign bus for large stretches through Queensland, even as he shot videos from the seats telling people he was “back on the strawberries”.
🚌 Broadbeach ➡️ Chambers Flat Strawberry Farm
— Scott Morrison (@ScottMorrisonMP) November 5, 2018
Today we announced Working Holiday Maker visa changes to support our farmers and their local communities.#BackingQueenslanders pic.twitter.com/zjyQF1AqsA
Stage-three tax cuts
Even this week, one of Morrison’s signature policy achievements may be up for renovation. The multiyear tax changes, legislated in 2018, are finally scheduled to come into full force from July with “stage three” in effect – at least, for the time being, as the Albanese government contemplates tinkering with some elements.
The tax cuts are an article of faith for the Liberal party, with Dutton already claiming that any changes made by Labor would be a broken promise that should require Albanese’s resignation. In his resignation statement, Morrison wrote “delivering tax cuts for individuals (stages 1,2 & 3) and small business” as one of his highlights in office.
The Coalition’s refusal to split their tax cut bill, as Labor had asked – so they could back earlier cuts for lower incomes without backing the stage-three cuts geared at the wealthy – forced the opposition into supporting them, creating the timebomb Albanese faces today.
The ‘miracle’ win – and crushing defeat
Morrison won the “unwinnable” election in 2019, then lost the next election which could pave the Liberal party’s fortunes for a generation.
With Bill Shorten expected to sail into the Lodge in May 2019, Morrison out-campaigned Labor to secure a result that wrote him into Liberal folklore. He famously told his victory party “I have always believed in miracles”, keeping the Coalition in office another three years largely off his own effort.
Three years later Morrison was turfed from office – with a badly wounded Liberal party losing prized blue-ribbon seats in Kooyong, Wentworth, North Sydney and more. The “teal” wave broke on Liberal heartland, fuelled by anger over the party’s reticence to advance policies on climate change, integrity and gender equality issues, leaving the Coalition in a tricky position to win enough seats to reclaim government.
The end of the Morrison era led to a fork in the road for the Liberals: to try to win back the teal seats by setting out a more moderate agenda or surrender them in favour of outer-suburban seats held by Labor? Dutton is still choosing exactly what strategy to take, but the latter seems more likely – meaning Morrison’s departure also spells a significant reshaping of the Liberal party into one that could ignore the cities in favour of focusing nearly solely on regional and mortgage belt seats.
Honourable mentions
We can’t fit everything into the above list, but we leave you with some final reminders about Morrison’s Photoshopped white sneakers, his boat-shaped “I stopped these” trophy, the strange affinity with Fatman Scoop, the lump of coal stunt, “there’s a boom up there”, his version of Dragon’s April Sun in Cuba on ukulele and, of course, the “bulldozer” taking down a child on the soccer field in his last days as PM.
