Scott Morrison’s position on the monarchy, stated in 2018, was typically clichéd: “If it ain’t broke, I don’t see the need to fix it.”
Pragmatically viewed, he had a point. We have arguably the most stable, least violent democracy in the world. As long as nobody breaks it, the system could continue forever.
The problem is, it’s broken — because Morrison broke it.
Is it that bad, really? Yes, it is. Morrison drove a stolen garbage truck through the middle of our constitutional arrangements, exposing their frailty in a way we cannot now unsee.
Our system has held together so long because it consists of a spare, utilitarian written constitution, existing within a web of conventions. To an occasional and limited extent, those conventions sometimes get held by the High Court to amount to implications, words not in the text of the constitution but necessarily implied to support the system of government it dictates (and therefore legally enforceable).
Mostly, however, the conventions exist in the ether, observed but not seen, followed but not given much thought.
The constitution entrenches the tripartite form of government — legislative, executive and judicial. It says very little about the executive arm, just enough to make it clear that the governor-general (as the Queen’s representative) heads it, and delegates its functioning to the ministers he or she appoints.
The rest is left to the central convention of the Westminster system: the concept of “responsible government”. The High Court has always recognised this as intrinsic, and defines it as “a system by which the executive is responsible to the legislature and, through it, to the electorate”.
It’s a neat and simple design — ministers hold and wield the powers of governmental authority, appointed to do so by the governor-general as head of state. They must be members of Parliament, and they are responsible and accountable to Parliament. Parliament, in turn, is accountable to the voters, because its members are our elected agents.
As Solicitor-General Stephen Donaghue QC concluded in his report to the prime minister on Morrison’s weird and secret acquisition of ministries in 2020 and 2021, the key to all this is transparency:
The end result is that, to the extent that the public and the Parliament are not informed of appointments that have been made under s 64 of the Constitution, the principles of responsible government are fundamentally undermined. Neither the people nor the Parliament can hold a minister accountable for the exercise (or, just as importantly, for the non-exercise) of particular statutory powers if they are not aware that the minister has those powers.
There were technical problems with how Morrison and his staff went about getting him appointed to the five ministries, but Donaghue confirmed that the appointments were lawful and the fact they were not announced did not change that, or break any law.
However, the secrecy was not just bizarre and indefensible, it smashed the principle of responsible government because, as Donaghue said, how can we hold a person responsible for doing their job when we don’t know they even have it?
When you look at it that way, it’s just classic Scott Morrison, isn’t it? Throughout his public career, he has constantly demonstrated his twin passions: zero responsibility and maximum secrecy.
But the recognition that Morrison never met a convention he wasn’t happy to destroy doesn’t help us now. It’s broken: we did not have responsible government from at least early 2020 to the 2022 election, and he demonstrated how easy it was to do it. The fact that the consequences were nothing compared to the carnage wrought by Trump or Johnson is just a lucky result of Morrison’s other defining features: laziness and incompetence.
So we have a choice: convince ourselves that what has been broken can be quietly glued together and put back on the shelf, because the bull has left the china shop and we’re sure we’ll keep the next one out. Or accept that we need to change the locks.
Donaghue lays out some options in his report, to ensure that, in future, Parliament and the people will be able to know who their ministers are and which departments they’re administering. That just requires simple legally enforceable rules mandating the publication and updating of that information as soon as each appointment or change is made.
But what about the monarchy? Has Morrison wrecked that too? No, because he could have done the same to a president if the constitution were otherwise no different. He did, however, co-opt the governor-general to his destructive scheme, and thereby compromised the role of the head of state.
Donaghue found that the governor-general was bound by convention to do as Morrison advised. Accordingly, the backstop of responsible government proved to be nothing more than a cypher for an irresponsible prime minister.
Bulldozer that Morrison was, as he was merrily wrecking a foundational plank of our democratic system, he took a big chunk off the credibility of the Crown as well. When we come to seriously contemplate a republic, it’s a lesson we’ll do well to remember. The most powerful conventional assumption of all — that even the worst prime minister will ultimately respect the rules — is gone.
