After yesterday’s spectacular media conference to justify his secret multiple ministries, it’s clear even to Scott Morrison’s few remaining friends within the Liberal Party that the former prime minister is a truly, profoundly weird man.
As I pointed out in Crikey’s Lies and Falsehoods series and book, one of the defining characteristics of Morrison is that — like Donald Trump — he lied when he didn’t need to. For Morrison, lying went beyond political expediency or the requirements of standard political discourse to something deeper, as if he enjoyed the sheer act of claiming something was the case when it plainly was not.
And that characteristic is now at the heart of the big question around his multiple ministries: why he kept everyone in the dark about it, including the affected ministers.
In failing to explain why he kept his acquisition of their ministries secret from his colleagues — not wanting them to act any differently in their jobs, not wanting voters to misinterpret it, he lamely offered — Morrison implies the most obvious reason: he didn’t trust them. Didn’t trust them to do their jobs properly if they knew, perhaps — or didn’t trust them to not immediately remove him from the prime ministership.
The line for Labor is obvious: Morrison didn’t trust his senior ministers, so why should voters? The only saving grace is that most of them won’t be around in 2025 anyway.
Who he did trust are The Australian journalists Simon Benson and Geoff Chambers, who were told about this unprecedented trashing of norms and deceit of cabinet “contemporaneously”, Morrison said, dropping his amanuenses right in it. They knew all along and said nothing until after an election handily lost by Morrison despite News Corp’s best efforts. It turned out Morrison’s trust in the two journalists was wholly justified.
What kind of leader trusts Murdoch journalists more than his own treasurer, finance minister, resources minister, home affairs and industry ministers — let alone cabinet, Parliament and voters?
Morrison’s paranoia about his own ministers — which would only have grown as he steadily stockpiled his secret ministries — was of a piece with his long-term tendency not merely to deceive but to operate in secrecy and without accountability.
It will all make for a fascinating explanation to Parliament, if Labor decides to censure him, or if he is otherwise required to explain within the chamber exactly why he treated his colleagues that way. And the body language of other MPs while he speaks will be an intriguing accompanying text.
To his psychological profile can be added delusion. There is simply no other word for his media conference yesterday, which was predicated on three basic claims: his handling of the pandemic was spectacularly successful and voters are grateful (evidently they all voted informal on May 21, but that’s another story); that you can only understand his actions if you were prime minister at the time; and that his actions were justified because everyone was blaming him for everything that went wrong.
Morrison thinks he did nothing wrong and it’s our problem — and that of his colleagues — if we think there was anything inappropriate about trashing political conventions and keeping it secret. It’s an elaborate version of “I apologise if you’re offended”. They’re the words of a man who has no grasp of the importance of political conventions or norms, and no idea of the kind of trust required for cabinet government to operate effectively. Morrison simply believed that whatever he wanted to do was necessarily right, regardless of the basic requirements of a democracy.
His colleagues now profess to be outraged by Morrison’s behaviour as a leader, but were they so blithely unaware he was like this? Were they — despite working closely with him, despite seeing how he operated, despite knowing firsthand what kind of individual he was — unaware he was capable of lying to them and trashing some of the most basic norms of Australian democracy?
Of course not. So many knew. So many fled when he became PM. None had the gumption to tell voters what Morrison was like ahead of the 2019 election, even as they dissected his profound flaws — more scatologically than psychologically, to be fair — among themselves.
They may now want to disown him, but the Liberal Party owns Morrison completely. They inflicted him on Australians and kept the truth about this man from voters. The result was a paranoid, deceitful and delusional man occupying the top job in Australia at a time of profound national crisis.
How much is the rest of the Liberal Party responsible for Scott Morrison’s behaviour? Let us know your thoughts by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.
