One of the beauties of Crikey’s Arsehat of the Year award is the flexibility of the category. “Arsehat” is such a perfectly polysemous designation.
The public figure subjecting themselves to relentless humiliation is a total arsehat, and so is the despot ruining neighbouring countries and their own. It’s just as vivid and accurate in each usage.
In 2014 then prime minister Tony Abbott beat ISIS for the top gong. This year our departing prime minister Scott Morrison beat Vladimir Putin, going one better than the French football team by successfully defending his 2021 title as Crikey’s Arsehat of the Year.
And, frankly, Morrison may have done even more to earn it this time around. He lead the Coalition to a catastrophic defeat in May’s federal election, which feels inevitable in hindsight, but as Kishor Napier-Raman wrote just before election day, this should have been the one he won.
Whether you credit Morrison or the state premiers for this fact, Australia came out of the early years of the COVID era with a record that was the envy of the world, and many other incumbents in Australia found their constituents extremely keen to stick with what they knew. Yet Morrison, at almost every turn, managed to repel voters.
There was the ongoing policy vacuum, that time he accidentally squished a child, and the inescapable conclusion he left voters with — that he viewed every situation through the lens of cynical politicking, not the national interest.
But what we learnt conclusively in 2022 is that Morrison might not have even been all that good at the politics side of things. As Bernard Keane put it the day after the Coalition was turfed, Morrison was the worst leader for his own side of politics that Australia has ever seen.
Witness the disastrous factional infighting in the lead-up to the election, with Morrison and his “consigliere” Alex Hawke accused of delaying the preselection process until dangerously close to election day so that the federal executive could intervene and install their favoured candidates — candidates like Katherine Deves in Warringah, one of the many culture war moves aimed at the gap where a policy vision ought to be.
It failed miserably, with the Liberal Party’s heart plucked from its chest — candidates who may have formed the core future leadership of the party beaten in Kooyong, Goldstein, Curtin, Wentworth and many other formerly safe seats. It felt like that was it, a farewell as appropriate, poignant and rich as Frank Sinatra singing “Angel Eyes” in 1971.
But just as Sinatra turned out to have hundreds of gigs left in the tank, Morrison wasn’t ready to depart the spotlight just yet. He had one more resounding, bravura encore performance of every trait that delivered him such a comfortable victory in 2021.
There was one more great Morrison scandal this year — maybe his defining scandal — completely in keeping with his aversion to scrutiny, his near compulsion towards dishonesty, and his grandiose accrual of power that he barely seemed to want to exercise.
Via what must be the greatest backfire in attempted hagiography in Auspol history, it was revealed after the election that he had secretly sworn himself into multiple ministries during the crisis. He had kept this information from the public and, in most cases, from the people unwittingly sharing their jobs with him.
And so, like the defining arsehats of the previous decade — Peter Dutton and Tony Abbott — Morrison will have to be awarded the Golden Arsehat for lifetime achievement in the field and be retired from future contention.
As he’s shown in the previous three years, he is uniquely, abundantly equipped with the talents to pick these things up, and as the Morrison government slowly recedes in the rear-view mirror, it’s time to give a new generation of budding Arsehats a chance.
We can thank you for your service, Scott. You were truly one of the greatest this competition has ever seen.
Read about this award’s esteemed counterpart: the 2022 Crikey Person of the Year.
