It’s not easy to overstate how grossly unsuited Scott Morrison was for office. Never before has the nation been led by a moral degenerate so hopelessly mendacious, so unserious, so full of righteous incompetence, and so brazen in his sly contempt for political norms and the pleasure he derived in debasing them.
“I am the custodian of the ministerial standards,” said he of five secret ministries during the Christian Porter blind trust scandal. “I take them very seriously … All of my ministers seek to uphold those standards at all times.”
Yet if recent days have proved anything, it’s that we’ve underestimated how deeply his slippery and scandal-prone politics have infected and emptied basic democratic conventions of much of their content across the nation.
In the past week, many on the right have steadfastly rallied behind Gladys Berejiklian, feigning moral indignation at the findings of corruption, and recasting the disgraced former premier as little more than the hapless victim of a “bum” man or a rogue anti-corruption body bent on forswearing the presumption of innocence.
Hence Peter Dutton’s monotoned insistence that Berejiklian is “not a corrupt person”, Trent Zimmerman’s salty description of her as “scrupulously honest and decent”, Matt Kean’s earnestly learned judgment that the findings of the Independent Commission Against Corruption “don’t pass the pub test”, and The Australian’s hollow concern at the damage wrought by “show trials”.
Theirs is the language of unreality. A theatre of the absurd. The positively unhinged mutterings of those who have retreated into denial, seeking refuge in their safe space, or who otherwise haven’t bothered to read the report’s six-page summary, much less the entire two volumes.
But what was more extraordinary, and what should provoke incredulity, was the decision of the state’s newly-minted Labor premier to echo the chorus of unfiltered outrage by flirting with a new and dangerous precedent at the expense of the old.
“I think that it’s important that there’s not an automatic resignation, or a suspension from public life, while [an anti-corruption] inquiry is taking place,” Chris Minns, unprompted, told reporters this week, pointing out he was “not prepared” to agree the inquiry had correctly judged Berejiklian’s conduct to be corrupt.
Seemingly concerned his position hadn’t been made abundantly plain, the premier added: “I realise a lot of people might be at home shaking their head [at the report’s findings] saying, ‘How hard is it to be a good person?’”
And as if to sheet home the point, he then said, when pressed, that he couldn’t possibly say whether or not he’d accept the same conduct from one of his own ministers, because — he reasoned — “rarely if ever” would precisely the same circumstances arise.
It’s unclear whether Minns was cleverly evading the issue by giving a formidably dim answer, or whether he is a formidably dim person giving a clever, albeit disturbing, answer.
What was evident, in the obvious licence in the language used, was that he wasn’t giving some random soliloquy. On the contrary, he seemed to be brandishing an olive branch to the opposition of a most dangerous and unthinking kind.
Dangerous, because it’s not every day the most powerful politician in the state openly invites a “discussion” aimed, no less, at jettisoning longstanding democratic convention, whatever its logical conclusion. And unthinking, because one need only turn their mind to the scandal-ridden record of the Abbott-Turnbull-Morrison era to comprehend what lies ahead if norm-torching and corruption find themselves normalised, and deliberately so.
Contrary to Minns’ view, declaring conflicts of interest is not a fraught or difficult task. And the point of resigning, or at least stepping aside, when a corruption probe is afoot is obviously to guard against a collapse of public faith in the system.
Shorn of convention, the twin concepts of ministerial responsibility and accountability situated at the heart of our democracy dissolve into nothing, leaving power and its abuse perilously unmoored.
But Minns surely knows all this. His natural rejoinder — implied, though expressly articulated by Dutton and Zimmerman — is that a politician’s presumption of innocence and entitled self-interest ought to take special precedence over such matters. The ensuing implication in such circumstances forever being: there’s nothing to see here, move along.
Taking the long view, this appeal to the sanctity of the presumption of innocence is a variation of the vaunted rule of law complaints deployed under Morrison. Framed as a kind of moral vanity, those arguments invited the nation to believe any non-judicial inquiry into potential wrongdoing, or resignation in the face of an historic rape allegation, would infringe the rule of law.
In reality, such arguments were always a rhetorical sleight of hand designed to obfuscate transparency and deflect accountability, giving way — almost ironically — to a situation in which government bends the rule of law to its will.
Such deceptions as they operate here are likewise little more than a desire to cast doubt on and undermine both the integrity and existence of anti-corruption bodies. So much finds reflection in Dutton’s insistence that findings of corruption should only be made in a court of criminal law, as well as Kean and Zimmerman’s fiction that it runs contrary to logic to find a person has engaged in corrupt conduct but not refer them for criminal prosecution.
They would know as well as anyone that many manifestations of corruption don’t meet the definition of criminal conduct, and that evidentiary barriers can otherwise stand in the way of a likely conviction.
And so ultimately this is all about power: who wields it, and at whose expense. To deem an anti-corruption inquiry an analogue to a trial, to insist on the “presumption of innocence” over an examination of all the evidence, is to give expression to a system in which corruption is normalised.
To openly ignore those conventions on which democracy rests is to lend weight to a calcified government more given to the holding and abusing of power than governing in the public interest.
It’s from this vantage point that Minns’ open and willing foray into this “debate” reveals a desire to weaken if not demolish norms that otherwise constrain his power. The combined force of the rhetoric is sinister, containing as it does the seeds of a bipartisan counter-insurgency against the public interest in and desire for integrity in government.
Similar observations can be made of federal Labor’s failure to properly embed transparency in its national anti-corruption body, notwithstanding its numbers to do so.
All of which is why we’d be fooling ourselves to suppose the legacy of Morrison has not licensed a casual degradation and coarsening of norms, and one that threatens to return or keep the country in the sewer for years to come.
