Scott Morrison has finally left the Australian Parliament.
"What?" I hear you say. "Is he still there?"
The recent ABC documentary, Nemesis, displaying the entrails of the nine years of Liberal/National government, doesn't exactly make him more appealing. His various colleagues and State counterparts range from diplomatic to scathing. Some suggest he did a good job of the pandemic response. Some of them talk about him as decisive, hard working, committed. Yet he is also called a bully, a misogynist, a liar and a hypocrite. The man himself sits through his long interview, leaning uncomfortably forward in his chair, with his characteristic smirk. Sometimes he expresses regret at the way his words were interpreted, but can't quite bring himself to admit that he actually made mistakes. Even when it comes to his secret swearing in to multiple ministries his regret is perfunctory, and grudging.
For those who missed the story, at various times through 2020 and 2021 he had himself sworn in to a number of ministries that were occupied by others. In 2020 it was Health, but that was done in the open, in the context of a global health emergency, with the agreement of the Health Minister Greg Hunt. Through 2021, though, he was sworn in to Treasury, Finance, Home Affairs and Resources without telling anyone, inside the government or out. It was a dirty little secret between himself and the Governor-General. Resources Minister Keith Pitt found out when Morrison made a decision on a controversial issue in his portfolio. He was unable to repeat his response on camera. The others found out months after they had been sent into opposition, or out of the parliament altogether, when they read about it in the paper.
It was bad. It showed that he neither trusted nor respected his colleagues, that he was fundamentally dishonest, and that he saw the answer to every problem, real or imagined, as giving himself more power. Dare I say the word megalomania?
To be honest, I see all this stuff as theatre. Sure, his colleagues felt betrayed, but that is not Morrison's legacy. Morrison's legacy, from his time as Immigration Minister, Social Services Minister, Treasurer and Prime Minister, is that he spread pain and suffering wherever he went.
To be fair, not everything he touched turned to shit. He managed to do a reasonable job with the pandemic, particularly early on. He came up with the National Cabinet idea which ensured quick, united decision-making, at least until it didn't. Health advice was front and centre along with ensuring people were not sent into poverty by the response. We had a rare moment of national unity.
Sadly, it didn't last. It seemed that even in a national crisis Morrison could only refrain from partisan game-playing for so long, so after a while he had various underlings out there in the community criticising State Labor Premiers for following the advice of their Chief Health Officers. Meanwhile he lost focus on his own job, securing the supply of vaccines, so we ended up behind other parts of the world as the Delta variant cut loose.
But let's roll back. When the Coalition was elected in 2013, he became Immigration Minister and implemented Operation Sovereign Borders. Asylum seekers who arrived by boat were shipped off to Manus and Nauru, where they were imprisoned for years on end for the crime of not travelling by plane. More than a decade later some of them are still there, while others suffer in indefinite limbo here in Australia, all in the name of 'stopping the boats'.
For this sterling work Morrison was promoted to Minister for Social Services, and later to Treasurer, where he oversaw the Robodebt scheme. Last year we saw him squirming and blame-shifting in the witness stand of the Royal Commission before disputing the finding that he was negligent. Without going into all the sorry details, this scheme used a flawed income averaging methodology to identify about a million people who had been allegedly overpaid on their income security payments, then reversed the onus of proof so they had to produce evidence that they didn't owe the money, up to seven years after it was paid to them.
The scheme robbed hundreds of thousands of low income Australians of about a billion dollars they didn't actually owe, causing massive distress to many highly vulnerable people, in an attempt to reduce the budget deficit. The government was alerted to the flaws in this scheme many times - by aggrieved consumers, by welfare rights advocates, by Administrative Appeals Tribunal adjudicators, by concerned staff members within the Social Services Department - but it was only shut down when a group of those who were robbed filed a class action and legal advice made it clear the government would lose.
Somehow, despite this sorry saga, Morrison's colleagues chose to make him Prime Minister because they thought Peter Dutton would be worse. Not that Morrison is more humane and inclusive than Dutton, but he is better at masking and deflecting. Lo and behold, right after he parlayed his daggy dad image and an unpopular Labor Party into a narrow election victory, large parts of Australia literally caught fire while Morrison headed off for a scheduled family holiday in Hawaii. When he was called out on it, he responded, as we all know, by saying "I don't hold a hose, mate". It's fair to say it didn't go down well in the fire zone.
If he and his ministerial colleagues had put as much effort into fighting fires as they did into fighting any form of meaningful climate action we would not have suffered anything like the same damage. After all, Morrison became Prime Minister in the first place to prevent Malcolm Turnbull from implementing even the pathetic, watered down version of an emissions reduction policy he had finally been able to wrangle through the party room. He proceeded to spend the rest of his Prime Ministership saying 'we won't adopt a net zero target unless we know what it will cost'. He and Angus Taylor even walked into National Party heartland in the National Farmers Federation congress to urge them not to pass a resolution supporting net zero by 2050. The farmers gave them the finger and passed the resolution unanimously. No-one suffers more from climate change than farmers.
They only yielded in late 2021 with a policy that expressed a vague hope that we would somehow get to net zero by deploying some yet to be identified new technologies. Everyone saw through it, the Teals ate them for breakfast, and that was all she wrote.
There was of course another reason that the Teals ate them for breakfast - they were all women. In 'Nemesis' his colleagues essentially say that he didn't have a problem with women, he just didn't seem to like them much. Which meant that when Australia had its #MeToo moment courtesy of Grace Tame, Brittany Higgins, Chanel Contos and many more, he seemed completely unable to respond with any compassion. While the Women's Marchers congregated outside Parliament House he kept his ministers, including the women, indoors and told the parliament it was great that the women could protest without getting shot. Rape, presumably, was OK.
Almost the last act of his government, and the final straw for many on his own team, was his attempt to push through the Religious Discrimination Act. The problem with this was not, of course, that his back-benchers, or indeed the Opposition, had any problem with freedom of religion. The problem was that the express aim of the Act was to make it OK for religious institutions like schools to discriminate against LGBTIQ+ young people and staff. Five Liberals crossed the floor, despite bullying from Morrison and his lackeys, and the bill was defeated.
So here is Morrison's legacy. Human rights violations. Theft. Racism. Sexism. Homophobia. Reckless negligence. It's hard to disagree with NSW Liberal Premier Gladys Berejiklian's private assessment that he is a 'horrible, horrible person', or Barnaby Joyce's text to Brittany Higgins describing him as 'a hypocrite and a liar'.
But before I finish we should ask ourselves a question. How much of the blame for all this should rest with Morrison? Sure, he played an outsized role and he shouldn't be off the hook. But he didn't do any of this on his own. After all, the Liberal Party elected him as their leader and we (or at least, just over half of us) put his party high enough on our electoral preferences that they formed government. The Labor Party has continued his toxic asylum seeker policies, has applied a bit of Spak-filla and a coat of paint to his dodgy climate change policies, and while not trying to revive Robodebt has otherwise left the punitive architecture of income security policy in place.
Ultimately the problem here is not that Scott Morrison is horrible or untrustworthy. The problem is that our political system rewarded him for these traits. He spent five years as a Minister. He became Prime Minister, and remained so for four years. No-one stopped him. No-one forced him to step down, or prevented him from implementing his toxic policies. In fact, they supported them and voted for them. We voted for them.
So once we have finished looking at Scott Morrison's departing rear end, we need to take a good, hard look at ourselves.
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