Yes, you normally begin a reflective piece on someone recently departed, either from the planet or merely from the scene, with the word “remembering”.
Not in the case of Australia’s thirtieth prime minister. When conversations turn to the nation’s worst PM, ScoMo should be there, right in the mix. Risibly, people who should know better, even those without ideological baggage and points to make, still bring up Billy McMahon. Not even close to the worst, by any reasonable measure. Like disastrous for the country. Disastrous for his party. Foreign policy blunders. Unforced errors. Ruining the economy. Committing crimes against the people.
There have been assessments of Morrison in the legacy media. James Allan at The Spectator Australia has noted the contributions of Greg Sheridan and Paul Kelly, for example. With disdain.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/03/scomo-and-dei/
Sheridan, an estimable “normie”, has had one of his periodic down moments in relation to ScoMo. On balance, history should be “kind” to him? I think not. Kelly and Sheridan are both embedded in the establishment narrative, and get caught up routinely in analysis of day-to-day politics. It is their metier. They miss much. They are constitutionally programmed to focus on minutiae. They haven’t cottoned on to the fact that what happens “on the ground” seldom matters. But even on their own confining terms, ScoMo cannot be regarded as anything but a disaster.
Another, less kindly view of Morrison was that of Augusto Zimmermann and Roco Loiacono, in their short, crisp book, Deconstructing ScoMo. Not surprisingly, James Allan wrote the foreword.
https://inhousebookstore.com.au/products/deconstructing-scomo
My review of the book can be found here:
https://politicom.com.au/deconstructing-scomo-reveals-labor-heavy-pm/
I won’t repeat my main points from that assessment here.
The day the Liberal Party ended was the day that they ditched Tony Abbott. Incidentally, Andrew Bolt once revealed that Tony Abbott “despised” Morrison. Not surprising. But Abbott, being a gentleman and inexplicably still loyal to the Party that used, then destroyed him, praised Morrison as a Liberal “hero” on the night of the 2019 election, when Abbott, unpromoted during the Morrison reign, lost his own seat and retired from politics.
Morrison was instrumental in Abbott’s demise. Characteristically, Morrison hid this. He said, hand on heart, that he voted for Abbott. Perhaps he did. But he got all of his mates, like the low rent Alex Hawke – he who later, as Immigration Minister, deported Novak Djokovic from Australia – to vote for the Malchurian Candidate. The rest, as they say, is history. What Turnbull himself would say about Morrison is probably unprintable.
Morrison’s political pre-history is shrouded in mystery, including his regular removal from posts, mainly in tourism promotion, on both sides of the Tasman. Some Liberal apparatchiks who transition to the Parliament are successes in their progression. Two were Andrew Robb and Nick Minchin, the former with post-politics blemishes and the latter with an outstanding record in government. Morrison, a former State Director of the Party, was not.
Scott Morrison is one of the few political leaders who wasn’t a politician-in-waiting from early days. Not that involvement in student politics is a guarantee of later success. But ScoMo seems not to have had much interest at all in politics, or policy, in his formative years. Decidedly odd.
Well, he double-crossed Turnbull as well, and cleverly disguised his own designs on the top job as the deals went down at the fag-end of the disastrous tenure of the progressive globalist.
His “heroic” effort to win the 2019 election turned on the miscalculations of the Shorten Labor Party.
James Allan fills in some of the ScoMo record:
He was a disgrace as regards Bruce Lehrman, and Christine Holgate, and a couple of his own cabinet ministers. Morrison also signed us up to net zero despite winning in 2019 by promising not to. His appointments barely consisted of any actual conservatives.
These two failures sum up ScoMo. He had no spine, no moral compass, no sense of stepping up to the plate in the cause of right. There are to conclusions possible. He was a moral coward. Or he was simply clueless on core moral issues. His parliamentary evisceration of the then CEO of Australia Post was an embarrassment to civilised politics. It was unconscionable, even for one of his low standards of conduct.
He joined with Shorten to embrace the mee-tooist revolution following the release of the Sex Abuse Royal Commission. It was, arguably, a material factor in the wrongful conviction of George Pell. (Morrison’s intervention took place neatly between the two Pell trials). It was up there with Daniel Andrews’ entirely predictable and mealy-mouthed response to the High Court’s magnificent destruction of the Andrews’ regime’s decades long attempt to get Pell. Virtue signalling to the woke gallery.
Here, just like during the Holgate farrago, Morrison had the opportunity to step up to the plate. On cue, he squibbed it. Worse, he joined the other side. Yes, it would have taken guts to say, okay, in the past the courts got sex abuse and sexual assault cases wrong, but we shouldn’t simply replace one kind of injustice for another, where the innocent accused get screwed. But leadership is about guts, above all, n’est-ce pas? Nope.
Those of us on the broad right (for want of a much better term) hate no one more than a right-wing disappointment. Or a quisling. The latter-day Liberal Party is a quisling party. And ScoMo was the quisling’s quisling.
Morrison promoted Turnbull mates. He kept in Cabinet the failed moderates. Simon Birmingham. Marise Payne. And many other wets hose names we will, mercifully, not recall. Unconscionably and idiotically, he failed to offer Abbott a job.
Scott Morrison’s big moment was Covid. He turned out to be Scotty from AstraZeneca. For those who say, well, in February 2020, he had every right to be scared of the virus and beholden to the “experts”, I say, well, look at the list:
· He closed the international borders;
· He created the National Cabinet, a travesty of democracy, which lives on;
· He shut down the Parliament;
· He retained Greg Hunt as his Minister for Covid “health”;
· He helped to create and embed the fraudulent false binary between staying in lockdown and “the vaccine”;
· He cheered on Daniel Andrews’ lockdowns and other police state actions;
· He funded the building of Covid concentration camps;
· He looked the other way when rogue state closed internal borders;
· He spent a trillion dollars (no misprint) on a pandemic that never was;
· He allowed the destruction of small business in this country;
· He oversaw organisations like the Therapeutic Goods Administration, which caused Australians to die, through their decisions about Ivermectin and other Covid-effective drugs;
· His Government funded corrupt academics to claim that Covid vaccines were safe and effective;
· He allowed his Party to join in the defenestration of Covid heroes like George Christensen;
· At the end of it all, he had the gall to say that he never believed in vaccine mandates.
Not a pretty legacy. Not to mention his Government’s efforts to embed the surveillance estate through “safe online” legislation. His then Minister, the execrable Paul Fletcher, remains a key figure. His factional mates in New South Wales continue to hold a torch for killing our freedoms.
Here is James Allan’s useful summation:
But worst of all was Morrison’s conduct during the Covid pandemic. Frankly, it was a disgrace. Every single civil liberties consideration was sold down the river as thuggish, authoritarian lockdowns came into play. ScoMo made up out of thin air the idea of a ‘national cabinet’, in part to get cover for the above-mentioned lockdowns. He refused to sign the Feds up to the border case leaving Clive Palmer to fight the states. I think Palmer had the stronger legal argument but you really can’t blame our top judges for opting as they did when Morrison refused to join the case. During this public policy fiasco Morrison and Frydenberg ran the biggest-spending government since the war; they oversaw a ballooning debt; ScoMo enabled the premiers to do such things as close the schools, meaning some, especially poor, kids will never recover (the research is inarguable on this). He enabled vaccine mandates. Massive wealth via printing money and asset inflation was transferred from poor to rich and from young to old. The small business sector was devastated. But this is all passed over in a very polite silence, except for Sheridan saying the current excess death data is wrong. Actually, Greg, you are wrong. Read world-leading epidemiologists like Jay Bhattacharya and many others. Comparing like-with-like and no lockdown Sweden and Florida have clearly outperformed similar jurisdictions even on cumulative deaths since the start of the pandemic. Throw in destroyed productivity, people unwilling to work, spiralling debt, soaring mental health problems, sacrificing the young in the name of those over the life expectancy age and this was clearly the worst and most illiberal public policy set of choices ever. (And any time you want to debate this country’s lockdown response, Greg, I’m available. I think you were wrong at the start of the pandemic supporting the government thuggery and you are more clearly wrong now.)
Many, many people (me included) will never forgive Morrison his choices and behaviour during the lockdown years. He didn’t have a liberal bone in his body. He will certainly not be remembered well by history. Nor will the coalition of views that make up today’s Liberal party come back together if people like Sheridan and Kelly try to sweep what happened under the carpet. Personally, I was glad ScoMo lost in 2022 even though I knew Albo would be terrible.
Yes, we knew Albo would be terrible. He is. Like ScoMo, Albanese is there by chance, and nothing else. He slithered into office, just, on the back of two years of Covid madness and eccentric, abnormal politics, and a legacy of Liberal failures in government over nearly a decade.
Morrison’s legacy assessments require the full treatment from the history books. They will, no doubt, bring up the story of the “secret ministries”. This was a non-story, relative to his real crimes. This is the ruling elites practising limited hangout theory.
Regrettably, the histories will mostly be written by those who agreed with him on the issues he got most execrably wrong, viz. the plandemic, and who will chastise him for (allegedly, and laughably) being a conservative. For this, he might, wrongly, gain some sympathy from the right. He deserves none.
A chancer, a real Chauncey Gardener (starring Peter Sellers in Being There), made it to the top. They never, ever should. These days, the tenor of Aussie politics suggests that this is entirely possible on a regular basis. The IMDB plot summary of Being There states:
Chance, a simple gardener, has never left the estate until his employer dies. His simple TV-informed utterances are mistaken for profundity. (Emphasis added).
https://gointothestory.blcklst.com/great-characters-chauncey-gardener-being-there-942e2f7798c
Just about sums up Australia’s 30th PM.
Lest we remember.
Paul Collits
13 March 2024
He is why I left the party after 20 yrs. Agree re libs since Abbot, should have resign then and regard my following 4 yrs membership fees as falling for a Nigerian scam.
Yes Paul the man is disgusting. As PM his only achievement was to be the worst in our history which is actually quite an achievement.