Scott Morrison, Plans For Your Good: A Prime Minister’s Testimony of God’s Faithfulness
“Most politicians write books about what they’ve done.” Scott Morrison is absolutely correct on this point.
Most prime ministers write books about what they’ve done. The prime ministerial memoir is an established genre in Australian letters, a response to the not-unreasonable expectation that the leader of the country has a contribution to make to the national record.
That these books tend to be monuments to their authors’ self-regard is beside the point. Prime ministerial memoirs are, effectively, closing statements. They represent a final chance for the departing politician to correct misapprehensions, settle scores and pre-empt criticism before the rest of us — journalists, colleagues, citizens and historians — pass judgment. Writing a memoir is a form of democratic accountability. That was never one of Scott Morrison’s strengths.
In this meagre book, Plans For Your Good, Morrison dispenses with the conventions of the prime ministerial memoir and unburdens himself of any obligations to future historians. This book, he explains, “is my story of what I believe God has done for me through His faithfulness in all my life’s circumstances and how I truly came to understand God’s promise in Jeremiah 29:11. It is also a book about what God can do in your life.”
Morrison may well yearn for his book, subtitled, “A Prime Minister’s Testimony of God’s Faithfulness”, to serve evangelical ends. Whether he likes it or not, though, Plans For Your Good will become a crucial text for anyone trying to understand the governing of Australia between 2018 and 2022. I suspect that Plans For Your Good will deliver unto posterity the portrait of a leader driven by profound faith, yes, but a leader who allowed that faith to licence a political career characterised by evasions, refusals and shockingly little care for the lives of the poor, the suffering and the vulnerable.
The text that Morrison has bequeathed the nation is neither a coherent narrative of his time in office, nor does it offer any useful insight into the relationship between his faith and the policies implemented by his government. Instead, we have a book about what God has done for Morrison (a lot), with some digressions on what Morrison has done for God (never enough, but that’s okay).
It’s been widely noted that Plans For Your Good was written to introduce Morrison to a North American evangelical audience and as such, the interests of Australian readers are irrelevant, and so too any high-minded notions of prime ministerial duty. Morrison is addressing a reader who needs a baseball analogy in order to make sense of a witless aside about cricket.
Usually, when Australian authors take a book to the US market, they’re asked to make changes so that local usages can be grasped by American readers. The edition of Plans For Your Good that I read retained Australian spellings, but otherwise no deference is paid to Australian readers. A sheep station is a bit like a ranch, you see, and we say, “how good is such and such” when we want to say how good it is. It’s a sign of Morrison’s indifference to his Australian readers, and to the expectations of the office he once held, that he didn’t insist on removing this stuff for the local edition. Presumably Harper Collins Christian Publishing anticipated selling sufficient copies of the book in Australia to make it worth releasing but the numbers weren’t there to mandate small editorial changes for the local market.
To say that Plans For Your Good is a patchy account of Morrison’s political career is an understatement. There’s naught here about Morrison the minister for Immigration and border protection, the architect of the punitive Operation Sovereign Borders regime, not even a smug little joke about the disgraceful “I Stopped These” trophy he reportedly kept in his office.
The one-time minister for Social Services has nothing to say about welfare, is silent on poverty, and when he uses the term “social justice advocates”, it is to deride his critics. He does not mention robodebt. We hear nothing about either climate change or Morrison’s loyal support for the resources sector. Nothing about the 2019 bushfires. Morrison showers himself with praise for leading the nation through the difficult years of the COVID-19 pandemic — and yet there is not one word in this book about the secret ministries palaver. Morrison is a marketing executive at heart and he’s trying to reach a new audience with Plans For Your Good — why would he bother surfacing these old accusations?
There are two episodes in the book that do prompt Morrison to defend himself at some length. The first is AUKUS, viewed by some, and certainly by Morrison, as his capstone foreign policy achievement. He is at pains to depict himself as both essentially truthful in his dealings with Emmanuel Macron and as unwavering in his commitment to Australia’s national interest. The French, he writes, “failed to appreciate just how seriously we were taking the threat to our security in the Indo-Pacific”.
The AUKUS saga becomes an occasion for Morrison, ever the strategist, to reflect on the shared values of the United States, the UK and Australia, and to establish kinship with his conservative American readers. He invokes Pearl Harbour, has a go at Barack Obama, and elaborates on the threat posed to global order by Chinese militarism. “I decided it was not in Australia’s long-term interests to duck and cover. We had to stand up for ourselves, face our fears, and not capitulate to China’s bullying.”
This section of Plans For Your Good is the one that most resembles a conventional political memoir — until Morrison uses it to present a moral lesson about facing your fears: “God’s assurance enabled me to step out of a mindset of fear and do what I believed was in the best interest of my country.” Morrison’s language as he delivers these lessons — and there are many such hokey, blokey adages in this book — is a reminder of the mutually sustaining relationship between secular self-optimisation literature and evangelical tracts.
Morrison pays little attention to First Nations peoples for most of Plans For Your Good. When he narrates the experiences of his convict forebear William Roberts, he does make reference to the violent settlement of the colony: “Awful cruelty, terrible suffering, and dispossession were also inflicted on our [sic] indigenous [sic] peoples who had been living on our [sic] continent for more than 60,000 years, comprising more than 500 separate nations and 250 languages.” Wait for the coda: “This was not unique to Australia.” How good is Australia?
This formula is repeated in a later chapter when he talks about travelling to Brewarrina to see the fish traps with the Aboriginal singer Col Hardy. “People are complex, and so are nations. Stories of dispossession and violence against indigenous peoples are not unique to Australia, but this makes them no less inexcusable. You will find similar terrible stories in every country that emerged from colonisation.” It’s a breathtakingly lazy rationalisation, one that reveals Morrison’s shrugging relationship with history.
And so to the second point on which Morrison deigns to answer his critics, his 2022 speech on the anniversary of Kevin Rudd’s 2008 Apology to the Stolen Generations, the one in which Morrison called for First Nations peoples to show forgiveness to settler Australia. He was criticised for this, especially by Indigenous leaders. By way of response, Morrison delivers a homily on forgiveness, taking a detour to clarify a distinction between earthly justice and forgiveness.
Whether you read this section as politics, philosophy or theology, it is a hodgepodge, and he finishes where he began, arguing that “forgiveness is the only real power victims truly have that is entirely within their control.” This may provide insight into how Morrison understands the Christian principle of forgiveness, but it also exposes his reluctance to adopt a position of humility and to listen to his critics.
The only critic Morrison cares about is God — that much is made clear in this full-throated assertion of faith. The former PM shares his frequent conversations with the Lord — “things got pretty heated between me and God as I poured my heart out” — and occasionally ventriloquises Christ. Curiously, the Christ of Plans For Your Good sounds quite a lot like Scott Morrison: “Scott, I get it, I’ve been there and worse, and you know what? I did it all for you.” I am not particularly troubled either by Morrison’s religious convictions or by their intensity, although I do not share them. What distressed me as I read Plans For Your Good was Morrison’s incessant use of his faith to deflect political accountability.
We are told a great deal about God’s mercy and Christ’s love, and Morrison likens himself explicitly to numerous Biblical figures. However, there’s precious little love or mercy expressed for any folks beyond the former PM’s circle of family and friends. He does let his guard down when he talks about his great love for his daughters and his wife. It’s moving to read of the solace Morrison’s family provided to him as he navigated the tremendous pressures of leadership. It’s just that we never here see him take a compassionate approach to strangers.
Morrison writes, “If you see the dignity and worth of another person, the beating heart in front of you, in all of its complexity, you’re less likely to disrespect them.” How do statements like this square with his cruelty to refugees, his punitive approach to welfare recipients, and his selective largesse during the pandemic? Ideology comes knocking every few chapters in the form of brief tirades against secularism, identity politics and cancel culture — and that’s about it. You would expect a man of such deep commitment to Christianity also to share some of the convictions of that faith concerning the poor and the dispossessed. And yet Morrison failed to see millions of beating hearts in front of him.
Other accounts of Morrison’s time in office bear witness to his mastery of the darker arts of politics — his ruthlessness, his deviousness and his opportunism. Faith might not be politics, but politics was a game that Morrison knew how to play very well. Morrison notes that not all Christians share the same political views, which is certainly true, and yet he will not elaborate on how his faith shaped his neoliberal, pro-business, socially conservative politics. We are left to take it on faith that it did.
That Morrison is not a gifted prose stylist will come as no surprise. Repetition, cliché, malapropism, daft diction, plodding syntax, more cliché, and bucketloads of sentimentality? This book has got it all. As James Ley wrote of the former PM’s rhetorical abilities in 2022, “He has never shown any interest in what words actually mean, or even the conventional ordering of their syllables.” If you prod Morrison’s aphorisms hoping for a sign of life, they fall apart.
Have a go with this one: “God is not a vending machine where we insert our faith and expect to receive the comforts of life in return. We don’t always get what we want, but we do always get God.” A careful reader might baulk at the transformation of faith into a coin here. I don’t think Morrison did. The Scottification of Biblical stories is one of the expected discomforts of Plans For Your Good:
“In the last chapter we talked about Daniel and his experiences in Babylon. He wasn’t the only one to face trials and persecution there. He had three really good friends who came with him from Judah. In Australia, we would call them Daniel’s mates.”
I suspect this book was not written at all, but rather recorded and transcribed. Read a few sentences aloud and you can hear the cadences of sermons and the influence of Morrison’s pastors. You can also hear, well, Scott Morrison — without all the bothersome interruptions and interjections from an audience who wishes to hold him to account.
Patrick Mullins’ superb biography of William McMahon, Tiberius with a Telephone (2018), is haunted by the ghost of an unwritten book, the memoir that McMahon found himself unable to write. Mullins finds a captivating pathos in McMahon’s efforts to write about his maligned tenure, a pathos that is a counterbalance to the scathing assessments of McMahon’s peers. Until not so long ago McMahon was widely supposed to have been the worst leader endured by Australians since Federation. That is no longer the case.
Scott Morrison, like McMahon, couldn’t manage to write a book about his political record. Instead of staying silent, though, he has written a book designed to catapult him into a lucrative consulting career in the United States. I find something revealing in the contrast between McMahon; vain, diligent and ambitious to the end, trying and failing to account for his time in office, and Scott Morrison’s brazen indifference to the office he once held and the country he purported to serve.
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