Full disclosure. There have been days since May when I’ve looked down at Scott Morrison from my viewing point above the House of Representatives chamber and felt sympathy for Australia’s former prime minister.
It must be very hard to lose an election that badly, so consequentially, then have to turn up every day and listen to your political opponents conduct open heart surgery on your failings, while watching former subordinates creep away when they once followed your edicts no matter how ridiculous, laughed at your jokes and paid lavish homage.
There is a reason why former prime ministers move on, post haste, after election defeats. They generally spare themselves the daily diminishment of the ensuing history wars.
But not Morrison. There he is most parliamentary sitting days, occupying the back corner of the chamber, lifting his glasses and peering at his iPad, signing his correspondence while the colleagues steadfastly avoid eye contact, taking care not to flinch or duck as the daily bombardments scream and whistle overhead.
Watching him, I’ve wondered: how can this pitiless, persistent reckoning not be shattering for a human being? Perhaps it is shattering and he keeps his grief private. But there is no visible sign.
A well-placed friend once told me the former prime minister harbours a palpable sense of predestination, of his history already having been ordained. I don’t know if this is true. I tried to ask Morrison about it once, but he pulled down the shutters, which is how Australia’s former prime minister responded to every question he didn’t care for.
I hope the predestination theory is true – and that belief sustains him. Because in my world (the world of personal agency, human frailty, and most importantly, earthly culpability and personal responsibility) – if I’d failed like Morrison, I’d need to stay in my room for a very long stretch until I’d found the words to convey the depths of my sorrow.
I would feel the weight of my misjudgments like a wound.
But Morrison turned up when the parliament chose to censure him on Wednesday. He made a point of telling us he wasn’t bitter (just in case anyone wondered). But nothing in his demeanour projected regret.
His voice, the familiar inflections and intonation, filled the chamber.
Politics demands that a former prime minister defends his own legacy, and when it comes to saving lives and livelihoods during the opening months of the pandemic, Morrison has a legacy worth defending. The premiers saved him from himself periodically, but his initial actions did save lives and businesses. He deserves credit for that.
But Wednesday’s defence was classic Morrison.
He has an enduring talent for being small in big moments. He’s better at this than any prime minister I’ve seen, and he leaned into his deep well of natural ability when he rose, with a familiar edge to his voice, to exonerate himself, and self-soothe, in the court of his peers.
Morrison’s defence can be summarised as follows.
If we’d wanted to know about him swearing himself into multiple ministries without telling the public or the ministers concerned, we should have asked the right questions. Silly us.
Morrison contended at several points he wasn’t a real minister, he was the prime minister authorised to administer several departments apart from his own. I wasn’t a real minister, I was just couch surfing seemed to him a killer point in Wednesday’s plea bargain.
But I strongly suspect the former resources minister Keith Pitt would have considered Morrison a real minister when Morrison asserted his intention to make a key regulatory decision Pitt would have thought he was going to make. Morrison deciding to nix a contentious plan to drill for gas off the New South Wales coast – determining he would be the decision-maker – makes an intangible tangible. The act of asserting authority makes you the minister for resources.
Morrison also imagined what was being debated on the floor of the House of Representatives was his prime ministership, his legacy, rather than the conventions of representative democracy.
Wednesday was partisan and personal and tactical – because all politics is.
But the censure was actually about something bigger than score-settling, bigger than him, which was a concept Morrison often struggled with as prime minister.
Morrison struggled with the line between prime minister and saviour. He did warn us about this tendency at the opening of his tenure, borrowing the dictum of the US general Norman Schwarzkopf: “When placed in command, take charge.” (For the record, that Schwarzkopf quote runs on – “even if the decision is bad, you have set change in motion”.)
Morrison also equated tending his faith during the pandemic with the moment when Moses looked out to sea, held up his staff, and led people to the promised land. During an online prayer group, he shared a verse: “You will be called repairer of broken walls, restorer of streets with dwellings.” The prime minister told me he’d discovered this vaulting verse during the black summer bushfires and it resonated with him.
None of these observations are meant to be gratuitous. Morrison carried responsibilities during that crisis that could have overwhelmed him. When life demands we carry great responsibility, we need to find our lodestars, be they spiritual or temporal.
But the truth is, Morrison’s oversized perception of his role in the grand sweep of history took him to a place where he disdained parliamentary and democratic conventions that are fundamentally important – conventions that exist to prevent abuses of power.
Morrison did this serially, in small ways and big ways. We saw him do it. We were all here watching and Morrison’s disdain for norms is part of the reason Australian voters repudiated him.
Anthony Albanese pointed this out in response to Morrison’s self-exoneration. He pointed out government was not a “one-man show”. Being prime minister requires the occupant of the office to be a custodian of the national interest. This is a high bar, and Albanese’s own prime ministership will also be judged against it. There is no escaping this yardstick.
Albanese also broke the fourth wall, acknowledging that when it came to the pandemic, Australians rallied to save themselves, and others, during the most dangerous public health emergency in a century. They were the heroes. Acts of heroism extended well beyond the parliament.
Speaking of acts of heroism, or at the very least, moral courage, one lone Liberal, Bridget Archer, ignored the tidal pull of tribalism on Wednesday, rising to support the censure of Morrison.
She told the chamber: “I do not accept any of the explanations put forward by the former prime minister for his actions, and I’m deeply disappointed by the lack of genuine apology or, more importantly, understanding of the impact of these decisions.”
Archer made two cut-through observations. The first was that democracy wasn’t a game. It was a grave responsibility, where elected representatives are accountable to voters, and politicians can’t be accountable in the absence of transparency. Morrison’s accrual of secret ministries flouted that fundamental tenet of the vocation.
The second cut-through point was her desire to stand resolute inside her own political movement and fight for fundamental values, like respecting freedom of action and the rule of law. “Democracy depends upon self-discipline, obedience to the law, and the honest administration of the law,” she said.
It would be easy for Archer right now to up stumps and move to the crossbench. She’d get a warm welcome from the crossbench women who felled metropolitan moderate Liberals six months ago during the visceral voter backlash against Morrison’s obduracy and overreach.
It’s harder to remain as a Liberal, upholding the tenets of liberalism. But she’s chosen the harder path.
Archer’s point was simple. The Liberal party was now at a crunch point. It could swim to safety or swim further out to sea. In the moment, it was a mic drop; but more – the sound of a gauntlet being thrown.
