One of the problems with the dynamic between journalists and politicians at press conferences is that basic decorum sometimes prevents the most obvious question being asked.
When Scott Morrison took time out on Wednesday to explain what exactly had been going on in the office of the prime minister et al the question, surely, was “What the hell?”
Morrison appeared confused by all the fuss. Yes, he had himself installed into five separate senior ministries, in a move many see as up-ending the notion of cabinet government. Yes he did not tell most of his colleagues and the wider Australian public.
But it all made sense, he said, once you understood the circumstances, which he was happy to explain in a vaguely contemptuous manner through metaphor, parable and a series of circuitous and self-serving logic puzzles.
Morrison explained he had taken on the extra powers because the “clear expectation” of him as he steered the ship (Australia) through the “raging tempest” (Covid and an assortment of other issues such as the Aukus agreement, the vaccine rollout and a gas drilling licence) to safety, had been to be “responsible pretty much for every single thing that was going on”.
He didn’t tell anyone standing on the shore (the general public and, in most cases, the ministers he was secretly coexisting alongside) out of his concern that doing the very thing he was so obviously expected to do would be “misinterpreted” by those he was doing it for.
And, crucially, these were emergency powers he gave himself in unprecedented times, only for use if, for example, a minister had become incapacitated. That didn’t happen, so he never used them … except for a gas licence off the coast of New South Wales, which he said was a “completely different set of circumstances”, something he had been “very clear” about.
Sure, some people may suggest there is an inherent contradiction in the suggestion he took on the extra roles because the public expected him to, while also insisting he did not intend to use them outside an emergency, but those people, he explained, had not been the prime minister.
And, in any case, it hadn’t been a secret, because when he stood at a press conference in December 2021 and announced that he was making the decision “directly as prime minister” to cancel the Pep-11 gas licence it should have been obvious he was actually invoking the authority given to the resources minister under the auspices of the well-known Offshore Petroleum and Greenhouse Gas Storage Act (2006), or the OPGGS, as it is usually called when it is regularly discussed at the country’s pubs, cafes and rugby league matches.
He was not blaming the Australian public for not figuring that out, by the way, merely explaining that when he said he made the decision as prime minister, he also had to be making it as the resources minister, which he was, but also wasn’t, because he was not, he said, a “co-minister”.
That “completely different set of circumstances”, whereby he announced it alongside a number of moderate MPs who were concerned (rightly, it turned out) about their re-election prospects, was not about politics, it was “about the prime minister making a decision in the national interest”.
All of this, he said, was, most importantly, legal.
“I imagine that people looking in to this are saying, ‘So, what is the wash-up of all of this? Did the prime minister use any powers that were unlawful?’ No,” Morrison said. “‘Did the prime minister exercise any powers that intervened with the operations of any minister?’ No, except bar the one circumstance, which we’ve been very clear about.”
There were a number of issues Morrison would not be drawn on, including whether he had received advice from the solicitor general, or whether the governor general, David Hurley, had asked any questions about whether the appointments should be made public.
On the last point, he insisted he would not be “bullied” by the media into giving an answer.
“You can draw no conclusions from that,” he said. “You can assert nothing about that. You can impugn nothing about that.”
Nor did he lie when he told a Sydney radio station on Tuesday that he could only recall being installed in three extra ministries, not Treasury or home affairs. He simply didn’t recall and he said had put in a request to the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet to seek further information before making his statement that day.
At one point during Wednesday’s press conference, a journalist asked Morrison who he meant when he used the word “we”, given none of his cabinet colleagues knew about any of the co-appointments aside from the health portfolio.
“We” in this instance, he clarified, was “the government”.
Who that was, at this point, is anyone’s guess.
