As we found when we first began detailing Scott Morrison’s relentless lying and falsehoods, one of the problems of being a serial misleader is that you have to keep doubling down on your lies, even when it’s obvious that you’re lying.
The Morrison who insisted he never ridiculed electric vehicles, and insisted it was a “Labor lie” that he ever had; the Morrison who said he’d never misspoken when he confused Taiwan for Hong Kong; the Morrison who repeatedly claimed he had a busy legislative agenda for 2019 but had to invent fictitious bills to fill it — that’s a man caught out in a lie desperately trying to pretend he hasn’t.
Yesterday in his sanctimonious self-defence against censure for his secret multiple ministries, he continued to dig deeper. He’s misled parliament before, as prime minister, and clearly had no compunctions in doing it again.
As Crikey noted on Monday, despite his best efforts to limit his participation in the Bell inquiry, Morrison couldn’t help himself and ended up in a nonsensical position on why he didn’t tell his closest colleagues about swearing himself into their ministries (or, as Morrison insists, in a distinction without a difference, appointed to administer their portfolios).
When the Simon Benson-Geoff Chambers would-be hagiography exploded in their faces due to their lack of understanding of how egregious a violation of norms the multiple ministries were, Morrison justified his secrecy from his own ministers by saying he didn’t want them to second guess themselves. And he justified his secrecy to the public by saying he didn’t want to alarm people and it would have been misinterpreted.
For the Bell inquiry, his lawyer explicitly pointed to those very statements as the core of his “participation” in the inquiry.
But Morrison went further, under written questions from Bell, and began claiming that, actually, he had assumed that the appointments were in fact gazetted and thus made public. On the one hand, Morrison claimed there was a good reason not to make them public, on the other, that he assumed they’d been made public. Which was the lie?
As Bell noted, it’s a nonsensical position.
But Morrison kept on digging yesterday. He’s stuck with the ridiculous position that he thought everyone knew, despite saying it was his goal that they didn’t know. In addition to insisting “no instruction was given by me as prime minister or my office not to publish those arrangements in the gazette”, he claims he thought his office had told incoming finance minister Simon Birmingham — who replaced Mathias Cormann — about his own appointment, and only realised it hadn’t when the scandal blew up. Then the kicker:
Had I been asked about these matters at the time at the numerous press conferences I held, I would’ve responded truthfully about the arrangements I had put in place.
This is the equivalent of a corrupt politician declaring they would have answered truthfully if they’d ever been asked about all those bribes they secretly took. Does Morrison think we’re complete fools? Did he expect journalists to telepathically determine that he was holding multiple ministries and ask him about it? Must the press gallery now preface all prime ministerial press conferences with questions like “how have you violated basic political norms this week”?
And what happened to the “it was good that no one knew I’d done it” line?
That all Coalition MPs but Bridget Archer lined up to endorse this horseshit shows how little they’ve moved on from the Morrison era. They knew Morrison was a relentless liar and breacher of basic democratic standards all along but they readily tolerated it when he was prime minister and they tolerate it now, even after he humiliated their most senior figures.
“I will take the instruction of my faith and turn the other cheek,” Morrison says. Rarely, if ever, has a senior political figure so ostentatiously paraded his religious beliefs. Rarely has any politician so egregiously failed to live up to even the most requirements of those beliefs, such as not deceiving others.
Morrison stains parliament every day he remains in it, the walking, talking example of contempt for integrity and accountability in politics.
