After greater than 18 months of wrestle, Scott Morrison has lastly discovered somebody who’ll make use of him past politics, and so is leaving the sphere he has inhabited, tainted and, briefly, dominated since 2007. The hole man has left the constructing, leaving barely even a emptiness to sign his departure.
If he’d by no means turn into prime minister, and as an alternative remained Malcolm Turnbull’s, and even Peter Dutton’s, treasurer, he’d be leaving politics with a much better fame.
Whereas apparently compelled to leak to his Information Corp mates — a bent that drove his colleague Matthias Cormann nuts — Morrison was an excellent treasurer. With Cormann on level as finance minister (Cormann, Morrison’s superior in each private and political approach, would have made a a lot better PM), Morrison presided over falling spending and rising tax ranges, considerably lowering the deficit the Turnbull authorities inherited from Joe Hockey and Tony Abbott. Unemployment fell from over 6.2% when Abbott was booted out to simply 5% when Turnbull was dumped.
And most significantly, workforce participation rose half a per cent — by then it was greater than a decade after we’d been informed participation would begin plummeting on account of an ageing inhabitants — fuelled by a a couple of share level rise in feminine participation. For a person so clearly bereft of even the slightest understanding or empathy for working ladies, Morrison as treasurer noticed a exceptional rise in feminine financial engagement.
For sure, he didn’t keep treasurer, however ascended to the prime ministership — and proved to be the one worst occupant of that workplace in Australian historical past.
After his shock win in 2019, Morrison, the miracle man, wholly dominated federal politics. However that dominance lasted lower than a yr. It started crumbling in the course of the Black Summer time bushfires, after which vanished with the pandemic that turned the defining characteristic of his prime ministership. The trigger: his innate fairly profound private and political flaws within the highlight after Labor determined to cease making itself and its insurance policies the difficulty. Now that actual management and competence had been required.
Crikey was among the many first to level out Morrison’s apparently obsessive must lie, in 2021. We’d meant to take action in early 2020, however the pandemic arrived and we thought it was hardly within the public curiosity to name into doubt the veracity of the person main the nation at a time of main international disaster (although the intervening interval yielded a treasure trove of Morrison whoppers).
We had been additionally the primary to discover intimately Morrison’s commonalities with Donald Trump and Boris Johnson. All three got here from backgrounds unrelated to coverage content material or public governance — Trump and Johnson from TV, Morrison from advertising. All three proved incompetent. All three routinely lied, even about issues they didn’t must lie about. All three presided over corrupt governments riddled with scandals.
The variations had been fascinating, nonetheless. Trump has readily inspired right-wing Christians to consider he’s divinely appointed to guide the US, “heaven despatched”, when he’s so solipsistic the query of whether or not he believes in something aside from himself is moot. Johnson seems to don’t have any private morality or religion of any form. However Morrison genuinely believed himself to have been personally gifted the prime ministership by God, elevating him above everybody else in public life — and positively above the conventional requirements of behaviour required for public life.
His private religion and theology is a bizarre and incoherent mixture of beliefs cherrypicked from quite a lot of sources, however there isn’t any doubt of his private central position within the scheme of issues.
He was additionally in some ways the fruits of long-term developments inside the federal Liberal Celebration reasonably than a genuinely new determine — not merely its infiltration and shift to the correct by extremists, local weather denialists and social reactionaries, however its full transformation right into a money-for-policy racket by which political donations and provision of post-politics employment had been the first determinants of coverage.
Morrison perfected this by successfully blocking the general public service from any coverage position (and appointing Liberal Celebration hacks to key public service positions), handing billions of {dollars} to main consulting companies to supply no matter coverage recommendation was deemed mandatory, and successfully operating the federal government from his personal workplace, helped by his unprecedented secret appointment of himself to a number of key ministries.
What he couldn’t management was the nationwide response to the pandemic, given vital levers had been within the arms of the states whereas he was caught with management solely of nationwide borders. His early laissez-faire “I’ll go to the footy” strategy to the pandemic — of a bit with the legal denialism of Johnson and Trump — was thus overridden by state leaders resembling Gladys Berejiklian, who famously regarded Morrison as a psychopath, Daniel Andrews, Annastacia Palaszczuk and Mark McGowan, all of whom typically left Morrison wanting like an addled bystander as they helped Australia keep away from the fates of the UK and the US. These areas inside Morrison’s management — vaccine sourcing, the COVIDSafe app, residential aged care — had been catastrophe areas.
There was one other approach by which Morrison was a transitional determine too. Whereas all the time completely happy to pursue the tradition wars cooked up for him by Information Corp and his C|T advisers, a lot of which ended up backfiring on him, Morrison as prime minister — courtesy of the laborious work of his Indigenous Australians minister Ken Wyatt — presided over a big shift in Indigenous affairs coverage.
Having appropriately concluded that Closing the Hole merely wasn’t working, Morrison backed Wyatt to start a elementary shift in how the Commonwealth developed and applied Indigenous coverage by elevating partnership with Indigenous communities to centrality in coverage — together with by devoting actual assets to capacity-building and empowering Indigenous communities to take part absolutely within the coverage course of.
The Coalition has since moved radically backwards on Indigenous affairs — not merely in opposing a constitutional Voice to Parliament, which Morrison by no means supported, however in adopting a neo-assimilationist coverage by which the distinctive expertise of Indigenous Australians is erased and the entire thought of particular Indigenous coverage is dismissed.
Beneath Dutton and Jacinta Nampijinpa Worth, the Coalition’s coverage is now to close down Indigenous coverage full cease, with First Nations peoples deemed honorary white folks and informed to recover from it and on with it.
The complete-blown white nationalism and grievance exploitation of Trump, and the (spectacularly failed) Euro-xenophobia of Johnson, by no means fairly had an analog underneath prime minister Morrison. However that’s modified underneath Dutton. Morrison was solely the harbinger of a worse politics to come back.