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| Former prime minister Scott Morrison with fellow Opposition MPs after a censure motion was moved against him in parliament, Wednesday, November 30, 2022. © Lukas Coch / AAP Images, in The Monthly, 30.11.22 |
On Wednesday 14 December 2022 the Liberal MP for Cook, Scott John Morrison, as former prime minister (Aug 2018-May 2022), former treasurer (Sept 2015-Aug 2018, May 2021-May 2022) and former minister for social services (Dec 2014-Sept 2015) will give sworn evidence before the Royal Commission into the Robodebt Scheme.
He is the only witness called before the Royal Commission on that day, in a week which will see a total of fourteen witnesses called to give evidence.
Although, Morrison avoided giving evidence in person during the Inquiry into the Appointment of the Former Prime Minister to Administer Multiple Departments, preferring instead to put his case and parry the Inquiry’s questions through his legal team, that opportunity was not open to him in this instance.
To avoid disappointment, anyone watching a live broadcast of the Member for Cook giving evidence next Wednesday — or reading whatever statements he makes afterward — should not anticipate any expressions of genuine regret for his policies, words, or actions taken over the course of creating and implementing the Centrelink automated debt creation and recovery process which was in operation between 2015 and 2019.
BACKGROUND
Report of the Inquiry into the Appointment of the Former Prime Minister to Administer Multiple Departments, Executive Summary, 25 November 2022, excerpts:
17. Mr Morrison does not appear to have attached any significance to the fact that, from the time of its making, each appointment operated in law to charge him with responsibility for the administration of the whole department. There was no delineation of responsibilities between Mr Morrison and the other minister or ministers appointed to administer the department. In the absence of such delineation, there was a risk of conflict had Mr Morrison decided to exercise a statutory power inconsistently with the exercise of the power by another minister administering the department. The 2021 appointments were not taken with a view to Mr Morrison having any active part in the administration of the department but rather to give Mr Morrison the capacity to exercise particular statutory power should the minister charged with responsibility for the exercise of that power propose to do so in a manner with which Mr Morrison disagreed, or fail to make a decision that Mr Morrison wanted to be made. In terms of the functioning of the departments this was as Dr Gordon de Brouwer PSM, Secretary for Public Sector Reform, observes “extremely irregular”……
19. Given that the Parliament was not informed of any of the appointments, it was unable to hold Mr Morrison to account in his capacity as minister administering any of these five departments. As the Solicitor-General concluded, the principles of responsible government were “fundamentally undermined” because Mr Morrison was not “responsible” to the Parliament, and through the Parliament to the electors, for the departments he was appointed to administer.
[my yellow highlighting]
20. Finally, the lack of disclosure of the appointments to the public was apt to undermine public confidence in government. Once the appointments became known, the secrecy with which they had been surrounded was corrosive of trust in government.
The Saturday Paper, Editorial, 3 December 2022:
Like a veteran troubadour, Scott Morrison rose from the backbench on Wednesday and delivered all the old hits: indignation, self-pity and sly evasions. The moment – parliamentary debate of his historic censure for secretly swearing himself into several portfolios as prime minister – demanded new notes, of course, namely songs of contrition. But Australians were kidding themselves if they thought they’d hear them.
Last week, former High Court justice Virginia Bell wrote that Morrison’s weird and secretive acquisitions were “corrosive of trust in government” and found that he had attempted to swear himself into a sixth ministry, Environment. Bell found that the secret assumption of powers was not illegal but gravely unorthodox and concerning, and wrote – despite Morrison’s previous justifications – that three of the five appointments he made for himself had little or nothing to do with the pandemic. She also wrote: “Being appointed to administer multiple departments seems an exorbitant means of addressing Mr Morrison’s concern about his ministers’ exercise of statutory power in cases that were not subject to Cabinet oversight”.
Despite the solicitor-general arriving at a similar conclusion, and the disgust of his own colleagues when they learnt, sometimes through the media, that he had secretly appointed himself to their portfolios, Morrison spoke with characteristic defiance. He told parliament the censure motion was “political intimidation” to which he would bravely refuse to submit, and with an air of brittle righteousness invoked the crisis of the pandemic: you have no right to judge me, he was saying, because you weren’t there in the seat of power during the storm. Incredibly, Morrison also said that had he been asked about his secret manoeuvre – of which his closest colleagues were oblivious – then he would have answered honestly.
With the lone exception of Bridget Archer, the Liberals decided to back their man. Opposition Leader Peter Dutton called the motion “a stunt” – a recurring party line – and their side of the chamber emptied after Morrison’s speech in theatrical protest. As they did, MPs filed past Morrison and shook his hand.
It is confirmation, if we needed it, that Morrison was a dangerously loose unit. He was not, as some in the press gallery once argued, an “extreme pragmatist”. He was paranoid, bullying and profoundly allergic to scrutiny. Prolifically deceptive, he was also thin-skinned and prone to unsavoury fits of rage and self-pity. His contempt for the media is obvious, but that contempt also extended to his own cabinet and basic conventions of democracy. And thus, to the Australian people. [my yellow highlighting]
And so, on Wednesday, parliament successfully passed its motion 86-50. It made Morrison the first prime minister, or former prime minister, to be censured in the house. It was proportionate acknowledgement of a historically deviant act and a suitably ignominious distinction for a man who was grossly unfit for the office he once held.
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