Parliament of Australia: as Scott John Morrison prepares to leave the building by the front door is he arranging access through one of the many backdoors?

 

It has been an open secret that the Member for Cook, Scott John Morrison - of 324 mocking nicknames fame - would not see a full parliamentary term out once he lost government on 21 May 2022. Many thought that he would be gone within a year.

His Statement of Registerable Interests 47th Parliament tells the story as it unfolds.....

Two months and 11 days after the 2022 federal election Morrison registered Triginta Pty Ltd with himself as sole director and shareholder. It is now entered in his Statement as "superannuation". An apparently self-managed super fund to complement his other two superannuation accounts with Australian Super & MLC Super & Investments.

He reactivated the Morrison Family Trust now operating "Advisory Services" with himself as both sole registered director  and, a "Beneficiary" along with his spouse & dependent children.

It is probable he was intent on availing himself of every lawful tax advantage when he also listed Triginta Pty Ltd as As Trustee For (ATF) the Morrison Family Trust with himself as "Trustee".

Either while putting these financial building blocks in place or afterwards, Morrison began to 'embed' himself deeper within a number of organisations that align themselves with increasingly rigid right wing ideology, U.S. foreign policy and/or the defence industry lobby.

These are organisations that make the Australian-based Institute of Public Affairs look like so many silly children.

In his Statement of Registrable Interests document processed on 28 August 2022 Scott Morrison lists 20 organisations under line item 13. Membership of any organisation where a conflict of interest with a Member’s public duties could foreseeably arise or be seen to arise.

On 13 September 2022 Morrison added another organization to this list: 

Honorary Advisory Board, International Democrat Union.

This 11-member Honorary Advisory Board is made up of former leaders of 'conservative' political party parties both in and out of government and, contains three former Liberal prime ministers, John Howard, Tony Abbott and Scott Morrison.

NOTE: In 2023 the International Democrat Union (IDU) which currently styles itself The Global Alliance of the Centre Right appears to be a decidedly right wing group whose principal purpose is to assist political parties with IDU membership to win elections and to retain government. The Liberal Party of Australia was one of 19 founding signatories of IDU in London on 24 August 1983.

History: Early US. Central Intelligence Agency assessment of UDI as transnational, anti-socialist & anti-Soviet at

https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP85T01058R000303190001-0.pdf

Present leadership of the IDU comprises representatives of: 

Conservative Party, Canada

Liberal Party, Australia (Brian Loughnane)

Conservative Party UK

New Patriotic Party, Ghana

Partido Unionista, Guatemala

Conservative Party, Norway

Republican Party, USA.

With the remainder of its organisational structure also including representatives of:

Kataeb Party, Lebanon

Christian Social Union, Germany

Christian Democrat Union, Germany

European People's Party

Likud, Israel

PRO, Argentina

Renovación Nacional, Chile

Democratic Party, Mongolia

PDM, Namibia

Asia Pacific Democrat Union

ECR Party.

On 29 September 2022 Morrison added another board to 13. Memberships of any organisation where a conflict of interest with a Member’s public duties could foreseeably arise or be seen to arise

Member of the Strategic Advisory Board of the China Center of the Hudson Institute.

This conservative institute peopled by former Republican politicians & former US government advisors or politically-appointed diplomats gives a simpler title to this 4-member board - “The Advisory Board”.

Then on 2 May 2023 Morrison again updated his Statement to include a position on the Board of Advisors of the Washington DC-based Centre for a New American Security (CNAS) whose 20-member board of directors includes James Murdoch. A position he describes for the record as an "honorary member". The Centre has strong ties to the American military and the U.S. defence industry.

Ahead of his retirement from the Australian Parliament he has been making additional casual income as he assembled his network of influence from:

Victory of Life Centre;

Worldwide Support for Development; and

The Hudson Institute.

Morrison has also had international air travel, accommodation and incidentals paid by:

• Owner of a South Korean daily newspaper Chosun Ilbo Co Ltd, Asian Leadership Conference 12-15 July 2022; 

• World Wide Support for Development, Japan 24-30 July 2022 (this included WWSD picking up the tab for his wife and multinational Servcorp supplying him with office facilities & administrative support); and

• International Democrat Union (IDU), New York & Washington DC 4-11 December 2022. 

As part of An initiative of the Worldwide Support for Development in association with the International Democratic Union and the Japan Forum for International Relations Morrison also gave an apparently ghost-written address at the Global Opinion Leaders Summit in Tokyo on 28 July 2022.

In fact whilst Morrison was supposedly focussed on being the Opposition backbench MP for Cook he was assiduously keeping himself before the international eyes he believes matter.

Morrison is not acting like a man who intends to keep out of politics and his international lobbying may be particularly problematic for the Commonwealth of Australia in the future.

@idualliance

@idualliance

This may be where he turns up next. June being the month recently rumoured for his parliamentary retirement to be announced.

Two more months to go until the 40th anniversary of the @idualliance. We are looking forward to welcoming our global membership and freedom loving partners and friends to the birthplace of IDU, to London! Register today and join us this June! #idu40 🇬🇧 pic.twitter.com/5hVZ5pXMLh

— International Democrat Union (@idualliance) April 18, 2023

All this has not gone unnoticed.....

The Saturday Paper, 6 May 2023:

Editorial

The lobbyist

prime minister

It is almost too perfect. Scott Morrison will leave parliament to become a lobbyist, an oily little stain trailing him out of the office. The irony is that this will be the first time he has represented somebody other than himself. He will finally go to Canberra with a purpose.

Looked at another way, AUKUS was a $368 billion pitch to get Scott Morrison a job. It is reported that he will soon take a role at a British defence company. He will not resign until the contract is signed. It is a continuous, unbroken grift.

Morrison is not “going to the other side”. He was always a shill for corporate interests. His approach to defence was always about his fortunes, not the country’s. This year, as he called for an enormous increase in military spending, he was shopping himself to the very companies that would profit most. There is no shame. There is not even self-respect. There is just Scott.

Lobbying is a grub in the political system. It exists to distort democracy. It is grotesque that someone who was once prime minister would hang out his shingle. It is appalling how common it has become for ministers and their staffers to take up work touting for industry.

This week it was reported that nearly 1800 lobbyists have orange passes that give them full access to Parliament House. There is no register for who has these passes or of which politicians sponsored them.

The lobbying code and register are not enforceable. As The Centre for Public Integrity notes, they need to be legislated and breaches need to carry criminal penalties. Ministerial diaries should be published and meetings with lobbyists noted.

In a report released this week, the centre points to a string of recent ministers now working as lobbyists: former Defence minister Joel Fitzgibbon; former Foreign minister Julie Bishop; former Trade minister Andrew Robb; former Defence minister Christopher Pyne, who days earlier had to register himself as a representative of a foreign government.

It notes that one of Anne Ruston’s staff took up as a lobbyist for Airbus nine days after leaving her office. One of Mathias Cormann’s staff began lobbying for Ampol a fortnight after their employment ended. On it goes, like a child pouring bath water from one cup into another.

Morrison the greaseball prime minister will soon be Morrison the greaseball lobbyist. It’s a smaller change than it should be, a final tarnish on the office, a sad expression of a failed politics, unable to attract real talent, bobbing back and forth through the sluiceway of venality and self-interest.

His pass will change colour, perhaps his shoes will get better, but he will remain the spiv he always has been, a travelling salesman driving a caravan of cant and opportunism and now guns and probably submarines. It is terribly sad in the way that realising the country was run for four years by a solipsistic thug is terribly sad.

On Wednesday 14 December 2022 the Liberal MP for Cook and former Prime Minister, former minister for Immigration and Border Protection, Social Services, Treasury, Public Service, Health, Finance, Industry, Science, Energy and Resources, Home Affairs & Treasury. Scott Morrison, finally has to give evidence under oath at the Royal Commission into the Robodebt Scheme

 

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.