Australia has a dose of ‘long Morrison’, and it’s nothing to sneeze at

COVID-19 may be receding in the memory but Australia can’t seem to shake off “long Morrison”, the lingering effects of a prime ministership widely deemed to have had a pestilential effect on the country’s body politic. Since his departure from office 14 months ago, we have witnessed the emergence of a number of variants.

First, in July last year, came his strange sermon at Margaret Court’s church in Perth, in which he seemed to tread the path of hellfire conspiracy-mongering: “God’s kingdom will come. It’s in His hands. We trust in Him,” he told the congregation. “We don’t trust in governments. We don’t trust in the United Nations, thank goodness.”

Next came the revelations of his prime ministerial power grab, a secretive self-appointment-to-ministries scheme which former High Court justice Virginia Bell described at the end of her inquiry as “unnecessary”, “corrosive”, “exorbitant” and “bizarre”.

Then came the findings of the royal commission into the robo-debt scandal, which directly criticised Morrison for allowing cabinet to be misled during his tenure as social services minister, for pressuring department officials and for providing “untrue” evidence to the inquiry. In its report, the royal commission also highlighted Morrison’s tough-talking rhetoric, and his pledge after taking up his new ministerial brief in 2015 to act as “a strong welfare cop on the beat”. The political striver who had stopped the boats now intended to stop the rorts. Vintage ScoMo.

This same penchant for political phrase-making was evident when Morrison rose in parliament this week to condemn the criticisms of the head of the commission, Catherine Holmes. “Unsubstantiated, speculative and wrong,” he called her findings. But his sharpest lines were aimed at the Albanese government, which he accused of pursuing a “campaign of political lynching” and the “weaponisation of a quasi-legal process to launder the government’s political vindictiveness”. Responding in kind, with a prefabricated soundbite of his own, Bill Shorten, the former Labor leader, called his one-time rival “a bottomless well of self-pity”.

“Long Morrison” has other protracted symptoms. There was his prime ministerial post-truthism, so memorably put on display when French President Emmanuel Macron accused Morrison of lying over the cancellation of a $90 billion submarine deal but went out of his way to pay his respects to the Australian people. In a near-Orwellian contortion, Morrison complained that “the slurs have been placed on Australia, not me”, adding: “I’m not going to cop sledging of Australia.”

There was his serial scaremongering, evident ahead of the 2019 election when he claimed the Labor Party’s promotion of zero-emission vehicles would “end the weekend”. There were his performative stunts, such as brandishing a lump of coal in federal parliament while serving as treasurer. There was his mimicry of Donald Trump. “They may be a paedophile, they may be a rapist, they may be a murderer,” Morrison claimed in 2019, when he warned of the dangers of allowing sick asylum seekers to receive medical treatment in Australia by deploying language that seemed cut and pasted from Trump’s attacks on Mexican immigrants.

Not only did the Morrison years bring about a decline in the standards of public office, but the dumbing down of political debate. It was telling that he used the phrase “political lynching” in his speech to parliament. Not only did the rhetoric sound like it had come express delivery from Mar-a-Lago, there were also echoes of Trumpian victimhood.