When Crikey first assembled the long dossier of Scott Morrison’s lies and falsehoods, we noted that he resorted to deception much more when he was under pressure — and at times of great stress the lies would rapidly accumulate.
Clearly Morrison is currently feeling the heat from the shambolic vaccine rollout, his forced U-turn on lockdowns and the humiliation of seeing Daniel Andrews vindicated and Gladys “gold standard” Berejiklian struggling with a months-long lockdown of Sydney. The lies and falsehoods are piling up fast.
Just yesterday, as Morrison struggled to dismiss Anthony Albanese’s proposal for a cash vaccination incentive — Morrison being the proud personal author, at News Corp’s direction, of a cash incentive for vaccination via the no jab, no pay/no play policy — he misled Parliament about the opposition leader. “He could start by talking to General Frewen who he has not yet sat down with — not once — since he came into the job … He hasn’t even bothered to talk to him,” Morrison told question time.
In fact, as Albanese later explained, he’d been trying to talk to Frewen — the stuffed uniform deployed by Morrison as political cover for the vaccine bungle — since late June and it was the government that had put off any briefing until later this week.
Albanese also asked Morrison about a now oft-repeated claim of Morrison’s that the notorious phrase “not a race” was only used by Morrison — at the instigation of health secretary Brendan Murphy, he insists — in relation to the approval process for vaccines, when Morrison clearly used it in relation to a question about the slow pace of the vaccine rollout on March 31. Morrison stuck resolutely to the lie.
That’s come on top of Morrison bizarrely claiming Berejiklian never raised the issue of additional vaccines for NSW in national cabinet when she said she had “argued my little heart out” on the issue and been rejected — with Frewen fingered as having spoken to her with “derision”, an outrageous insult to a democratically elected leader by a bureaucrat and a military man to boot — sufficient that, if true, the general should have been sacked on the spot and kicked out of the meeting.
There were a succession of lies and falsehoods from Morrison throughout July — on ATAGI’s AstraZeneca advice, his favouritism toward Sydney, and that whopper about there being no vaccine schedule that would have made a difference to the current Sydney outbreak.
This is the psychology of a man who despises and fears accountability — even for his own words, which he frequently denies having said despite them being on the public record, on the transcripts on his own personal site.
With no relief in sight for a beleaguered non-leader hemmed in by his own bungling and politicking, how many more lies will be racked up by the end of the year — let alone in the run-up to the election? We’ll be tracking them all at the ever-growing dossier.
None of this is new. The Australian public let Morrison shut down Parliament for 8 months before the last election. We knew his character then, we know his character now. At election time however the minions will vote for their glass baubles and Morrison will miracle again. Sheesh Kebab.
Unfortunately, this exactly. With NewCorpse as the PR arm of the LNP and a largely disconnected and disinterested voting population, all the lies told will probably not stop Morrison et al from grimly clinging to power at the next election.
I know quite a few people that are so ashamed of their last vote, that they would do it again rather than admit their error…
It’s a secret ballot. Admit to whom, themselves?
It’s a common psychological fault, esp. in gamblers and dumb investors, known as “sunk cost“.
ABC RN had a program on this tragic failing of the stupid.
Like all conservatives there is a diagnosable condition evident
http://archive.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2010/07/11/how_facts_backfire/
Recently, a few political scientists have begun to discover a human tendency deeply discouraging to anyone with faith in the power of information.
It’s this: Facts don’t necessarily have the power to change our minds.
In fact, quite the opposite.
In a series of studies in 2005 and 2006, researchers at the University of Michigan found that when misinformed people, particularly political partisans, were exposed to corrected facts in news stories, they rarely changed their minds.
In fact, they often became even more strongly set in their beliefs.
Facts, they found, were not curing misinformation. Like an underpowered antibiotic, facts could actually make misinformation even stronger.
This bodes ill for a democracy, because most voters — the people making decisions about how the country runs — aren’t blank slates.
They already have beliefs, and a set of facts lodged in their minds.
The problem is that sometimes the things they think they know are objectively, provably false. And in the presence of the correct information, such people react very, very differently than the merely uninformed.
Instead of changing their minds to reflect the correct information, they can entrench themselves even deeper.
“The general idea is that it’s absolutely threatening to admit you’re wrong,” says political scientist Brendan Nyhan, the lead researcher on the Michigan study. The phenomenon — known as “backfire” — is “a natural defense mechanism to avoid that cognitive dissonance.”
And rather than facts driving beliefs, our beliefs can dictate the facts we chose to accept. They can cause us to twist facts so they fit better with our preconceived notions. Worst of all, they can lead us to uncritically accept bad information just because it reinforces our beliefs.
This reinforcement makes us more confident we’re right, and even less likely to listen to any new information.
In 2005, amid the strident calls for better media fact-checking in the wake of the Iraq war, Michigan’s Nyhan and a colleague devised an experiment in which participants were given mock news stories, each of which contained a provably false, though nonetheless widespread, claim made by a political figure: that there were WMDs found in Iraq (there weren’t), that the Bush tax cuts increased government revenues (revenues actually fell), and that the Bush administration imposed a total ban on stem cell research (only certain federal funding was restricted). Nyhan inserted a clear, direct correction after each piece of misinformation, and then measured the study participants to see if the correction took.
For the most part, it didn’t.
Shorter version – “If I hadn’t believed it, I wouldn’t have seen it with my own eyes!”
Being a pathological liar hasn’t made his nose grow any longer but it sure seems to have had an effect on his hair growth. Vain vapid vermin that he is.
It’s a old age wig! Makes him look like he’s been working hard and worrying over us; his Aussie comrades that he paternally oversees because we are all too childishy stupid to like pastor Morry’s stupid sermons.
Crikey did a great job chronicling Morrison’s lies, not least because it was a such a big job. I’d like to suggest an excellent compliment to that work would be chronicling his “announcements” and the gap between them and anything at all happening. Counting the repetition of them would be a good metric as well. The total result would allow a picture of both his lies about doing something as well as his lies about what he has done and said.
Honestly, it would have been a massive task for the Working dog people (Utopia, Hollowmen etc) to have dreamed up a character so grotesque in character and ineffectual in his actions, while maintaining an equanimity of duplicity. In Trump, Morrison and Johnson, we live in a time when reality constantly outstrips the outer limits of satire.
It’s a phenomenal 3, Trump, Boris and ScoMo. If you had a time machine and went back even just 20 years and told them the types of people on top in those 3 countries they would think you mad. Things move swiftly these days, but it always seems to be a race to the bottom. Would it be possible to get the trajectory going the other way just as quickly?
Combination of neoliberalism and securitisation, isn’t it? The state starts to be hollowed out, competence no longer a selection criterion for progression. Meanwhile, you can hide any number of foul-ups under the cloak of “national security.”
Laura Tingle’s Political Amnesia is pretty good on this, including on the dementia of the media.
The “what is to be done?” question is the more interesting one, imo.
Though one might see Joh Bjelke-Peterson as John the Baptist to this unholy trio, at least as example of what is possible.
And Morrison would say we may be heading for the bottom, but “it is not a race”.
Morrison has always been on the bottom crawling among belief litter looking for the rubbish and goblets of effluent cultism
20 years ago our PM was John Howard, so “they” would probably be expecting more of the same. UK was Tony Blair, US was W.
Nope, no surprises in any of the three. Most likely response would probably have been along the lines of “So still no improvement then?”
50 years ago?
Conservative parties have never been any different in any nation in the world it’s all about power money the end justifies the means stamp on anyone that not is in their tribe
Great idea. Just a simple table announced vs. delivered
might focus a few minds
“Morrison is entering the Billy McMahon free-fire mockery zone. And not before time. Can’t recall a more incompetent, deceitful, do-nothing PM.” Morrison and his government are well ahead of Billy McMahon’s government in terms of incompetence and John Howard’s in terms of venality
Yes, Morrison’s broken all records in his events, he’s going for gold in all of them…
Not gold, iron pyrite.
Would that be fool’s gold, selkie?
No, more like political lead in the saddle bag for the LNP.
FeS2.
if you support the LNP when the election is called you are part of the problem.