Among the many Matrix-like evasions Prime Minister Scott Morrison was forced to make at COP26 was his failure to answer Andrew Probyn’s question: why had the PM or his office leaked private texts with another world leader to the media? In his address to the National Press Club this week, French ambassador Jean-Pierre Thebault called the act, which no one appears to be disputing, an “unprecedented new low”.
But is it? As it happens, opponents of Morrison have long had an unfortunate habit of finding private information in the public domain.
Michael Towke
We almost never got Morrison the MP, let alone Morrison the PM. Back in 2007, making his first tilt at federal politics, he came up against a local candidate called Michael Towke in the first round of preselection for Cook. He lost, badly (people forget just how badly: it was 82 votes to 8).
But then Morrison made some comments about “issues” around Towke and a series of stories appeared in The Daily Telegraph. As Paul Sheehan detailed, the rookie Morrison had made some powerful friends:
Two senior people within the Liberal Party, whose identity is known to a widening circle within the party, went through Towke’s nomination papers to find every possible discrepancy and weakness. Then they started calling selected journalists to tell them Towke was a liar.
… It is telling that experienced Telegraph journalists appear to have based their stories on sources they trusted, suggesting those doing the leaking were both senior figures and seasoned in dealing with the media.
The stories ended up being factually incorrect and profoundly defamatory, and Towke would receive a settlement from Nationwide News. He later noted that Morrison’s backers (we’ve never found out who, exactly) were “prepared to ruin [his] life” to get Morrison up.
Julia Banks
The former Liberal MP who quit the party soon after the coup against Malcolm Turnbull described the process from the inside in an interview earlier this year, and it’s worth reading the whole account. After the new PM asked her to delay the announcement that she was leaving, she agreed to wait 24 hours:
And that was my first mistake because I’m told afterwards that the PMO’s office, the prime minister’s office, for which, obviously, Morrison is accountable, were backgrounding the press and others, certainly within the party, that I had had a complete sort of emotional breakdown, I had not coped with the coup.
… and then his first press conference, he was asked how do you feel about Julia Banks not recontesting? And I remember watching the television and thinking, ‘What’s he saying?’ He said: ‘All I’m doing right now is checking in with Julia, making sure she’s OK. All that matters at the moment is Julia’s welfare in what has been a really torrid time for her.’
So this whole narrative — which is what he’s very good at, controlling the narrative — and this whole narrative about me being this weak petal that hadn’t coped with coup week and that’s the reason I was leaving was the narrative that they had created and he was complicit, absolutely complicit in it when he did that first presser.
Brittany Higgins
In February Brittany Higgins, a former Liberal Party staffer, went public with allegations she had been raped in Parliament House. She became emblematic of the sickening treatment of women in Parliament in particular and politics in general, and in the process caused Morrison’s government a lot of media headaches. By March, she had written to Morrison’s chief of staff, John Kunkel alleging that “numerous journalists” had told her the PM’s office was backgrounding the media against her and her partner, former reporter David Sharaz.
Asked to “categorically” deny this, Morrison managed nothing better than the following equivocation: “Nothing has been raised with my office from anyone in the gallery making any of those accusations or any discomfort about anything that my office has done.”
It took until May for Kunkel to deliver his report, which found, with almost palpable uncertainty, no “first-hand” evidence of the backgrounding.
Joe Biden
What’s slightly been forgotten in the Emmanuel Macron/Morrison melee is that Macron wasn’t the only world leader having to read about his supposedly confidential dealings with Australia in the papers. After US President Joe Biden “threw us under the bus”, The Australian suddenly had the scoop on a “confidential 15-page document that raises serious doubts about the president’s claim he believed France knew ahead of time that its $90 billion contract with Australia would be terminated”.
If you had to pick a common thread in the ungodly narrative that is the parlous state of our local democracy, it is the Daily Terrorgraph….the Oz is arguably worse, but nobody reads it and if it were not for ABC repeatedly quoting it and inviting its paid liars onto current affairs programs to spout their filth, it would have no real bearing on our polity.
Way past time Murdoch was booted out of Australian media, and prosecuted in absentia for crimes against society.
Or registered as an affiliate to a political party.
Surely it’s the other way about – they are a fully owned and managed affiliate of NewsCorpse?
The two most offensive parts of having David Speers heading up “The Insiders” is that he always looking for a gotcha moment AND that people who I would never read due to their credibility gap get more airplay than Laura Tingle, Michelle Grattan, Nikki Savas and David Marr combined.
Spot on about gotcha moments ratty. Nowhere near as competent as Baz. Doesn’t ask the big questions ever.
Read the Morrison CV Very hard to see any evidence that would encourage a prospective employer.
Tourism NZ Left early Tourisim Aus Sacked by 100% liberal board .Preselection Possibly only vote his own .False accusations against selected candidate on eve of election , Guess who is parachuted in?
Appears the PM has a problem with understanding its his way or no way and then nothing to see all move on
Surely Malcolm should be on the list too.
He does not communicate, he confabulates. The man has a psychopathic developmental relational disorder. He’s a narcissist. And it is extremely dangerous to have such a person effectively running the country. Labor really need to take this seriously.
The Electorate need to take it even more seriously.
Insane, our PM is some crazy happy clapper nut-job from a group of religious fanatics whose beliefs are not shared by anybody who is not intellectually handicapped. How the heck did this come to pass? Don’t the punters who voted for this idiot see him for what he is? Rhetorical question, obviously not.
Unfortunately only 107K voters (in his electorate, Cook) are given the option of rejecting him and he seems to have mainlined the Sylvania Waters demographic – exemplified it one might suggest.
However, the real guilt for his being PM rests with just over half of a party room of fewer than 90.
Why has the Australian press not noticed the biggest lie(s?) from last week? Morrison explained initially he dropped the French contract for reasons of Australia’s ‘security’. We needed nuclear powered submarines. Then after Macron noted Morrison had effectively lied to him, our PM came up with a narrative that Naval Group has both time and dramatic cost overruns on the submarine procurement. He then added – if these had not occurred they might be still supplying Australia – (check on Morrison’s interviews). How can both be ‘true’?? Either Naval group were dropped only because of their industrial tardiness, OR, we dropped them for vital security reasons. Morrison of course was trying to message the Aussie electorate on the LNP’s twin conning “towers for electoral success”, defense and good economic management. But that all falls to nothing by his clincher that Naval group could still be supplying us if there had not been overarching cost and development overruns.
Morrison said “there were problems with timely fulfilment of the contract.”
Not according to Defence Dept Secretary Greg Moriarty at Senate Estimates last week.
He said ” The total estimated cost of the program was $88 billion in out-turned dollars. This is the same estimate that the department took to government in 2016, adjusted for foreign exchange rate variations. There was no cost blowout. The actual Attack class submarine contracts in place at the time of the announcement accommodated the design phase…. The contracts have been terminated because our requirements have changed, not because of the poor performance by either Naval Group or Lockheed Martin Australia.”
Moriarty said the reason for cancelling the contract was Australia’s strategic requirements had changed. He said the Defence department “initiated a preliminary examination of the feasibility of Australia acquiring nuclear powered submarines in March 2020.”
At the same hearings, RAN Sub expert former Rear Admiral Greg Sammut at Estimates said:
“I think I’ve made it clear in previous testimony that what was required was an affordable and
acceptable offer for the next phase of work, being Core Work Scope 2, and that we had also done other work in the normal course of our program such as regular reviews of the schedule and the program cost estimate. That work had been completed, and Naval Group had in fact presented an affordable and acceptable offer to proceed with the next phase of work.”
So, contrary to Morrison’s lie, there were no problems with the fulfillment of the contract.
Interesting things happened in March 2020. Payne and Dutton visited the US. Payne met Pompeo. Dutton met Bar and Ivanka. Upon return to Australia, they both called for international investigators to be allowed into Wuhan to find the source of Covid. In the same month, Defence initiated the preliminary examination of the feasibility of Australia acquiring nuclear powered submarines. All of this in the same month – March 2020.
As a disciple and follower of that great one-term president Trump the operating campaign instruction commandments for our PM do not include anything about lying so its OK
Greg Moriarty is also the criminal who tried to hide the criminal activity of some of the SAS troops such as Ben Roberts Smith in Afghanistan and Iraq. He sign the orders so that the corrupt AFP commissioner Andrew Colvin could start an “investigation” on the ABC journalists who broke the story as well as Annika Smethurst.
The French could have supplied nuclear subs because the Attack class they were to build for Australia are simply denuclearised Barracuda – the nuclear subs the French build for themselves.
In MorrisonWorld, both are true.
Actually Morrison is lying on both accounts. Evidence before a Senate inquiry is that Naval have met every milestone, and that the subs the French were to supply to Australia were denuclearised Barracuda class subs – so if nuclear subs were the issue all the Australians had to do was change the contract for the French to supply nuclear-powered Barracuda subs – same as the French Navy have already got themselves.