(Image: Tom Red/Private Media)

Comparisons with the Donald always risk being overstated, but Australia has reached a Trumpian moment with Scott Morrison: he is actively seeking to undermine the rule of law by not merely refusing to establish any meaningful kind of federal integrity body, but by seeking to destroy existing, effective state integrity bodies that might hold him and his political colleagues to account.

If the immediate goal of him boosting Gladys Berejiklian as a potential candidate for Warringah is to add one to the Coalition’s seat tally at the election, the broader goal is to prevent and nullify any independent accountability systems.

It’s difficult to overstate how passionately Morrison hates the idea of accountability, or any system or standard against which he can be assessed that he doesn’t control. He passionately loathes it. From the start of his ministerial career, Morrison has sought to shut down capacity for external scrutiny of his actions, invoking the fiction of “on-water matters” to throw a blanket of secrecy over most of his activities as immigration minister and pushing the AFP to investigate journalists to identify immigration whistleblowers.

As prime minister he has continued and accelerated the degradation of Australia’s freedom of information laws, backed ministers who have blatantly rorted taxpayer funding or been accused of serious misconduct, and argued that the national cabinet is a Commonwealth cabinet subcommittee and therefore should be completely opaque. This obsession with secrecy goes to absurd lengths — currently his government is attempting to block the release of the ACT Supreme Court’s decision to refuse its demand to prosecute Bernard Collaery using secret information.

He has proven to be a uniquely thin-skinned prime minister, raging against journalists that ask inconvenient questions, complaining to media owners and losing his temper in Parliament. And most of all there is the incessant lying — particularly about his own words and actions, in which he routinely denies ever having said things that are on the public record, or done things of which there is clear footage, because previous words and actions have become inconvenient for him.

These are the actions of a man who cannot stand the idea that he should be held accountable by anyone, even against his own words. That’s why the idea of a federal ICAC has always been anathema to Morrison, and why his “model” for a federal integrity body was laughably weak — indeed, structured so as to actually help corrupt MPs avoid scrutiny.

Morrison’s criticisms of the NSW ICAC go much further than what is required to float the idea of Berejiklian’s return to politics. In demonising ICAC as a “kangaroo court” that has simply “paraded around” “private conversations, detailed, intimate things”, that it was judging her romantic choices rather than her alleged abuse of public trust and misallocation of taxpayer funding, and claiming that Berejiklian was forced by ICAC to resign when it was Berejiklian herself who chose to resign — on the basis, she said, that standing aside while being investigated was not appropriate during the pandemic — Morrison is aiming to undermine an important state anti-corruption and integrity body.

And he is happy — as always — to blatantly lie to make his case. And note in the transcript of yesterday’s boosting of Berejiklian that Morrison simply ignores questions from journalists who attempt to correct his lies.

In a political system with even the most basic integrity, Berejiklian would be persona non grata. She maintained a romantic relationship with a corrupt MP. She turned a blind eye to his absurd and corrupt schemes to make money. Her office shredded documents to avoid accountability for pork-barrelling, which she then defended. She appears to have misallocated taxpayer funding to favour her boyfriend’s seat.

Many in the media are part of Morrison’s campaign. News Corp has been trying to destroy ICAC for some years, driven by its partisanship for the Coalition. But the boosterism for Berejiklian and a willingness to undermine ICAC in other parts of the media — especially at The Sydney Morning Herald — is dangerous. As supposed watchdogs against the powerful, the media shouldn’t be in the business of undermining the few major institutions engaged in the same task, even if it serves the obsession of political journalists with personalities and race-calling.

There are too few, not too many, checks and balances on politicians in our political systems. NSW is fortunate in having many more than our federal system. They are a fundamental part of the rule of law and the functioning of a democracy — without them, the powerful simply do what they like without constraint.

Journalists backing Morrison’s Trumpian attacks on institutions supporting the rule of law betray not merely their own profession but the public interest.