Paul Keating returned for a caucus meeting after the March 1996 election, put his face in his hands, and left Parliament. John Howard lost his seat, so didn’t have the problem. Julia Gillard and Malcolm Turnbull left politics immediately. Kevin Rudd and Tony Abbott hung around, undermining their successors, but showing up and taking their spots on the backbench. Peter Costello remained in Parliament on the backbench, by and large keeping his counsel, writing his memoir, before departing in 2009. Alexander Downer remained in Parliament for six months on the backbench. Wayne Swan sat two terms on the backbench after Labor lost.
Scott Morrison has chosen a different option: continue to draw a backbencher’s salary, but don’t bother showing up to work. Add “attendance in the House of Representatives” to the list of jobs Morrison doesn’t see as his.
Suffering an acute case of limelight deprivation, he’s fled to Japan, where he’ll join fossilised Canadian neocon Stephen Harper and David “Greensill” Cameron in a kind of “forum of the failed”.
According to his statement yesterday, Morrison wasn’t consulted by Anthony Albanese and Tony Burke on the sitting schedule for the rest of the year and they’ll just have to make do without him.
“I will be holding a series of meetings with Japanese political and business leaders,” he said, designating himself a kind of unofficial foreign affairs and trade minister. Possibly he’ll be sharing his view that you can’t trust government with Japanese political figures.
Morrison will presumably refund a week’s salary to taxpayers given he can’t quite make it to work. Every other remaining Coalition MP that he led to defeat has to eat the shit sandwich of facing Parliament from opposition; that Morrison can’t bring himself to join them in that ordeal speaks volumes.
He will exit Parliament at some stage before the next election. Better that he does it now, so that taxpayers aren’t paying more than $200K a year to a bloke paying more attention to opportunities on the international rubber chicken circuit, and trying to rehabilitate his reputation from that of international pariah and the man who wrecked the NSW Liberals to that of suburban statesman, than to the needs of the constituents of Cook.
“I don’t hold a seat, mate”
You could put the blame on the voters of Cook, I suppose.
You are absolutely correct Mercurial; at the end of the day, they are the ones who must bear the responsibility for electing this creature.
But see above for why Smirko got preselected for Cook!
Preselection is not election. Two different races.
Not so as as Smirko slithered into the seat of Cook… aided by Liberal Party apparatchiks smearing Michael Towke…
Nasty saga you nearly missed SMH By Paul Sheehan October 26, 2009
Towke is also a long-serving member of the Liberal Party. In July 2007 he won preselection for the then safe federal Liberal seat of Cook. He was set to replace the outgoing member, Bruce Baird.
The contest attracted a large field, including Paul Fletcher, who recently won Liberal preselection for Bradfield (vacated by the former Liberal leader Brendan Nelson), and a former state director of the NSW Liberal party, Scott Morrison.
Towke won easily. On the first ballot, he polled 10 times as many votes as Morrison, 82 votes to 8, who was eliminated in the first round. His victory meant that a Lebanese Australian would represent the Liberal Party in the seat where the Cronulla riot and revenge raids had taken place 18 months earlier, in December 2005.
“The campaign against me started four days after preselection,” Towke said.
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.
The first story appeared in The Daily Telegraph on July 18, 2007, under the headline, “Liberal ballot scandal in Howard’s backyard.” Three days later, on July 21, a second story appeared in the Telegraph: “Towke future on hold.” The next day, in The Sunday Telegraph, a third story: “Party split as Liberal candidate faces jail.”
“That was the story that sent my mother to hospital,” Towke told me.
Murdoch’s libel cost him ( or rather his shareholders ) $100,000+
Obviously Morrison will return the salary or the fee for his speech. He can’t keep both (unless of course he has joined the Joe Hockey mantra of the end of entitlements). His apology to his constituents will make interesting reading too.
What has me flummoxed is why would anybody be interested in hearing from Morrison or for that matter David Cameron and Stephen Harper. I look forward to the day he calls a press conference and nobody turns up.
Joe Hockey : “The Age of Entitlement is over!”
* Whisper, whisper *
“No, I only meant you plebs, not us!”
Hockey certainly dead, as he presumably drew a Ministerial pension as well as Ambassadorial salary when he went to Washington. He performed his function so effectively there as to be shocked that Trump struggled to get a double figure percentage of votes in the US capital.
An interview with Simon Earle, Labor’s candidate in Cook, would be very welcome. He is everything that Morrison is not.
Thanks for keeping the hate alive, Bernard
It’s going to take quite some time for the hate to dissipate. And that’s only in the Liberal Party.
It will all get refreshed when he fronts the new all-singing, all-dancing Federal ICAC…………….
…………frankly, I can’t wait.
Let’s hope the dancing is performed at the end of a rope.
I think that you are over-dramatizing the situation there a bit Kimmo. No need to go overboard with the hyperbole. We should never forget (or indeed, be allowed to forget) what a negative influence that Bible-bashing, unethical and dishonest man Morrison was (and no doubt remains).
Most employers would consider failure to attend the designated workplace as an abandonment of employment, requiring only the briefest summary along with a final payslip and acerbic best wishes for the future.
Why is the Australian taxpayer supposed to accept this kind of behaviour?
There was that minister that took a year off on full pay and tudge the “Schroedinger ” education minister, so there’s a lot of precedence.
Some members of Parliament have taken time off for health reasons, which is perfectly legitimate. This is not.