One of the beauties of Crikey’s Arsehat of the Year award is the flexibility of the category. “Arsehat” is such a perfectly polysemous designation.
The public figure subjecting themselves to relentless humiliation is a total arsehat, and so is the despot ruining neighbouring countries and their own. It’s just as vivid and accurate in each usage.
In 2014 then prime minister Tony Abbott beat ISIS for the top gong. This year our departing prime minister Scott Morrison beat Vladimir Putin, going one better than the French football team by successfully defending his 2021 title as Crikey’s Arsehat of the Year.
And, frankly, Morrison may have done even more to earn it this time around. He lead the Coalition to a catastrophic defeat in May’s federal election, which feels inevitable in hindsight, but as Kishor Napier-Raman wrote just before election day, this should have been the one he won.
Whether you credit Morrison or the state premiers for this fact, Australia came out of the early years of the COVID era with a record that was the envy of the world, and many other incumbents in Australia found their constituents extremely keen to stick with what they knew. Yet Morrison, at almost every turn, managed to repel voters.
There was the ongoing policy vacuum, that time he accidentally squished a child, and the inescapable conclusion he left voters with — that he viewed every situation through the lens of cynical politicking, not the national interest.
But what we learnt conclusively in 2022 is that Morrison might not have even been all that good at the politics side of things. As Bernard Keane put it the day after the Coalition was turfed, Morrison was the worst leader for his own side of politics that Australia has ever seen.
Witness the disastrous factional infighting in the lead-up to the election, with Morrison and his “consigliere” Alex Hawke accused of delaying the preselection process until dangerously close to election day so that the federal executive could intervene and install their favoured candidates — candidates like Katherine Deves in Warringah, one of the many culture war moves aimed at the gap where a policy vision ought to be.
It failed miserably, with the Liberal Party’s heart plucked from its chest — candidates who may have formed the core future leadership of the party beaten in Kooyong, Goldstein, Curtin, Wentworth and many other formerly safe seats. It felt like that was it, a farewell as appropriate, poignant and rich as Frank Sinatra singing “Angel Eyes” in 1971.
But just as Sinatra turned out to have hundreds of gigs left in the tank, Morrison wasn’t ready to depart the spotlight just yet. He had one more resounding, bravura encore performance of every trait that delivered him such a comfortable victory in 2021.
There was one more great Morrison scandal this year — maybe his defining scandal — completely in keeping with his aversion to scrutiny, his near compulsion towards dishonesty, and his grandiose accrual of power that he barely seemed to want to exercise.
Via what must be the greatest backfire in attempted hagiography in Auspol history, it was revealed after the election that he had secretly sworn himself into multiple ministries during the crisis. He had kept this information from the public and, in most cases, from the people unwittingly sharing their jobs with him.
And so, like the defining arsehats of the previous decade — Peter Dutton and Tony Abbott — Morrison will have to be awarded the Golden Arsehat for lifetime achievement in the field and be retired from future contention.
As he’s shown in the previous three years, he is uniquely, abundantly equipped with the talents to pick these things up, and as the Morrison government slowly recedes in the rear-view mirror, it’s time to give a new generation of budding Arsehats a chance.
We can thank you for your service, Scott. You were truly one of the greatest this competition has ever seen.
Read about this award’s esteemed counterpart: the 2022 Crikey Person of the Year.
I can think of no starker evidence of the ignorance and gullibility of our electorate, that this zealous adherent of the transparently self-serving Prosperity Gospel wasn’t voted out the first time he stood for election as PM.
I can’t pretend I predicted the full depths of this rancid filth’s abject depravity, but I knew he was unprecedentedly nasty piece of work when that smug fat face uttered the words “on water matters” like he could effortlessly gaslight me into believing it was a thing.
I knew it wasn’t a thing. And at that moment, I also knew the Lying Nasty Party was deliberately unconstrained in its vile mendacity. These douchebags insist on demonstrating there is no upper bound to righteous loathing – you think you’ve reached it, then they hit a whole new level. Like making the emptiest of their suits the leader; what a testament to the lack of talent in their ranks.
Charlie’s citation didn’t even have room for the creepy Hillsong stuff.
Don’t be shy Kimmo, tell us what you really think. ; )
Kimmo well said……………..
Exactly. All of it, but the fact that he was voted back in, after people had seen what he was and what they were, that speaks volumes about our polity, bad volumes.
And what does it say about his electorate who voted him back in ?????
It perhaps says more about the nature of the Liberals that they snuck him into parliament after he was resoundingly defeated in preselection.
I love it when someone is able to articulate my extreme loathing towards the LNP. I get so upset I usually just mumble incoherently.
Well said.
Too right sport, one look was all it took, it was down hill from there.
There is nothing nice to say about this pitiful pile of excrement. Arsehat of the decade, and he probably will never be topped.
I always say that until the next conservative comes along. NEVER underestimate the coalitions ability to stoop lower.
A very deep talent pool
Yes, the last administration ground integrity to dust
as Scott Morrison’s wild fairytales were spun,
for the Arsehat of the Year devastated public trust
in our parliament and how its work is done,
but some words are chasing after him around the country now,
and they’ll follow him forever down the years,
for the travesty we’re witnessing is one that won’t allow
him to laugh it off or blame it on his peers.
For these words will haunt him daily as a regular refrain
on the streets, in interviews and parliament,
they will echo in his nightmares and they’ll hammer in his brain
to remind him of the widespread discontent,
words like “arrogance”, “corruption”, “inaction” and “deceit”,
“egocentric”, “rorts”, and “failure”, but the one to underline
is the word that’s so compelling that it’s worthy of repeat…
it’s “resign”, and yet again I say “Resign!”
Aaahhh Gazza, you’ve done it again…Bravo..!!
The worst thing about him is how he led his government in normalising deceit, corruption and incompetence. He has damaged the country, and I don’t think we’ll ever return to how we were before him. It’s incremental, the damage done by a bad government led by a bad person. John Howard showed us that.
At least Howard was competent and managed to do things. Morrison on the other hand……
Normalising – yes that is what happened – and couldn’t have happened without the craven co-operation of so many MSM journos.
Whilst for many years Australian politics has become presidential, propelling the PM to embodying the entire party, surely it is those in the LNP who supported Morrison when he became PM who are as bad as him. Many of them would have known what he was like, yet still they supported him. At a further distance behind are the voters who voted for the LNP in 2019, when the ALP promoted policies which would have helped create a much fairer society.
What this asks us is what part of Australian society allows itself to support the embodiment of what Morrison represents? Surely it is this group of voters who are as bad as him, even forgiving their ignorance of politics below what it projected on the front pages of the MSM.
I agree that the party is responsible, they represent vested interests such as fossil fels and banks ,not voters.
I think the power of mainstream media is grossly underrated and that the sophistication of influencing the hearts and minds is still woefully misunderstood.
Although Crikey readers aren’t as likely to become victims I would like to remind people here that to expect media to not be lying, to not be misrepresenting, to not be acting on behalf of vested interestsisn’t just an act of faith, it is trusting that the world isn’t a horrible profit driven environment first and foremost.
I don’t think that is unreasonable, it is just misinformed in terms of the majority of the motives of the people who own mainstream media.
If you can’t afford to pay for this or expect common decency from the major media outlets you are not a fool, it is that your reality has been very deliberately been nobbled and losing interest is a natural instinct that plays perfectly with the design outcomes of the owners of these vast empires of media reach.