Scott Morrison has started 2022 in the same way he finished 2021 — lying routinely.
The Master of Mendacity, the Prime Minister of Prevarication, he has kicked off an election year with plenty of falsehoods and lies over the various crises that have beset him over summer.
The first one carried over from the end of December into the new year. Asked about the availability of rapid antigen tests just before Christmas, Morrison offered a personal example:
I was in this situation last week, I had been at an event where I was informed that I had met someone who had COVID. Now I wasn’t defined as a close contact. I was a casual contact. And until I had further information, I went, I got a COVID test from the local pharmacy. At Terrigal. Picked one up.
But he didn’t pick one up. The cheery image of a PM not afraid to do his own shopping was false: his office later confirmed to news.com.au that Morrison sent a staffer in from his vehicle to buy the test. That was after Morrison admitted that he and his ministers got tests from the government’s own stockpile, or his wife went out to buy them at local chemists.
So he sent a staffer in, rather than go himself. It’s not exactly a Profumo-level lie, is it? Except it fits Morrison’s casual lying MO perfectly: a little deception to make himself look better, in service of a broader lie about how the government hadn’t failed on the availability of RATs.
Morrison doesn’t reserve his lies and falsehoods for big matters only.
the little lies are the craftiest ones, you can casually spread hundreds of them, and over time they create an overall broad brush stroke impression of how you want to be seen…and you can be reasonably secure in the knowledge that in isolation, no single lie can hurt you too badly if challenged. You can label the challenger as being pedantic, or that you were talking colloquially, or you could get pedantic yourself and analyse the exact dictionary definition of the words you used, to hang on to the plausible deniability so crucial to the slippery customer.
Morrison is quite adept at the hundred little lies technique.
However, he is an absolute bozo when it comes to the whoppers. Especially when he has to think on his feet. They’re so poorly thought out and so instantly disprovable that it makes you think “what sort of a goose is this guy?”.
He’s only gotten away with it for so long because most of the media were too scared to call him out. It took a French prez to give them the green light, the “Prêt, prêts, partez”. Now Morrison’s bs has become the defining characteristic of his tenure .
Merci, Macron!
Yep
‘Plausible denial’, ‘being pedantic’, ‘talking colloquially’ – why, you could be talking about Crikey journalists’ justification for their poor grammar, sentence construction and logic!
‘Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and to remove all doubt.’ Abraham Lincoln.
Lying is obviously so deeply ingrained that he does it when it’s not really necessary, or when he can be easily shown up. You wonder if he is really in touch with reality at all.
The worry is the PMs version of reality is singing the Pentecostal propaganda and the problems of the world will disappear
Why is no one except the Saturday Paper covering the real reason the PCR tests became unavailable and how much the federal government spent with private pathology firms before their “batching” was too spotty to be reliable?
No one seems to have got the Doherty Institute to explain the effect of removing Testing from the National Plan.
No one seems to have got the health Minister to explain how we came to this state of affairs.
To have the UK, US and Singapore borders shut to Australia.because our Covid19 infections per 100,000 are so high that we are a danger to them.
Slowly but surely we’re becoming a Rogue Nation. Even the Yanks are starting to write us off over this. So much for all our sycophancy in years gone by.
Yes, that Saturday Paper story should have been prominent all over Australian news outlets. It explains exactly how incompetence, insouciance and routine rorting wrecked the management of the epidemic here in the last month or so. Funny how nobody else seems interested. It’s almost as though stories that do the Coalition no favours are out of bounds; surely not?
Not out of bounds, just unreported. Zero interest. Decided by Murdoch and Nein.
National Plan? What National Plan? We never had one; I never said we had one. It never existed!
Has there ever been a more appropriate name given to a particular person than “the liar from the shire?” It fits him to a tee plus we have the added satisfaction of knowing he hates being called it.
Unfortunately, Labor won’t use this slogan during the coming election promos.
Had the shoe been on the other foot, LNP would’ve been screaming at the Labor PM who told incessant lies.
Clearly, he was never introduced to the tale of Pinocchio as a child.
If he had he would deny it. Just as he does not “believe” that he has lied at any stage during his time in public life.
George Costanza: ‘You must believe the lie.’