Scott Morrison smirks and sniggers as Bill Shorten shreds the ex PM’s attempt to play the victim over Robodebt. Mugs the camera. Peter Dutton needs a stunt to distract from his deal with a corrupt contractor Nauru. Or the stench from his rejection of six indigenous applications to the 2019 safer communities fund.  But it takes more than chutzpah to repudiate a Royal Commission. 

Dismissing Catherine Holmes’ report as “unsubstantiated, speculative and wrong”. Morrison denies all responsibility and blames public servants for keeping him in the dark. As for his not giving truthful evidence, the notorious liar simply says Holmes is wrong. We can take his word for it.  

You can’t swagger and sit at the same time but somehow Morrison manages to drape himself over the green leather of the back bench as if it’s a throne. I’m still Boss Cocky, the body language says. John Howard shrank his party and the nation to fit his meagre, “mean and tricky” leadership.

A deluded egomaniac, Morrison fancies he can still cut Labor down to size. And he’s always fancied himself as a black belt in rebarbative wit. The Sultan of Sting.

Instead, Morrison’s an epic failure; he’ll go into the record books as the Liberal’s most talentless has- been, or never-was PM- a fraud who fluked a second term in office he didn’t deserve and whose Rorts R-Us racist, sexist, chauvinist government was contracted out to the gas lobby only to waste years in office doing nothing.

His bogan chauvinism? OK, he’s the only PM to wear the Australian flag on his face. 

Or unless you count epic corruption; the Buttrosing of our ABC; an eagerness to appease corporate greed and tax cuts for the rich. And galloping inequality. 

The PBO finds that the stage three tax cuts will cost $20.4bn in their first year, 2024-25 and increase every year to $42.9bn in 2033-34. Yet 3.3 million people now live below the poverty line; 761,000 of whom are children. Let’s not talk about AUKUS and the four hundred billion dollars we plan to sink on obsolete, nuclear submarines that we can’t fuel, dock or crew. That’s a lot of aged care or welfare. Buy a lot of social housing. 

Flash back to that Robodebt moment in Question Time, another parliamentary convention Morrison continues to abuse. Parliament is lessened by the presence of an ex-PM and poly-minister, under a cloud whose legacy includes his Robodebt monster; his undermining of responsible, democratic government, a holiday in Hawaii and that kamikaze ending- in which his embrace of ugly transphobic bigots and his capture by the dirty liars of coal and methane mining helped the federal Liberals destroy themselves.

But how he smirks. Scotty could smirk for Australia. You wonder what’s wrong with him. Or, perhaps, like Macron, you don’t wonder, you know. ScoMo’s a sociopath. Not just naff; grotesquely inappropriate. Dangerous. 

Shorten talks of the human cost; lives ruined. Or poor people who took their own lives to escape ScoMo’s shakedown extortion racket. As he acted out the tough new cop on the welfare beat, a Kafkaesque terror was unleashed on the poor, the weak and the vulnerable. Nearly half a million of us received false debt notices, some with AFP logos. We were told we would go to jail, victims say. Or they punished us for speaking out.

Take a bow Alan Tudge. To “Tudge” should be a transitive verb in the vocabulary of state sanctioned violence. To Tudge is to order your underlings to get the personal files of everyone who complained about Robodebt and then leak their details to mates in the media. Alan Tudge did that.  

Michael Towke, pre-selected for Cook, suffered something very similar, except his vilification ran for four excoriating articles in The Daily Telegraph filled with lies. One claimed Towke faced jail; a headline that sent his mother in hospital while eminence grise Morrison got the nomination for the safe Liberal seat in a second ballot.

Unless you’re a Scott Morrison, or a Tudge or a member of the Coalition who condoned if not cheered them on – or any one of the countless public servants who went along with Robodebt. It’s unfathomable. You wonder what it takes to be a Minister who demands the files of every public complainant about an illegal income average strategy to levy false debts on people who couldn’t pay. Wonder what it says about us. 

What is not in doubt is that as PM Morrison knew exactly what was going on. His utterly unrepentant denial is completely at odds with the reports of his colleagues.

Fran Bailey at Tourism Australia, his boss from 2004-2006, reports a complete lack of trust. Says Morrison hasn’t changed. Cites his need for secrecy, lack of consultation and a “supreme belief that only he can do a job”. 

Or take credit for others’ dirty work. To the average man or woman, Morrison’s boat trophy boast “I stopped these” would evoke the destruction of so many lives. Terror. Separation from family. Crushing poverty. The death in life of indefinite detention. 

It gets weirder when you know it’s a lie. Rudd stopped the boats.

Morrison’s disconnection is disturbing.  Imagine. You withhold vital information from your cabinet; duck your duty to inform your colleagues and wage a dirty war on Australia’s poorest and most vulnerable. Only to achieve abject failure. 

“Not my doing” you lie to the Royal Commission and you bully Rachelle Miller, who worked closely for former Human Services Minister, Alan Tudge. 

Although Morrison swears that he ceased his Robodebt involvement once he got promoted, Miller confirms that it’s just another lie.

“We were getting feedback from the PM’s office that this was playing quite well in the marginal seats, Western Sydney, that sort of thing.”

Back to the chamber. Government Services’ Minister, Shorten, uses last Tuesday’s (1 August) Question Time to rebuke the disgraced former PM over his self-indulgent statement on indulgence the previous day. 

A brazen kleptocrat who stole five colleagues’ portfolios from under their noses between 2020 and 2021, Morrison just loves to steal any show. Bad news is good news in the moral algebra of the post-truth- post shame ScoMo-Dutton-Trump era. 

Never waste a good crisis; even if you have to set your own pants on fire.

“Very personal, Bill…And we all know why,” Morrison heckles across the chamber stooping to personal innuendo himself. But the sly dig only encourages the Sisyphean Bill Shorten, one of Labor’s top performers. Bill knows he’s drawn blood.  

Shorten belabours the failed federal Liberal Leader over ScoMo’s lonely, tone-deaf, off-key solo played to a deserted chamber, Monday 1 August, in which the dreadful ham plays the victim of a political lynching. 

It’s a TKO. In a powerful, mounting incremental repetition, Shorten lists a dozen real victims of Robodebt to ridicule Morrison’s public display of self-pity. Here’s a couple.

“The real victims were those who suffered trauma, anxiety, distress. The real victims were those who took their own lives. The real victims are the mothers of those who took their own lives.”

“The real victims are all those Australians who lost trust in government because of an unlawful scheme run for four-and-a-half years.”

“One person who is not a real victim is the member for Cook.”

Morrison’s snide riposte accuses his nemesis of personal revenge, payback for ScoMo’s key role in Kill Bill, a campaign of AFP raids, ridicule, innuendo, slander and bastardry which Liberals have run since 2013 but only with the collusion of our MSM and with our ABC increasingly over-eager to join the anti-Labor fray. 

Shorten’s under no illusions about ScoMo. Bill’s late mother, Ann, was not off-limits. Lies appeared about her in The Daily Telegraph, in May 2019, alleging her son had lied about his mother’s “illustrious career as a lawyer”. 

Some hear a dig about 2019 where Labor lost the unlosable election largely in Queensland and chiefly because of Clive Palmer and Pauline Hanson. But the Liberal team plan is to pummel Labor at every turn, as it does via the reporting of Morrison’s melodramatic stunt almost alone in the chamber Monday. 

It’s a dramatic contrast to last November and Labor’s censure of his secret powers; appointing himself to other key ministries. In the end, Morrison was in charge of six of the fourteen departments of state, as former High Court Judge Virginia Bell notes, early in her report. Then, Dutton organised a show of solidarity with a notorious liar who continues to undermine our democracy.  Morrison is the Dutton regime’s totem.

In November, every Opposition MP was rounded up by Whips despite klepto-Mo’s dim defence of his multiple ministry megalomania. He had to keep his new portfolios secret so that his colleagues wouldn’t have to second-guess themselves. But he expected them to find out when it was all gazetted?

Of course, nothing was gazetted. And Greg Hunt was told. Another lie is called for. His lawyer writes to Bell adding another crazy evasion.

The public statements by Mr Morrison were directed to the fact that he did not inform all relevant ministers or members of the public of the ministerial appointments by way of media release or public statement. However, this in no way suggests that he did not expect that the usual practice would apply and that PM&C would publish the appointments in the Gazette.

As in Robodebt, Morrison poses as the innocent victim of dud public servants. Which brings us back to his latest one-man political lunatic fringe festival show.

You could hear a pin drop, says Paul Bongiorno wryly – not because Scotty from marketing has his audience rivetted but because there’s no-one there. But be fair. The theatre of self-pity can be a lonely place. And let’s not kid ourselves that “Optics” Morrison’s orchestrated performance falls on deaf ears. 

Or that professional nihilist, Peter Dutton, is not in on the act. He has the Whip hand. In a flash, Uncle Spud’s on plasma TVs across the nation: “Mr Morrison has put a very strong case in relation to his position”. Archly, Dutts adds, “He is right to put it in parliament and he is right to serve in parliament after having been elected.”

Dutts is all loved-up, buff, refreshed and reset after a quick second honeymoon – all part of his reinvention as a loving husband and family man – which buys him some time to ring the odd mate in the AFP and dodge a bucket of dung dug out of the muck-heap that was his realm as Czar of Home Affairs and Minister for stopping people at random on Melbourne streets in 2015.

Did Dutton do a deal with a dodgy contractor, Mozammil Gulamabass “Mozu” Bhojani? At first, AFP spokespersons claim they tipped off the Minister that Mozu was bribing local politicians on Nauru. Seriously? It would be news if he were doing business without bribes. Is that possible on Nauru? 

“The AFP acting commissioner provided a verbal briefing on the investigation to the then minister for home affairs on or around 12 July 2018.”

Minister of Home Affairs Supremo, Spud-who-just-can’t-recall anything is briefed Bhojani is under AFP investigation, on Nauru, a twenty-one square kilometre island of fossilised bird turd which is now eighty percent mined out, a uninhabitable and infertile wasteland, leaving its people to eke out survival on its coastal rim; a tribute to our proud history of colonial exploitation. Or is he? 

The time frame is telling. Dutton returns, aglow with connubial bliss, flash as a rat with a gold tooth. Now the AFP retracts its claim. What it could have done is “used tighter language”, is their latest response to Labor senator Helen Polley, earlier this year.

Polley knows something. She asks if AFP told Dutton or his office that it was investigating Mr Bhojani for foreign bribery prior to September 2018.

At first AFP say they provided “a verbal briefing on the investigation to the then minister for home affairs on or around 12 July 2018.” Now it claims that it warned of the danger an over AFP presence might pose to diplomatic relations. 

That exceeds peak implausibility. This is the same Nauruan government which in 2015 is reported to have colluded with Australian Immigration Department officials in the persecution of public enemies. Yet our dodgy dealings go back a long way.   

The former island paradise is now a wen of nepotism and corruption, run by gangsters; a tribute to the civilising mission of Australia’s imperial past. We had the power to help make the place whatever we desired but instead, with our customary colossal colonial conceit, we have fashioned it in our own image. 

A type of portrait of Dorian Gray, the ravaged wasteland of what was once a fertile Pacific idyll is now a desolate, barren husk where Islanders struggle to exist on the rim. Nauru attests to our appetite for environmental degradation. Most of the island’s vegetation is replaced by unsightly mining tailings. Using the miracle of mercantile enterprise and The Pacific Phosphate Company much of Nauru disappeared long ago; fertilising paddocks all over Australia and New Zealand.

“A worked-out phosphate field is a dismal, ghastly tract of land, with its thousands of upstanding white coral pinnacles from ten to thirty feet high, its cavernous depths littered with broken coral, abandoned tram tracks, discarded phosphate baskets, and rusted American kerosene tins,” Photographer Rosamond Dobson Rhone, writes in 1921 for National Geographic Magazine

The people of Nauru took us to the International Court of Justice in 1989 seeking compensation for mining away their home. They won a pittance. Since then, Australia has been involved with economic help and most recently with its regional processing centre but under the relationship corruption has flourished. 

Mozu was up to no good. Even if bribery is endemic.  What could come out about Nauru may help terminate Dutton’s career. But, stop. Look over there! 

Within hours, Morrison’s package of lies; his capture of the narrative is faithfully relayed on all MSM stations across the nation, in all its defamatory glory, with ScoMo safe in coward’s castle; parliamentary privilege. 

Scott Morrison accuses Labor of a campaign of political lynching, The Guardian Australia, happily gurgles, regurgitating a key theme in Opposition HQ comms. It does help to flood the zone with shit, as master of disinformation, Steve Bannon, puts it. MSM help him subvert the narrative of the Royal Commission’s indictment of Morrison for failing to act responsibly in presenting Robodebt to cabinet whilst knowing that it was illegal. 

Of course, there’s more. Morrison lied. Commissioner Catherine Holmes also found the liar from the shire lied to the commission. Or presented untrue evidence. No-one ever told him income averaging was an established practice yet he claims he was given verbal assurances of this fairytale.

It not only beggars belief that Morrison had nothing to do with Robo-debt after he became Treasurer or PM, as he claims, it upends ministerial seniority. In ScoMo’s absurd version, he grew less responsible the higher his rank.

It gets worse. Echoing Julia Banks who says that he was a “menacing, controlling wallpaper”, Commissioner Holmes found that Morrison then bullied public servants; or “pressured departmental officials” over Robo-debt.

Liberals knew Robo-debt was illegal in 2014, before the scheme even started. David Mason, Acting Director within The Department of Social Services DSS told its delivery arm, then known as the Department of Human Services

“We would not be able to let any debts calculated in this manner reach a tribunal,” Mason warns. 

“It’s flawed, as the suggested calculation method averaging employment income over an extended period does not accord with legislation, which specifies that the employment income is assessed fortnightly.”

Robo Debts are still being collected. Those who were coerced into paying back an illegally assessed debt and money they didn’t owe are still meeting instalment arrangements which Centrelink says must be honoured. The culture of the department administering them hasn’t changed even if the rhetoric of its Minister is upgraded. 

As ever, there’s a touch of the torch song of unrequited love from Morrison. Narcissus drowning. Tragically, grotesquely overcome by self-love and self-pity, a vainglorious lout who is in love with himself, can have no rivals. 

Mixed with bile and venom, ScoMo’s swan song (we can hope) is a bizarre, discordant, contortion of lies, crack-pot logic and Trumpery which slanders the Royal Commission into the Robodebt Scheme as a part of quasi-legal political lynching while the coward in him abuses parliamentary privilege. 

Morrison who is fresh back from serving his electorate of Cook by holidaying in Italy and Greece, is “a bottomless well of self-pity with not a drop of mercy for all the real victims of Robodebt”, Shorten tells Parliament. 

But it’s worse than that. Our attention is turned away from some serious corruption to an easier narrative; the fiction of Labor’s vendetta or political lynching of poor Scott John Morrison whose own version of the truth – a bit like the apocryphal tale of the boy who put his finger in the hole in the dyke -he was only maintaining the system’s integrity and saving taxpayer dollars is grotesque and insulting but a cunning parody, nevertheless.  

Worse. Trumpista Morrison would have us believe that he is the victim and that Commissioner Catherine Holmes, a former Chief Justice of Queensland, has let herself become a Labor Party stooge in Shorten’s vendetta. It’s defamatory and untrue but our parliamentary privilege convention makes it all somehow OK if it’s said in parliament? 

As with Trump, there is the chance of legal proceedings against those mentioned in the sealed section of Holmes’ report. Holmes also warns of victims suing individual ministers for misfeasance in public office. 

A fitting outcome would be the prosecution of both Dutton and Morrison over their engagement of a contractor known to be corrupt given he was sentenced before the then PM and Home Affairs Ministers renewed his contract.

But who knows what other evidence of misfeasance may turn up? Dutton and Morrison must have upset enough AFP and Border Force operatives in their race to the bottom that more damaging evidence of corruption Is highly likely. 

Not that you’d wish a prison sentence on anyone. Some community service on Manus Island or Nauru would be most appropriate for either as long as the pair are kept apart.  Indefinite detention, whilst fitting, is probably a patrol boat bridge too far. But no mobiles, no conjugal rights and don’t let Morrison near a camera. Ever again.