It seems whatever he does, Scott Morrison leaves a bevy of disgruntled colleagues in his wake.
An early job was with the Tourism Task Force where he was 2IC. After he jumped ship to join its main rival, Tourism Council Australia run by Bruce Baird, the TTF was unimpressed and changed its employment contracts to prevent others from “doing a Morrison”.
From there, Morrison moved on to the Office of Tourism and Sport in New Zealand. Within weeks, the tourism board’s three most senior figures – the chair, the deputy chair and the chief executive – were gone.
“I suspect it was just about power,” said board member Gerry McSweeney. “You had the meeting of two people [Morrison and Tourism Minister Mike McCully] who were very ambitious.”
The Auditor-General was scathing about Morrison’s role in commissioning PwC to conduct a secret review of the board and then recommending they be sacked.
“We were surprised by the vehemence and timing of this advice,” the auditor-general commented. “Mr Morrison was aware that the board’s directors (including the chairperson) had deliberately been excluded from the review process, as part of the terms of reference.”
When interviewed last year, McSweeney said of Morrison, “Picking off soft targets, seems to have been a career projection of your PM.”
McCully resigned over the scandal and, with a year still left on his contract, Morrison returned to Sydney in March 2000, where he took up a position as the state director of the NSW Liberal Party.
After four years in that role, in a move that reeked of political cronyism, Morrison was rewarded when Joe Hockey, then tourism minister, gifted him the $350,000-a-year job as chief executive of its newly created tourism body, Tourism Australia where he, once again, ran foul of the board.
Its members complained that he did not heed advice, withheld important research data, was aggressive and intimidating, and ran the government agency as if it were a one-man show.
Confident that John Howard would ultimately back him, Morrison reportedly boasted that if then tourism minister Fran Bailey got in his way, he would bring her down. When board members called for him to go, however, Bailey agreed, and soon it was Morrison who was on his way. “Fran despised him,” says an industry insider. “Her one big win was ousting Scott. His ego went too far.”
“He was an invisible MD, he wasn’t present, he wasn’t around, he wouldn’t know anyone’s names,” one long-time staffer said.
A subsequent report from the Auditor-General regarding three contracts worth $184 million may shed more light on the real reason Morrison’s contract was terminated a year early.
The audit report revealed that information had been kept from the board, procurement guidelines breached, and private companies engaged before paperwork was signed and without appropriate value-for-money assessments.
Out of a job, Morrison found his next sinecure after being parachuted into Cook, the seat of his former boss, Bruce Baird. And even that was dodgy. He failed dismally in the preselection ballot until the Telegraph did a defamatory hatchet job on the successful candidate, Michael Towke, who was then disendorsed by the executive.
Purportedly a moderate, as the party lurched to the right under the leadership of Abbott, so too did Morrison. “Supreme opportunism,” scoffed one senior Liberal when asked about the one-time moderate’s confrontational approach on asylum seekers. The more publicity that came Scott Morrison’s way, the more hardline he became.
According to Niki Savva’s book about the spill that installed Morrison as leader, Plots and Prayers, at an April 2018 lunch Michael Keenan, who served as justice minister when Morrison was immigration minister, told his West Australian colleagues, including Finance Minister Mathias Cormann, Attorney-General Christian Porter and Mr Morrison’s chief ally Ben Morton, that Morrison was an “absolute arsehole“.
“Porter joined in, saying he did not think Morrison was a team player. Cormann said he had seen Morrison up close now, and, in his opinion, Dutton was better,” Savva wrote in her book.
Julia Banks described Morrison like “menacing controlling wallpaper” during the period where she decided to leave the Liberal party after Malcolm Turnbull was deposed as prime minister.
“It was the three months of Morrison’s leadership that … was definitely the most gut-wrenching, distressing period of my entire career.”
Leaked texts between Gladys Berejiklian and a current Liberal federal cabinet minister during the 2019-20 bushfires suggest they share that low opinion.
“In one, [Gladys] described you as a horrible, horrible person, going on to say she did not trust you, and you are more concerned with politics than people,” Peter Van Onselen said at the National Press Club on Tuesday.
“The minister is even more scathing, describing you as a fraud and ‘a complete psycho’.”
And who could forget the French president who didn’t mince his words about Morrison’s lack of integrity – he’s a liar.
These criticisms are all coming from people who have worked closely with Morrison, people from his own side of politics, people who are supposedly part of his “team”, and other world leaders.
I can only concur with their informed opinions.
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