It’s hard to believe we are coming to third anniversary of a night which not only stunned the nation, but it also meant a person who was not, and indeed still is not, fit to lead the nation was now going to do so for the next three years.

I was certainly surprised about the outcome of the Federal Election on 19 May 2019, as I honestly thought the nation would see Mr Morrison for what he is, namely treacherous, and an alleged failure at Tourism Australia who had probably been our worst treasurer, and who had acted in such a perfidious manner towards his prior leader Malcolm Turnbull (et tu Brute?) the nation surely would not support such nauseating character.

History is now etched in stone, and regrettably Morrison was able to accomplish a devious victory that 19th day of May 2019. Of course Morrison didn’t pass the finishing line first that night of 19 May 2019 because of ‘a parting of the Red Sea miracle’, no he passed that finishing line with his nose just in front because of the media bias, because of a huge media spend by Clive Palmer, and finally because of a leader who could not cut through due to the media bias (before the crowds of feigned indignation come after me, I have previously acknowledged in my one of my articles Labor has on a very few occasions been the beneficiary of such bias.

Now here we are in 2022, and to say the Australian public are displeased with Morrison would be minimising their sentiment. A vast proportion of the country dislike and do not trust him, it’s as simple as that. Morrison not only divided the nation at the last election; he is now trying to dig himself out of a hole of poor economic management, poor foreign relations, poor national security, and broken promises, which he alone has dug for himself. He still has his media cohorts of Murdoch, Costello, and Stokes. Even dear Old Aunty ABC is a crumbled ruin of what it once was, not to dissimilar to Shelly’s poem Ozymandias, as it bit by bit falls apart under the pressure of diminished government spending (Mr Morrison can still find in the coffers of our money to pay a billionaire whisky distiller $4,500,000.00), and government interference to be this relic of a once golden age of public broadcasting.

SCOTT MORRISON is under fire for today announcing a taxpayer-funded gift of $4,500,000 to Lark Distillery — part-owned by a billionaire baron. Lark Distillery has enjoyed soaring profits in recent years, while Aussies face plunging wages and surging costs of living. #auspol pic.twitter.com/54kgXDokHw

— PRGuy (@PRGuy17) April 29, 2022

There now seems to be five clear elements of his governing, or his character attributes, which has turned the public off Mr Morrison, no matter how hard the biased journalists at Nine Entertainment, Seven West Media, the Murdochracy and the ABC try to paint this fallacious picture Mr Morrison is your typical married Australian father cooking fish or curries. So, I shall now embark on this journey of the reasons why you should not (I would very much like to say be compelled, however such language is inconsistent with my beliefs in democracy) vote for the Coalition, which by virtue of voting for the Coalition would result in three more years of us as a nation having to endure lies, waste of our money, promises made but not delivered, and finally ensuring Australia isolates itself in a region of the World where we were previously held in such high esteem.

Broken Promises

It is a corollary of our democratic system of government that if a politician makes a promise to do something for us the voting public, and the public do so vote for them, only for the promise to be broken, then we as members of a democratic system should not vote for that politician again.

1. Federal ICAC: notwithstanding his feeble explanation as to why he broke this promise, what was prepared by Mr Morrison and Mr Porter as a draft Federal Integrity Bill in November 2020 would have prevented a Federal ICAC to hold its own independent inquiries, prevented a Federal ICAC from holding public hearings into politicians or public servants, and banned the Federal ICAC officers from investigating past scandals. It is now etched in the history books of time Mr Morrison made this promise of establishing a Federal ICAC with teeth before the 2019 Federal Election. It is hard to comprehend what Mr Morrison considered a Federal Integrity Commission with ‘teeth’ meant back in 2019, but he knew from the reported sources it had to include public hearings. When the draft Federal Integrity Bill was presented to Parliament he would not even allow debate on the draft bill which is just contrary to the principles of parliamentary democracy, in which both upper and lower houses debate the legislation and tweak it so that it conforms with the legislative intention. In any event it appears Mr Morrison is going to break this important promise of the 2019 campaign.
2. A budget surplus: ah yes, how can we forget Mr Frydenberg’s AC/DC moment of shame. Despite any attempt by Mr Morrison or Mr Frydenberg for that matter claiming otherwise, we were never on track to achieve this misleading, indeed even deceptive, proclamation which the Coalition and Mr Morrison made before the 2019 Federal Election. By the way, I’m wondering what the cost of the ‘Back in Black’ mugs would be fetching at the various low-priced stores where such items may be sold at.
3. Carparks: yes, nothing like promising 47 new commuter car parks at a cost of $650Million to entice the voting public to vote for you. However, only 6 car parks have been built and construction work has started on another 6, whilst the remaining 35 have been scrapped.
4. New trees: I shall refrain from ridicule or jeer towards the Morrison Government for breaking this promise, as it was an important promise by the Morrison Government during the 2019 Federal Election to address climate change. In 2018 Mr Morrison announced a plan to plant one billion trees to help the environment, and the government said 400,000 hectares of new tree plantations were needed to meet its target. Presently, government statistics record there are only 4,300 hectares of land where new trees have been planted.
5. Social Media Trolls: in March of 2019, the former Attorney-General Mr Porter promised there would be a tightening of laws on social media, pledging to increase penalties for breaches of another person’s rights to privacy. Those legislative amendments were not introduced to Parliament by the Morrison Government. In 2021 Mr Morrison proposed a fresh crackdown on social media, pledging laws to unmask anonymous trolls, but these laws were also not introduced to Parliament.

As one may see, this is a significant record of broken promises by the Morrison Government, and despite Mr Morrison saying it’s not his fault (when actually it is), these facts alone should see him being hosed out of Parliament on 21 May 2022. However, like the old advertisement, ‘but wait, there is more.’

Economic Management

Now I can’t recall just how the Liberals ever managed to pin the dirty badge of being good economic managers to themselves, because the facts are they never have been.

Some of you may be too young to remember the 1982 recession when Mr Fraser was Prime Minister and Mr Howard was Treasurer, but I can recall it and it was far worse than the subsequent Keating recession. We had the worst recession since the Great Depression, and when Mr Howard handed over the treasury reigns to Mr Keating the budget deficit was $4.3Billion, inflation was 11%, unemployment was 10.2% and growth was a negative 0.4%. Terrible numbers. When Mr Hawke and Mr Keating examined the books the budget deficit forecast quickly increased to $9Billion. Regarding interest rates, from 1977 to 1982 the average mortgage rate was set at 13.5% and business interest rates reached 17.5%.

Even when Mr Howard was Prime Minister, he, and his Treasurer Mr Peter Costello (now chair of Nine Entertainment), sold our gold at the worst possible time being when the price of gold was very low, and they failed to act on the funds derived from the mining boom to develop infrastructure, improve health care (The Howard Government slashed the funding to Medicare) and Education. Instead, we had to endure Mr Costello’s off-putting smirk as he delivered budget surpluses which did not provide much macroeconomic benefit to Australia, as surpluses cause a market disequilibrium in the demand and supply chain. When Mr Hawke and Mr Keating ran surpluses, it was because of fears about the current account deficit. The so-called low interest rates of the Howard Government era were a product of the one-off impact of the introduction of the GST and the fall-out from the resources boom, the Australian current account went into a larger deficit and household debt almost doubled during the Howard Government’s years of office from 1996 to 2007. Home loan interest payments were higher than 1989 when they peaked at 18%, because of sharp rises in house prices, so in relation to mortgages to income this data had grown prodigiously during the Howard years (Ibid).

Now we look at the Morrison Government’s performance, and the striking issues are obviously its failures in respect to the economy. The first myth I wish to dispel is the notion the Liberals tax less than Labor. That is just a lie, and ABC Fact Check said it was a ‘Fair Call’ when Dr Chalmers said the two highest-taxing governments of the past 30 years have been Coalition governments. Figure 1 below, proves Dr Chalmers claim:

The next myth about the Liberals claims to economic management is the amount of national debt. The ABC found it was a fair call when Dr Chalmers said two thirds of Commonwealth debt had been incurred before the outbreak of the pandemic. We now have almost a $1Trillion in debt with nothing to show for it, and Figure 2 below reflects the sharp incline of national debt before the pandemic:

Regarding the issue of employment, a clear majority of Australians (69%) say the Roy Morgan February 2022 unemployment of 8.5% is closer to the truth than the figures which Mr Morrison and Mr Frydenberg have trotted out before us. The claim by the Coalition to 4% unemployment is deceiving for two reasons. The first reason is the data is obtained by simply including the underemployment rate with the unemployment rate. The Australian Bureau of Statistics (‘ABS’) calls the sum of the unemployment rate and the underemployment rate the under-utilisation rate. The unemployment rate on an FTE (full-time equivalent) would be more than 4% but perhaps not as high as the underutilisation rate of 10%. The second method to measure unemployment is to count the number of people receiving unemployment benefits. There are two unemployment benefits, namely youth allowance (paid to people 21 years of age or younger) and JobSeeker which is paid to those persons 22 or older. You would typically expect the reported unemployment rate to sit between the rate of people receiving JobSeeker and the rate of people receiving either JobSeeker or the Youth Allowance (other). It was very solidly there till 2013.

From then to the start of the pandemic, the unemployment rate and JobSeeker recipient rate have been very close. However, the performance in benefits payment has not matched the claimed recovery in unemployment. Both rates are well above the levels applied before the election of the LNP, and for JobSeeker payments they are still at the highest levels through the entire term of the LNP government. The explanation for the discrepancy lies in the definition of ’employed person.’ A part-time worker who is looking for full-time work can receive JobSeeker. The real question is on what number should the government focus. Should it be crowing about the 4 per cent rate, or should it be concerned that the rate is almost a percentage point lower because persons on temporary visas aren’t doing some jobs? Should it be more concerned that the under-utilisation rate is 10 per cent or that between 2 per cent and 3 per cent of the workforce has a job but needs income support? This is a genuine concern. It isn’t that the unemployment rate relies on a definition of employment that under-reports the rate. The situation is that the Liberals have plenty of other data to tell them that the employment picture is nowhere near as strong as they claim. Whether that is because the Liberals are intentionally misleading the public or because they really don’t understand the numbers themselves is a matter of judgment.

The final issue regarding the Morrison Government’s economic management is unlike Labor, the Coalition does not have a proper plan and our escalating inflation is proof of this, as I have previously written about:

The inflation we did not need to have

From Back in Black to a Trillion in Debt

The Morrison Government are poor economic managers. Mr Morrison has recently provided a guarantee he won’t increase taxes, but I have already addressed the reasons why I wouldn’t accept such a guarantee.

Character

Notwithstanding remaining close to his media cohorts, and the benefits of shielding from the press which goes with such an undermining on the Fourth Estate, the voting public are not enamoured with Mr Morrison anymore and even members of the Liberal Party say he is allegedly unfit for public office:

• Senator Fierravantti-Wells on the night of the 2022 budget alleges Mr Morrison as an autocrat and bully who has no moral compass.
• Ms Banks and Ms Archer alleged in December 2021 Mr Morrison is a bully.
• Senators Lambie and Hanson allege Mr Morrison is a bully.
• Allegations made by Mr Towke.

There are the alleged lies, character and incompetence I have written about regarding Mr Morrison and the Morrison Government which do not paint a pretty picture of him at all:

Scott Morrison’s Lies, Character and Incompetence

Scott Morrison’s Lies, Character and Incompetence (part 2)

There are just too many lies, too many unanswered questions and too much alleged bullying and deception to allow Mr Morrison to continue as Prime Minister.

The Pacific Stuff-up

I have previously written about the almost 8 years of neglect and insulting by a succession of Coalition governments which has led to our worst display of foreign affairs and national security since WWII:

Scott Morrison’s national security fail

Even Julie Bishop, a former Coalition Minister for Foreign Affairs, said the current Foreign Affairs Minister Ms Payne should have immediately flown to the Solomon Islands. Instead, Mr Morrison sent a junior minister in Mr Seselja to the Solomon Islands, clearly conveying a lack of respect for that country. Mr Albanese called the whole Solomon Islands situation a ‘Pacific Stuff-Up.’ I have not heard too many commentators disagreeing with Mr Albanese.

Scandals, Aged Care and Too Late

This has been government which has had the word ‘Gate’ written about it more often than any previous government. From ‘Watergate’ to ‘Grass Gate’, and Barnaby Joyce’s spending of $675,000.00 of our money to apparently produce a text message report. There are matters of alleged scandal I shall not refer to, for legal reasons, however I shall repeat Jason Clare’s comment yesterday, about where Mr Tudge is, why are we not being told why we are paying $500,000.00 and “even Scooby-Doo would not be able to find Mr Tudge.”

In relation to Mr Morrison, he has gone missing during our hours of need on too many occasions. He secretly went to Hawaii whilst Australia was going up in flames. Mr Morrison said we were at the front of the queues for vaccines when we were not in such a position, and Ms McManus quite properly referred to the vaccine rollout as being a ‘stroll out.’ Mr Morrison also let down the country again regarding the floods, and he has strangely only paid Queenslander’s half of what the good people in New South Wales (‘NSW’) are receiving.

Then we have our disgraceful treatment of senior citizens, an issue which could be substantially improved by paying Aged Care staff more than what they currently being paid. I have already written about this issue on earlier occasion, and I provide my link to that article so that you may acquaint yourself with my thoughts regarding this national disgrace:

Are YOU Really Arguing We Can’t Feed and Care for Our Grandparents?

Finally, we have the Coalition tearing itself apart over net zero climate change and Mr Morrison’s intervention in the NSW branch of the Liberal Party.

I could write more facts and opinions about this terrible government; however, War and Peace would then be a shorter and not so daunting book.

I have put up my hand 🤚 to say I will be voting for Albanese Government. I hope after you read this article you will do the same.