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Mr Morrison Wasn’t Told About The Illegality Of Robodebt And He Wasn’t The Only Minister!

Apparently, ex-PM Scott Morrison…

Mm. Sorry, I got distracted writing that. You know how when you see a thing of beauty and you just pause and forget what you were doing and just stare? Well, the phrase “ex-PM Scott Morrison” had that effect on me and I lost my train of thought…

Losing one’s train of thought and not remembering. Where was I?

Ah, the Robodebt Royal Commission. Mr Morrison was giving evidence.

Now when I say he was giving evidence I’m being even looser with the truth than our ex-PM… I probably should say that he was doing everything in his power not to give evidence including, I’m led to believe, showing holiday snaps of Jen and the girls and explaining that he didn’t know anything about the so-called Robodebt because he’d had to take Jen and the girls on a trip because the one to Hawaii was spoiled when he had to return a day early to not hold a hose and look at maps and point to the places that he wasn’t going to go to because they were on fire.

I’m yet to confirm this but I’m hoping for a job with the Murdochs so it’s not so much getting to the truth as what you can make up that gets you paid the big bucks.

Speaking of making things up, let’s get back to my account of the Royal Commission. (In the interests of clarity, I’m going to point out that this is deliberately ambiguous so you don’t know whether I’m telling you that I’ll be making up Morrison’s account or whether I’m accusing him. How can something be made clearer by telling you that it’s deliberately ambiguous? Well that’s a good question so I’m just going to ignore it and say what I intended to say regardless.)

Yes, I didn’t listen to the whole thing but I did listen to enough bits and pieces to get the flavour of what Scotty was doing. He was using his old tactic of talking a lot in the hope that people forgot the original question and moved on. While this tactic has been effective in press conferences and in one on one interviews where he can reject the premise of the question, Royal Commissioners and Kings Counsel aren’t quite so easily put off. At one point, the head Ms Catherine Holmes pointed out that while he was used to relying on rhetoric, he should stick to answering the question without extra detail.

At one point, the KC said that the last ten minutes could have been summed up with the simple word “No.”

Anyway, we learnt that he wasn’t the only minister who wasn’t told about the illegality because lots of other ministers weren’t told to.

I was disappointed that he wasn’t asked if he was all those other ministers who weren’t told.

 

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18 comments

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  1. Goog

    More evidence of incompetence but “Jesus” has forgiven him

  2. paul walter

    A deliberate, cynixcal, evil, fraud perpetrated on the vulnerable, with the victims framed, but its remains astounding that some peole can lie with a mouthfull of marbles underwater, feeling nourished by the pain.

    “Thou shalt not bear false witness”
    “thou shalt not steal”.

  3. pierre wilkinson

    I couldn’t be any clearer in answering that I was not informed of whatever the question was at the time as I was being especially busy trying my utmost to satisfy the requirements of good governance and seeing that those who had a go were given a go so that they could in fact get where they wanted to go without recourse to stopping anyone else from the opportunity of getting a chance to have a go at getting to where they wanted to go too…
    see, perfectly clear

  4. Andy56

    It seems karma is a bitch. Wasnt it tony abbott who set the scene, beauracrates are to follow orders not gve fearless advice? Its obvious the heads of the departments just wanted to please. The minister set the agenda $3something billion in savings? So the heads obliged. Scott is now following the line ” i wasnt told”.
    If there is a hell, its made for such nasties as scott. JC would surely have whipped him good !
    How clever of scott, he isnt to blame, the public service is to blame.

  5. Helen JENNINGS

    Rossleigh, once again you’ve delivered the hideous truth about Scotty and his lnp..with humour. The message is not lost, it was a cluster f*^:k of corruption, greed, illegal activity with the result of their deception being the unforgivable and never to be forgotten suicides of over 2000 young people.
    What the lnp did to Labor about the 4 deaths of people working within the pink vats scheme was reprehensible and by no means am I trivializing those deaths or comparing. What I’m doing is trying to understand why the lnp got away with this persecution of innocent people and the ALP and the length of time it’s taken to bring it to the legal scrutiny it deserves. Perhaps 2000 people may be living satisfying lives, persuing great careers and these criminals would have been charged and these awful outcomes for family and friends would never have eventuated. The Robodebt is a very emotional issue and I find I cannot excuse him and the his ilk but I know there will be no repercussions and punishments that will equate for the crimes.

  6. Paul Smith

    Andy56 says: “If there is a hell, its made for such nasties as scott.” So did Dante. In the Inferno there are nine levels of hell. The lowest, where Satan is trapped by the very means he uses to free himself, is reserved for… anyone? That’s right, LIARS!

  7. K

    I don’t hold a degree, mate! 😂👀😏

  8. New England Cocky

    Having seen the Albanese LABOR government just fork out undisclosed damages from public monies paid to the victim of alleged rapist Bruce Lehrmann rather than the personal costs of the ministers responsible for complete failure of duty of care to provide a safe workplace, I doubt that a suitable financial punishment will be contemplated by either the Robodebt Royal Commission or the LABOR Party.

    IMHO the only suitable consequence of this objectionable illegal policy is for Scummo, Stuart Robodebt & Friedeggburgher to be held personally liable for the already paid multi-million damages paid to surviving victims of the LIARBRAL Nazional$ Robodebt policy, expelled from Parliament and stripped of any and all post politics benefits usually provided from the public purse.

    As a distant relative of Scummo Chosen by the Eagle to create the first Australian royally endorsed democratically elected theocratic dictatorship following the teaching of the Hell$inger$ cult to buy your way to heaven now, Lehrmann got off far too lightly for exposing the disgraceful way of life practiced in OUR Parliament House. Remember as Prim Monster, Scummo is ultimately responsible for what happens ….. a task he has repeatedly failed throughout his public life.

  9. Phil Pryor

    Morriswine the unsniffable is on “trial” in an easy way, lying and bullshitting at length, as per usual, to avoid any comprehensiblity. This particle of pigpoo is such a disgrace to Australia’s political history, with endless possibilities to come , that we’ll never scrub the stains or ease the nostrils. Unravelling of truth is difficult, the bowelbothering brothers of conservatism unite in obfuscation, deviation and destructive farcoffery that we may never get all the truth and nothing but the truth, BUT, may the process continue and the rubbish get outed and binned. Conservatism is a fithy instinct of anti-social selfishness with mememe first and last, so NEVER ever support or even tolerate an extreme uncaring conservative, for you will be betrayed.

  10. New England Cocky

    @ PP: I love it when you accurately describe the self-serving members of the LIARBRAL Party.

  11. Henry Rodrigues

    Listening to and watching this fool, once again exhibiting such base stupidity and misplaced arrogance in his own abilities, makes me wonder over and over again, how the Liberal party placed all their confidence in his leadership. There must surely be a profound dearth of talent in that miserable collection of dunderheads which was easily exploited by that devious media owner, Murdoch the crinkled. Hopefully we’ll finally be rid of the useless scrounger, once and for all.

  12. wam

    beauty rossleigh,
    Have we come far from the sudden IQ drop of alan bond?
    Still the story of him not knowing and her not clearly remembering if she knew does fit with the facts we know of these two pollies?

    yes, NEC,
    Labor just hasn’t the guts to shit on the crooks or even govern on its own without deals.
    It is time to put up the legislation and if they lose the vote DD whilst we still remember the last 10 years.

  13. Phil Pryor

    Cocky, they don’t listen to us much; perhaps they never will…

  14. Terence Mills

    He spent many hours of dodging questions, circumnavigating answers, and diverting blame elsewhere but finally, grudgingly conceded to the robodebt royal commission yesterday that the scheme was illegal. He relied on and had great trust and “confidence” in his officials so the matter of legality (and illegality) rested in their capable hands. Morrison maintained it was their “obligation and duty” to warn him of any issues and that he frankly found it “distressing” that they never did.

    He failed to notice that we are not actually having a Royal Commission to investigate his ‘distress’. It is about the distress and anguish he caused many thousands of Australian citizens. This scheme was designed and implemented in 2015 when Morrison was social services minister.

    The damning thing was the use of averaging Tax Office income data to falsely claim recipients received too much money. The kicker was that the onus was on the individual to prove otherwise but there was nobody to talk to, no structured appeal process so nobody was interested in hearing your case : if you didn’t pay up they handed it over to a debt collector – what a nightmare !

    Among the traits of a narcissist : One who exploits others without guilt or shame. …frequently demeans, intimidates, bullies, or belittles others.

  15. leefe

    Maybe there should be an extra level of hell created for narcissistic hypocrites liike ScoMoFo and most of his LNP cronies. Given that neither hell nor satan actually exist, I’m quite happy about someone building a hell on this earth just for them.

    I really thought that, once they were voted out, my level of seething disdain and contempt for them would ease off. Instead, it grows greater by the day.

  16. Clakka

    Yes Rossleigh. Having watched 3+ hours of it, I too was disappointed. But also re-educated.

    Re-educated
    that out from behind the facade of parliament question time and media stops, and when brought to detail, he is non-stop a tiresome, second-guessing, paranoid, manic jabbering autodidact, almost always wrong. Even about his m.o., he is not a bulldozer, but by any definition a peddler of filibuster. More, a Landfill Compactor (a fill buster). A collector and spreader of discarded waste.

    Up in the high chair, a purveyor of dross, a handler of pestilence, a pulveriser and god of the gulls. Yet even after his rumbling back and forth, his remoulding of the landscape and spreading of seeds, nothing lasts to disguise the stench from his operations.

    Such a tough life communing with flies.

    Disappointed that they weren’t yet, on camera, able to nail him on his main, repeatedly attested ‘mindset original and persistent’ that ‘the process’ was a continuation of dept recovery involving ‘(ATO) income averaging and investigation’ undertaken under all governments since the early 90s.

    Trapped by his own film flam, he has provided on this, inconclusive and insufficient attributions upon which later he will be hung – and the Commissioner and Counsel have nursed him to agree to provide further documentary detail. Having also attested that he was completely aware of the provisions and operation of the Act, as was his duty, he will be brought to reveal that those pre-Robo-debt processes complied, whereas those proposed (for Robo-Debt c2014-5) in the (post-benchmarking) ‘investigation’ phase were utterly different, did not comply with the Act, maliciously and divisively reversed the burden of proof, and in the absence of investigation (through engagement by the recipient) processed and pursued a debt – a cascade of intimidation and unlawfulness.

    Blind Freddy would have or ought to have been so aware, and as (a self-proclaimed) (super)minister, had a duty to chase down the legal specifics. And then later, regardless of omissions by the departments, not permitted omissions, misrepresentations and lies to be carried through the processes to cabinet, its committees, the critically important ERC and implementation.

    Unless I’m mistaken, it won’t be a hanging, but death by a thousand cuts.

    But then again, do they have the will to prosecute? What did they do with the Lord of the Flies?

  17. Jack sprat

    Scummo defense relies on the fact that he is the type of person that can’t be told .

  18. GL

    Jack,

    Don’t forget that in Scummo’s nightsoil and charnel pit mind nothing is ever his fault.

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