Being a prime minister calls for all sorts of delicate judgments. Picking your friends is one of them, writes Michael McGuire
Prime minister Scott Morrison has an interesting assortment of mates. But do the pals you choose also say something about you?
Opinion
Don't miss out on the headlines from Opinion. Followed categories will be added to My News.
- Michael McGuire: Finally rumbled on his life as a spy, Alexander Downer comes clean
- How to get the most from your Advertiser digital subscription
Can you judge a bloke by the company he keeps? Maybe not entirely, but surely to some extent that’s a reasonable proposition.
Which makes it a bad few weeks for Prime Minister Scott Morrison.
This week, it was revealed a close family friend was an eager proponent of the frankly bonkers conspiracy theories put forward by an outfit called QAnon.
This follows Morrison’s alleged efforts to have a chap invited to the White House who was criticised by a royal commission for failing to immediately notify police that his father was a paedophile.
Then, of course, we had Morrison’s simpering lapdog performance with US President Donald Trump.
A man who has used the office of the president to ask foreign powers to dig dirt on political opponents.
It’s quite the trio.
Morrison’s link to the QAnon enthusiast was detailed in The Guardian this week.
Even in the dark world of conspiracy theories, the QAnon crowd is something a bit different. It’s an out there, far-right group that came to life in 2017 on the 4Chan message board when someone under the name Q began posting, posing as a government insider with top security clearance who knew the truth about the “deep state’’.
Q drops allegedly secret clues as to what is actually happening, including a belief there is a global ring of Satan-worshipping, child-eating paedophiles who more or less run everything and Donald Trump is humanity’s last-best hope to save the world.
Yes, the same Trump who struggles to close an umbrella is apparently some kind of superhero battling the world’s evil.
The Marvel movie should be terrific. According to QAnon tens of thousands of these nasty paedophiles are all about to be arrested and tried for their crimes.
They have somehow also come to the conclusion that Trump and Robert Mueller (you know, the bloke who wrote a long report detailing many Trump outrages) are actually working together to bring down the paedophiles.
There is no evidence Morrison believes any of this nonsense. And I’m not going to create my own conspiracy theory by saying he does.
However, an online poster called BurnedSpy, who is a regular on Twitter, is a longstanding family friend of the Morrisons.
Indeed, his wife is on Morrison’s staff and is an old friend of Jenny Morrison.
Perhaps BurnedSpy is just a silly distraction. His views are too ridiculous for anyone to take seriously.
He seems to believe Alexander Downer and Julie Bishop are part of this global conspiracy against Trump.
But Morrison’s continuing association with the pastor of the Hillsong Church Brian Houston in Sydney is more worrying.
There were reports last month that the PM wanted Houston as part of his delegation to Washington but was rebuffed by the White House.
Houston was criticised by the 2015 Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse for failing to report his father Frank Houston to the police for his admitted abuse of a young boy.
“We are satisfied that, in 1999 and 2000, Pastor Brian Houston and the national executive of the Assemblies of God in Australia did not refer the allegations of child sexual abuse against Mr Frank Houston to the police,” the commissioners wrote in their report.
The Commission also found Brian Houston had a “conflict of interest’’ in handling the complaint about his father. Morrison didn’t deny he wanted to invite Houston to the White House.
"It's all gossip,’’ was his less-than-forthcoming response.
Then there is Trump himself. As his presidency continues to unravel, as most sensible world leaders try to retain some distance, Morrison goes the other way.
While Australia needs to keep a close relationship with the US, it shouldn’t mean debasing ourselves to keep him happy.
Yet we have agreed to help out an inquiry into how the Mueller report into Russian interference in the 2016 election began, presumably including any possible role played by Downer.
And last week Morrison echoed Trump’s disdain for “globalism’’ in a speech to the Lowy Institute.
Being a prime minister calls for all sorts of delicate judgments. Picking your friends is one of them.