‘Dangerous and deranged’: Joe Hildebrand unloads on Scott Morrison

Columnist Joe Hildebrand has described Scott Morrison’s actions as “dangerous and deranged” when he secretly appointed himself to five ministries.

The Roman Empire was the most powerful state in the world for the best part of a thousand years and yet it had no written constitution.

Instead, when looking for political or moral guidance, its leaders referred to what they called the “mos maiorum” — the old ways.

In Australia we do have a written constitution but it is a delicately threadbare one.

It essentially explains how to set up the parliament and leaves the rest to us.

The role of the prime minister is not mentioned in the constitution, nor does it dictate that government is formed by whichever party can command a majority in the House of Representatives.

Yet these are the two most important and powerful roles in the nation.

What determines these vital positions and the people who hold them is what politicians and scholars simply call “convention”.

Just like the Romans we rely on a collective understanding of the way our system of government has evolved and assume a collective commitment to that ethos. Without it we would cease to have a functioning society.

This is what makes our constitution so elegant and flexible. And it is also what makes Scott Morrison’s inexplicable power grab so dangerous and deranged.

Morrison was right to say that his actions were legal but a more honest description would have been that they were not technically illegal.

The constitution, while silent on the role of the prime minister, does not explicitly forbid a PM from secretly acquiring multiple ministries from his cabinet colleagues with the uninformed assent of the Governor-General.

It also doesn’t forbid a PM from taking a dump on the Despatch Box.

And why would it? The quaint assumption at the heart of the document is that Australians were mature and responsible enough to govern themselves and that those privileged enough to be elected to the national parliament would have the decency and wherewithal to behave accordingly.

Morrison’s perverse and purposeless power grab has trashed all that and in so doing he has torched more than a century of Australian democratic tradition.

None of his belated justifications for his actions make even a skerrick of sense. On the contrary, his rambling and irrational press conference this week was downright deranged.

He began with a long and preposterous preamble about the pandemic, invoking tempests and the heavy mantle of leadership as the reason for his actions.

And yet the only action he actually took was on an issue wholly unrelated to the pandemic — the blocking of an oil and gas exploration project.

Scott Morrison during a fiery press conference this week. Picture: Gaye Gerard / NCA Newswire

His response to that chasmic hole in the argument? Oh, that was a separate matter.

We might ask why he couldn’t have simply asked his minister to do it or why he never declared he had taken said minister’s powers. Such questions alone would be grounds for expulsion from the parliament and yet in the context of this constitutional clusterf*ck they pale into a swampy backdrop.

Morrison’s explanation, for the record, is that he made the decision as prime minister but anyone who had detailed knowledge of the regulatory framework would have known that he could only have made the decision as prime minister by acting as the minister.

So in essence it wasn’t his fault, you were all just too dumb to figure it out.

But that is only one of many red-herring rabbit holes Morrison rolled out.

The primary justification for his unprecedented parade of clandestine power grabs was Covid-19 but the one portfolio in which he actually intervened had literally nothing whatsoever to do with it.

On the other four portfolios he seized, of which only one was Health, we were told that these were matters of grave importance. So important that he couldn’t remember seizing two of them when he was asked about it on radio a day earlier.

Likewise we were told that his failure to inform his ministers he had taken their powers was an oversight in the fog of war but a day later his failure to inform the ministers, whose powers he had once forgotten he’d taken, was in fact a deliberate decision not to cause them undue angst.

And we were told that the circumstances in which he would have to exercise his secret “reserve” powers were, given the crisis rapidly unfolding, innately unforeseeable.

Yet that other totally separate time when he secretly and pre-emptively took a minister’s powers was to exercise them in circumstances he had specifically foreseen.

Meanwhile, reeling back to the coronavirus crisis and the reason he apparently had to secretly take all those other ministerial powers with the weight of a nation on his shoulders because urgent action might be required, what did he actually do?

Nothing. Nada. Zip. Zilch.

The one reason he gave for taking such unprecedented power was the one power he never exercised. Not in the health portfolio, which was the only one which had a shred of legitimacy, nor in any of the others whose ministers laboured on oblivious to the ghost in their midst.

Meanwhile the people of Australia laboured on oblivious to the knowledge of who was actually in charge, which brings us back to Morrison’s existential crime against Australia.

The most fundamental principle of any democracy is government with the consent of the governed. That the people know, and have elected, those who enable and curtail their rights and responsibilities.

For two years the Australian people were governed by a lie. The public record of who was in charge was not just false but deliberately and secretly fabricated.

In any democracy this cannot stand. And no perpetrator of such a fabrication should ever be allowed in public office.

Originally published as ‘Dangerous and deranged’: Joe Hildebrand unloads on Scott Morrison