Joe Hildebrand: Ex PMs turning into miserable ghosts

Something weird seems to have effected some former Prime Minsters and not in a good way, writes Joe Hildebrand

Somewhere in the Oxford Dictionary there must be a collective noun for ex-prime ministers.

Perhaps a grumble of former PMs, or a morose of them.

Because we need a word to sum up the uncanny phenomenon that achieving the highest office in Australia turns people into beings once so perfectly described as “miserable ghosts”.

Indeed, the phenomenon is so powerful that even the former PM who coined the term “miserable ghost” himself became one.

In fact, there are now so many of them perhaps the correct term is a pandemic of ex-prime ministers.

Interestingly, the only inoculation against this terrible disease is apparently to be a woman.

Julia Gillard – who arguably came to power most dubiously and damagingly – has conducted herself with more grace and dignity than any of her male counterparts over the past decade and a half. Which is to say any grace and dignity at all.

This brings us to the curious sight that greeted newspaper readers yesterday. On the front page of both The Australian and the Sydney Morning Herald was a story about an ex-PM blowing up his own party.

But it wasn’t the same story.

In the Oz, Paul Keating launched yet another unhinged spray about the Labor government’s national security strategy, this time savaging NATO and its boss just as Anthony Albanese was about to represent Australia at a NATO summit.

Scott Morrison during Question Time at Parliament House in Canberra last month. Picture: Martin Ollman

And in the Herald, Scott Morrison trashed the Liberal Party’s scant remaining brand by insisting he did nothing wrong during the Robodebt scandal and remaining Araldited to his seat in parliament more than a year after losing the election.

On the same day, on two completely different issues, two former PMs were actively wrecking the parties that elevated them to the highest office in the land.

But perhaps the greater awakening to both men would have been picking up the morning papers to read the reviews of their work only to discover they were looking at a mirror image of the other.

There is probably no greater insult for Keating, who considers himself better than everyone, than that he is in fact no better than Morrison.

And of course he would be in good company, with a number of former PMs who were at each other’s throats in politics suddenly finding out they are exactly the same.

After all, Malcolm Turnbull and Kevin Rudd discovered after leaving office that it wasn’t because most of their colleagues didn’t like them that they were rolled but that it was all News Corp’s fault. They even job-shared a campaign to prove it!

This desperate attempt to reinvent reality would be laughed out of the Sharknado 7 writers’ room and yet it’s actually happening in this country.

Former Prime Minister Paul Keating. Picture: Nikki Short

As for Morrison’s refusal to accept what the rest of us call reality, one can only guess at his state of mind.

Peter Dutton at least had the decency to apologise to the victims of the appalling Robodebt scandal – at least those who are still alive – after a royal commission report so blisteringly scathing it offered prosecutors a list of people it thought should face criminal charges.

Morrison, rather than engaging in any of the substance, simply rejected any findings of wrongdoing against him.

In other words, notwithstanding the thousands of hours of hearings and the mountain of evidence produced by the commission in its thousand-odd-page report, any part of it that found that Morrison did wrong must ipso facto be wrong.

At least a dog can provide loyalty in politics. It is difficult to imagine which animal could offer support to such a world view.

Certainly it is not the human. Even after Morrison was busted secretly stealing his colleagues’ portfolios – tellingly busted in part because he saw nothing wrong with his own behaviour – they showed remarkable forbearance in allowing him to stay in parliament while he waited to see if anyone else would hire him.

Even his treasurer Josh Frydenberg – who lost his own seat in parliament because of Morrison’s unpopularity, neutered his own leadership ambitions to support Morrison’s prime ministership, and whose portfolio powers Morrison still stole – refused to come out swinging against him.

But now surely enough is enough.

If the Liberal Party is to survive and see off the existential threat posed by the teals, Morrison must at last do the one decent thing he can.

Indeed, it is the one simple thing he apparently expected all the victims of the Robodebt scheme to do – go and get a job.