John Rolfe: Scott Morrison made the wrong call
It’s in the interests of the public, and Prime Minister Scott Morrison, to know the details about his chat with Mick Fuller, writes John Rolfe.
Opinion
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I take NSW’s top cop Mick Fuller’s word for it that he was joking last year when he said Scott Morrison used to put his bins out for him when they were neighbours, but the PM sure has added to the bin fire of the “doctored” document saga with his actions and inactions this week.
Morrison has previously described Fuller as one of his closest mates.
Fuller on Wednesday said that they don’t have a personal relationship.
Either way, it was wrong for the PM to ring him over the police investigation into Energy Minister Angus Taylor’s galactically stupid letter to Sydney Lord Mayor Clover Moore.
But having made the call, the PM should have released any notes that were taken during the conversation, as requested by Labor leader Anthony Albanese in Question Time on Wednesday.
Albo asked: “Did the Prime Minister get any advice from the Secretary of the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet prior to making that call? Were any note takers present, and, if so, will the Prime Minister release those notes to clarify the difference between his and the police commissioner’s accounts of their conversation?”
ScoMo made a brief reply which ended with “the normal arrangements applied for those calls and the normal processes apply for accessing any information in relation to those matters”.
So no clarification of whether notes were taken. If notes were, try your luck with a freedom of information application.
Privately, the government says there is no precedent for releasing notes of conversations and it’s unhelpful to make such discussions public. How do you think an FOI application will go?
Now I am still quite new to federal politics. And I do not believe that I have become a captive of the “Canberra Bubble”.
This is not “bubble” stuff. The PM can’t dismiss it as such.
I genuinely believe the public has a right to know what was discussed.
I’m surprised Morrison can’t see that it is in his interests for the public to know. It would prove the conversation was innocuous, if it in fact was.
But he seems to think it’s all a bit of a joke.
“Did they think I was going to call the parking infringements officer at the Sutherland police station?” Morrison said in response to another probing question from the Opposition Leader this week in Parliament.
“Maybe I was going to call the water police, or the dog squad, or perhaps the commander of the police band! But I spoke to the police commissioner because I needed to know, to exercise my responsibilities both to this House and under the ministerial standards, to exercise the assessment that is required of me on those matters. That’s what I said I would do and that’s what I did.”
But he didn’t need to call Fuller.
There were plenty of people to whom Morrison could have delegated the task of confirming The Daily Telegraph’s report that an investigation had commenced.
The chosen person shouldn’t have rung the Police Commissioner either.
It would have been more proper to make contact with the head of Strike Force Garrad (the name for the investigation) or someone within NSW Police who was not directly connected to the probe.
When Albo was asked by reporters whether it had been inappropriate for Morrison to ring Fuller, the Opposition Leader said: “I’ll tell you what Australians will be thinking today … They will think to themselves: ‘If one of my mates was under investigation, can I pick up the phone to the head of the police and ask for the details of that investigation on the day that it’s launched?’ I think not.”
The entire handling of the “doctored” document fallout smacks of a lack of commitment to transparency.
Albo was right when he said yesterday that Taylor “has had over 80 days now to actually say, ‘who gave this document?’ How was it formed? How is it that he came to refer to it in the letter to Clover Moore? And yet we’ve seen no explanation, just an attempt to cover up and dismiss.”
While he would rather not be in this mess, the PM believes his decision to take the heat for Taylor will promote loyalty and unity.
As John Howard has long said, in politics “disunity is death”.
But this government needs to learn to live with scrutiny.