The genesis of the attack was based on a response he gave to a journalist’s question last Friday — she asked why he considers questions about Gladys Liu racist but it’s not racist to label Sam Dastyari “Shanghai Sam”.
The PM responded by saying he never uttered those phrases, but later clarified that he misheard the question, apparently. That clarification was necessary because Morrison has in the past described Dastyari as “Shanghai Sam” on well over a dozen occasions — on television, radio, even in writing on Twitter.
Readers can decide if the PM made an honest mistake or if he was simply backtracking from an inaccurate effort to bat away what was an awkward question. Of course the question went unanswered: what is the difference? It really needs answering.
Labor certainly thinks Morrison is loose with the truth, which is why one of its shadow ministers — Murray Watt — yesterday labelled the PM “the liar from the Shire”. It’s actually a phrase Labor MPs are increasingly yelling across the chamber when the PM is at the podium. Expect to hear it used more often.
Anthony Albanese has gone after the PM before for saying one thing and doing another. Shortly after the election he used parliament to ask why Melissa Price had been dumped as environment minister when Morrison specifically guaranteed that she would stay in the role during one of the televised leaders debates on the campaign trail.
Some Labor MPs are particularly aggrieved by the claims that “rapists” and the like would be pushing their way into Australia courtesy of the medevac laws that Labor and the crossbench pushed through the last parliament. They consider the claims nothing more than false attempts to whip up fears. As senate hearings since that time have revealed, no one of bad character has even applied for a medevac since the laws were introduced.
And of course we have David Crowe and Niki Savva’s books which pick over the leadership manoeuvring last August, suggesting Morrison (or at least Team Morrison) was counting numbers privately while publicly backing Malcolm Turnbull’s leadership.
There are a host of other examples where the PM’s rhetoric doesn’t necessarily match with reality, but they are more complex and not cut and dry. And after all, it’s hardly an infliction only he suffers from. This is politics: being loose with the truth is part and parcel of the role.
In fairness, whether the PM’s loose rhetoric is sloppiness or intentional is hard for anyone but him to know.
But getting caught out being loose with the truth is dangerous, especially for leaders, and even more so for leaders whose persona is one of the everyday bloke mainstream voters can relate to. It is the same reason the “mean and tricky” memo Shane Stone — as then Liberal President — wrote about during the Howard era caused such ructions. It would have been far worse had the suggestion been that Howard personally was mean and tricky, as opposed to that being the perception of his government.
Which is why Team Morrison is responding aggressively when anyone in the media points out such inconsistencies in the PM’s rhetoric. They know that if the “liar from the shire” catches on in the mainstream — not just in the so-called Canberra “bubble” — it will damage what has been a very carefully crafted public persona.
Peter van Onselen is a professor of politics at the University of Western Australia and Griffith University
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Some political attacks hurt more than others. Yesterday Labor went after Scott Morrison’s integrity, using Question Time to label him untruthful.