Scott Morrison enjoys the fruits of ambition

Cool, calm and hardworking, Scott Morrison is a strong team player. But the friendly demeanour can disappear in an instant.

Scott Morrison and family arrive at Government House yesterday. Picture: Kym Smith

The rise and rise of Scott Morrison is testament to supreme ambition. His elevation to Prime Minister is the prize for a man who made the best of his street smarts and lucky timing from the moment he ­entered parliament little more than a decade ago.

Cool, calm, hardworking and heavily influenced by a muscular brand of evangelical Christianity, Morrison is regarded as a strong team player, and he stayed with Malcolm Turnbull to the end.

But just don’t cross him. The friendly demeanour can disappear, it could become unpleasant. Morrison has his hard side.

The new Prime Minister’s drive was noticed well before he became a public figure. Even then, the pastor from the local Hillsong-­offshoot church in Sydney’s south that Morrison has attended for years made an astute assessment. He predicted this man would ­become prime minister.

Political mentor Bruce Baird, who introduced Morrison to the Liberal Party in the late 1990s, hired him for a stint with the ­Tourism Council and eventually handed on his federal seat of Cook, was also impressed early on. Part of Morrison’s secret, Baird believes, besides his commitment to hard work, has been not to align himself with anybody in politics.

So when Turnbull’s number as PM was clearly up this week and drumming up his own support could not be construed as disloyal, Morrison’s ability to hit the phones in a short, sharp 48-hour burst and attract support from party moderates as well as his ­centre-right base was critical to his victory over Peter ­Dutton by 45 votes to 40 yesterday.

“He can play both sides of the street to an extent,” Baird tells ­Inquirer. “I’d call him centre-right but he’s not ideologically driven. He’s not a zealot like Tony Abbott.

“He’s always been ambitious, but not like Abbott’s style of ‘knock your opponents down and walk all over their bodies’.”

Morrison’s chief centre-right group backer, NSW Liberal MP Alex Hawke, helped muster the numbers. So did Liberal MP friend Ben Morton, a former party chief in Western Australia.

The final key to Morrison’s numbers game was Michael ­Photios, the Liberals’ unofficial moderates leader in NSW. Photios originally stood strongly behind Turnbull but took a pragmatic ­decision after Monday’s spill result to swing behind Morrison and lobby for him directly.

Age 50, Morrison’s climb up the ladder has been fast. He was elected to parliament for the first time at the 2007 election when John Howard lost and the Coalition seemed destined for a long spell in opposition.

He asked then new Liberal leader Brendan Nelson for a spot on the opposition frontbench straight away but was turned down. Nelson thought he needed more time learning the ropes as a backbencher. Morrison’s break came in September 2008 when Nelson’s replacement, Turnbull, in his first incarnation as leader, made him opposition spokesman for housing and local government.

Thus began a pattern as Morrison’s climb progressed swiftly, benefiting from the revolving door of leadership that culminated in him winning yesterday.

When Abbott replaced Turnbull and reshuffled his frontbench in December 2009, he made Morrison the Coalition’s immigration spokesman and brought him into the shadow cabinet.

Taking a hard line on border protection helped build Morrison’s image as a strongman, but it was not all plain sailing. When 48 asylum-seekers died in a late 2010 Christmas Island boat disaster, he was criticised for challenging Julia Gillard’s decision to pay for the relatives of victims to fly to funerals in Sydney. Morrison ­admitted the timing of his comments was insensitive but did not withdraw them.

Baird, who had been offside with Howard over the treatment of asylum-seekers as a Liberal backbencher, says the same issue has divided him and Morrison. “He is a man of integrity and faith. It’s the only area where we’ve had some sort of disagreement. But it was never cranky or furious. He said there were too many people dying at sea and so we needed an orderly process.”

As immigration minister in the Abbott government, Morrison suddenly became the uncompromising face of the Coalition’s policy to “turn back the boats”. He headed the paramilitary Operation Sovereign Borders, giving sparse information about boat ­arrivals and cementing his reputation as a tough operator who was critical to the Abbott government’s success on this policy.

When Abbott moved Morrison to social services in a 2014 reshuffle, it was interpreted as a comedown by some but turned into a blessing. Here was the opportunity for Morrison to broaden his image — indeed, soften it — in a way that unfortunately eluded Dutton in the eyes of many voters when he took over the portfolio and stuck with it until this week.

Morrison fell out with Abbott when Turnbull forces sprang their leadership coup in September 2015, and relations have never been the same. Abbott felt bitter that, in his view, Morrison did not publicly endorse his leadership and seemingly ran dead by letting Hawke and other allies shift their allegiance to Turnbull. Morrison saw it differently. In his desperate last days, Abbott had promised Treasury to Morrison only for Morrison to discover that hapless incumbent Joe Hockey had not been told.

The revolving door favoured Morrison again when Turnbull, as PM, made him treasurer. His first two budgets were bolstered by an improved economy and were well received, despite sniping from ­Abbott that last year’s was “Labor-lite”. The Treasury portfolio, a stepping stone for other leadership aspirants, made Morrison a household name. It was positive for his profile despite very public spats with 2GB radio broadcasters Ray Hadley and Alan Jones.

Morrison watchers predict he will be a consensus PM with a firm direction. They do not rule out ­Abbott continuing to snipe from the sidelines, embittered that his candidate Dutton did not win and carrying on a proxy feud that does not let up with Turnbull’s exit.

Malcolm Turnbull and Scott Morrison take in a rugby league game in April. Picture: AAP

A graduate in applied economics and geography, Morrison spent his early career with the Property Council. He then moved to the Australian Tourism Task Force as its deputy chief executive, working well with Chris Brown, the son of former Labor minister John Brown.

Baird, a former NSW Liberal transport minister, not only poached Morrison to join him at the Tourism Council in the late 1990s; he signed him up to the Liberal Party. Appointed as an outsider to be party state director in 2000, Morrison’s job was to overhaul the organisation. He brought Turnbull back to the party, helped Howard to his third win, but ­endured testy relations with state parliamentary leader John Brogden.

Morrison also had a poor relationship at his next job heading Tourism Australia with federal minister Fran Bailey. His finest moment was the “Where the bloody hell are you?” campaign with Cronulla bikini model Lara Bingle to lure overseas tourists. But as one insider recalled: “He was a good choice, but Fran kept interfering, telling him how to run his job. They were constantly clashing.” Morrison, it seems, ­miscalculated because Howard backed his minister. He was sacked.

When Baird confided he was thinking of quitting Cook at the 2007 election, he turned to Morrison. It was an impressive field for a safe Liberal seat with future luminaries Paul Fletcher, Mark Speakman and David Coleman in the race. The preselection was won 82 votes to eight by Michael Towke, who had helped Turnbull in Wentworth and then moved south for a huge branch-stacking operation. Morrison emerged the victor when the state executive stepped in, disendorsing Towke and calling a fresh vote that Morrison won.

Morrison has always been clear on the importance of family; he met wife Jenny at a church youth camp when they were just 12 and invited her on their first date at 16. They married five years later but it was to be 14 years before they had children, with 10 cycles of IVF treatment preceding the natural conception of their first daughter, Abigail Rose.

In his first speech to parliament, in February 2008, Morrison thanked Jenny for “her determination to never give up hope for us to have a child”, saying that after such a long period of “bitter disappointments God remembered her faithfulness and blessed us with our miracle child, Abbey Rose, on the seventh of the seventh of the seventh”.

Abbey was joined two years later by a sister, Lily, also conceived naturally. In that same speech, Morrison said he had “made a commitment to my faith at an early age” and derived from it “the values of loving kindness, justice and righteousness, to act with compassion and kindness, ­acknowledging our common ­humanity and to consider the welfare of others”.

He revealed more of his reliance on these values last year when, after handing down his ­second federal budget, he hosted Jenny’s brother and sister-in-law, Gary and Michelle Warren, at the National Press Club post-budget speech.

Fully funding the National Disability Insurance Scheme had been a signal element, and Gary Warren, Morrison told the audience, was an example of why.

Diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 1999, the former fireman had told Morrison it was “not flash being disabled” but that if there was anything good about it, “it’s that you’re disabled in Australia”.

“That’s an incredibly generous statement about the big heart of Australians,” Morrison said.

Sydney Muslim community leader Jamal Rifi backs the picture of compassion Morrison paints for himself, calling the Prime Minister “a devoted Christian who understands faith communities across the board — whether Jewish, Christian, Muslim or others”.

As immigration minister, Morrison could have been expected to antagonise the large Muslim population of the city’s southwest, but Rifi says he went out of his way to establish good links with that community. “He had his views and he ­implemented his policies. We didn’t see eye to eye but he always was logical, visionary and defending his belief that it was the interest of the nation that drives him,” Rifi says.

Scott Morrison, then prime minister Tony Abbott and Peter Dutton in 2015.

Morrison developed a sense of community service early, influenced by his police officer father John’s time as an independent councillor at Waverley in Sydney’s east, answering the phone for his dad to constituents and handing out how-to-vote cards. Morrison Sr eventually became mayor.

The young Morrison spent his early life in the eastern suburbs, noting yesterday that he knew “the beaches of Bronte pretty well, having grown up on them as a kid, and played footy on the local fields”. He went to school at Sydney Boys High, following his brother Alan.

But it is in the Sutherland shire, with its Hillsong-linked Horizon Church where he pursues those Christian ideals, and his beloved Cronulla Sharks rugby league team, where he gets another kind of inspiration.

Morrison’s backing of his local side, much like his Christianity, is a deeply held article of faith. Asked before the meeting yesterday about his predictions on the spill, he joked: “The only tip I’ve got (is) the Sharks to beat Newcastle this weekend.”

“That’s so true to form,” Sharks chairman Dino Mezzatesta tells Inquirer. “I love him, that’s unreal. It’s just typical of his love and commitment for the Sharks — and really we just know him as Scott Morrison, not as the treasurer or now the prime minister.”

Morrison has his own dedicated seat at the team’s home ground in Woolooware in Sydney’s south, often bringing his family to games, but Mezzatesta says a highlight was when he dragged along Turnbull, whose side is the nearby Sydney Roosters.

“They were each in their Roosters scarf and Sharks scarf and Malcolm was brilliant on that day as well, giving people plenty of time,” Mezzatesta said. “Scott is not only our number one ticket holder but our number one fan as well.”

Rifi says he breathed a sigh of relief at yesterday’s outcome, ­explaining he had been “disheartened by events of the past days” and feared the threatened lurch to the right of a Dutton government.

“Members of my community were fearful of the fact the Liberal Party pendulum was swinging to the far right (but) there was a belief after Scott Morrison put up his hand that he’s the better prime minister. We have known his views in the past and we are happy to live with it,” he says, adding that Australians had better get used to the fact the new Prime Minister tells it like it is, unvarnished.

This refusal to waver is a defining feature of the man, Rifi ­believes, and the lack of similar character — “to just be himself” — a key reason for Turnbull’s ­downfall.

“What I’ve noticed is that Scott is a good listener and a good analyser, he expresses his view very succinctly. Even amongst friends, there is no compromise. That’s what I like about him. That’s what all politicians must be.”