Grieving PM put black lives first on the day his dad died

Scott Morrison is so committed to indigenous welfare that on the day his father died, he chose to meet their leaders rather than go home to his family.

Scott Morrison with his father John and mother Marion. Source: Facebook

Some time after 9pm on Wednesday January 22, Scott Morrison’s older brother Alan rang him at The Lodge, where he was with his wife Jenny, to tell him their father had just died in Sydney.

“It was the hardest period of my life,” Scott Morrison says.

No one could doubt the depth of despair in such a statement. Yet he told very few people.

Josh Frydenberg knew, as did Deputy Prime Minister Michael McCormack and Indigenous Australians Minister Ken Wyatt, who were all in Canberra preparing for what would be a historic meeting the following day.

Morrison’s closest advisers were also aware and pleaded with him to cancel his schedule and go to Sydney to be with his family.

The Prime Minister had earlier that day visited the Chief Medical Officer, Brendan Murphy, at the recently activated coronavirus incident room in Canberra. The virus had just landed on his desk. Bushfires were still raging across the country. And the Nationals were in a political crisis, with a leadership spill looming over the then deputy leader Bridget McKenzie and the sports rorts affair.

Morrison refused the pleas from his friends and staff to return to Sydney. He insisted on staying. There was one meeting planned for January 23 he refused to cancel.

He had made a commitment and was determined to keep it.

That meeting, in the cabinet room, was a gathering of the leaders of the peak indigenous groups representing about 50 indigenous community organisations. It was the first time a prime minister had sat around a table with all of them.

Frydenberg, McCormack and Wyatt were in the room as well.

“It’s a historic day,” Pat Turner, head of the National Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Organisation, told the meeting.

“Never have Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peak bodies from across the country come together in this way, to bring their collective expertise, experiences and deep understanding of the needs of our people to the task of closing the gap.

“And never have Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, through their elected community representatives, had a formal agreement with governments on how we can work together to close the gap. We have an unprecedented opportunity to change the lived experience of too many of our people who are doing it tough.

“We know that over many years our people have lost faith in the Closing the Gap policy. It wasn’t delivering the changes needed and, year after year, failure was reported and people disengaged. Governments, too, lost faith, seemingly contented with the reported failures.

“We acknowledge the Prime Minister’s leadership in bringing the Council of Australian Governments to the collective task.”

Morrison was still keeping his personal tragedy to himself. Had those leaders been told that morning, they most likely would have cancelled the meeting themselves out of respect to the Prime Minister and his family.

Again, his staff counselled him to head home and cancel a press conference after the meeting. And again, Morrison rejected the ­advice, claiming it was too important an issue.

He knew this is what his father would have expected of him.

“I said to him, you don’t have to do this, but he was adamant,” one adviser said.

Twelve questions were asked at that press conference about McKenzie and why the government hadn’t sacked her. Seven questions were asked about the coronavirus and about the decision to advise against travel to Wuhan.

He was quizzed six times about the fires, and twice about the budget. Not one question was asked about the outcome of the historic indigenous leaders meeting.

By the time the press conference ended, bushfires had erupted in Canberra, closing the airport. He was told that he might not be able to get back to Sydney.

Staff were making preparations to drive the Prime Minister three hours up the Hume Highway to get home. The emotional strain of the death of his father, 15 hours earlier, began to sink in. He was slumped at his desk.

His friend and Minister Assisting the Prime Minister Ben Morton told him that they had found a way to get to the airport. They would have to “bush bash it” around the back to the RAAF terminal where the jet was fuelled and ready to go before the smoke from the fires overwhelmed the airport, which had already been closed to commercial aircraft.

The will to put aside personal tragedy to keep good on a promise stands in stark contrast to the questioning of his commitment to Closing the Gap and indigenous issues amid the Black Lives Matter protests. Forced to apologise for a remark about Australia not having a history of slavery, that had been taken out of context, Morrison has suddenly found himself in the middle of the “history wars”.

A close friend of Morrison said to question his commitment to ­indigenous issues was “offensive”.

The fact he made such a personal sacrifice to attend that meeting says more about the Prime Minister, another close friend said, than a regrettable comment that some now seek to define him by.