Only one man could save Scott Morrison from himself. And he chose not to

Scott Morrison played a central role in his own downfall. Here is how his government unravelled.See all 4 stories.

Josh Frydenberg had fantasised about becoming prime minister for 30 years but when the opportunity finally arrived he didn’t just shrink from it. When his colleagues asked him to save the Coalition government by challenging Scott Morrison for the prime ministership, Frydenberg went straight to Morrison to tell him about it.

“There’s unrest in the party room,” he warned the leader in November last year, as he later related to colleagues. He wanted Morrison to know that he was a loyal deputy: “I’ll work with you to try to turn it around.”

It was the Liberals’ last chance to ask the electorate to be forgiven for Morrison’s sins: by removing him and anointing a new leader in time for the federal election.

Frydenberg was by far the most popular government member. He drew big crowds and fat donations. Though there was no formal count, his closest supporters estimated he was within about 10 votes of a majority in the Liberal party room.

It wasn’t enough to win outright. But it would have been enough for a credible first strike in a two-strike strategy.

Instead, Frydenberg did exactly what Morrison guessed he would do, exactly what the other two possible prime ministers, Peter Dutton and Anthony Albanese, guessed he would do.

Nothing.

“I never worried about Josh,” the former prime minister breezily told a confidant. He thought of the dissent as unhappiness with some of his policies, rather than his leadership. Dutton, the only other potential challenger to Morrison, told colleagues to forget about him: “Josh doesn’t have the backbone. They shared pyjamas at the Lodge.”

And Labor leader Albanese said he talked about the possibility with his campaign advisers “but we didn’t workshop it because I didn’t think it possible – he didn’t have the guts to challenge. We didn’t put any resources into it. And if Dutton had challenged and won the leadership, it would have been diabolical for them.” Dutton had enough self-awareness to stay his hand.

In any case, the de facto leader of the party’s conservative faction was expecting Morrison to emerge with a brilliant masterstroke before election day.

Scott Morrison and his trusted Liberal deputy, Josh Frydenberg.Credit: Dominic Lorrimer

Surely after three years the Liberal leader and his deputy leader, Frydenberg, were working on a secret showstopper to clinch the election? Dutton and the entire government would wait in vain.

Even as late as March this year, the month before Morrison called the election, veteran Queensland MP and former crocodile hunter Warren Entsch implored Frydenberg to strike: “I said to Josh, ‘If you are looking at doing something, now is the time to do it, rather than not say anything, as happened in the Costello time.’” (Then-treasurer Peter Costello had declined to challenge a failing John Howard before the 2007 election.) “And he said I wasn’t the first one to say it to him. But it was up to Josh to make the move. My view was Morrison wasn’t going to change. I understand why Josh didn’t jump in there but, had he jumped in, there may well have been a different election outcome.”

In the meantime, Frydenberg’s moment passed. So did the Coalition’s chance for absolution. The decade of the revolving door prime ministership came to an end. Morrison became the first PM since Howard to serve a full term. But it also meant that Morrison’s sins were retained all the way to election day.

How Labor played the game

Anthony Albanese had written a three-year plan to make it so. From the outset of his term as Labor leader, he emphasised three essentials in positioning the party.

One, Labor under Bill Shorten had been prone to scare campaigns but now would seek to reassure the voters that it offered safe change by “allaying unnecessary fears”, he told the National Press Club in setting out his strategy as early as November 2019.

Two, Labor would stop frightening voters with new taxes and “return Labor as the party of aspiration, the party of the mainstream”.

Three, and perhaps the hardest of all, it would not plunge into every political fight that the Coalition invited it to but would pace itself for a three-year term.

Labor’s true believers are “a passionate bunch”, said Albanese: “I sometimes think that if they’d been there to see Jesus rise on the third day, some of Labor’s supporters would have said: ‘Well, what took you so long?’

“We’re not going to make the mistake of rushing it and putting out all our policies before we know the economic and political context of the next election.”

Restraint was hard, Albanese says today: “The point of the strategy was to not get up in the morning, see what was in the papers, and then decide how to respond. I talked about political culture, and the point of that was not responding to every 24-hour media cycle.

“There’s enormous pressure on an opposition leader – ‘Oh, the government’s doing something next week, what’s our big announcement?’ It took discipline.”

The result? Morrison was allowed to fail on his own terms, uninterrupted by Labor trying to make itself the story. He didn’t disappoint.

Aloha, trouble

Scott Morrison’s staff really thought no one would notice. They really thought that the prime minister could go on holiday, leave the country for a week, in the middle of a national emergency, and no one would notice. While the premiers were crying out for national leadership.

The bushfires of that terrible season of 2019-20 were the biggest national event of the time; Morrison’s sneaky Hawaiian holiday quickly became the biggest political event. The holiday was poorly judged, but the real killer was the attempt to keep it secret. It was farcical.

The man who stepped into his shoes, the acting prime minister, the then Nationals party leader Michael McCormack, was coached in how to avoid stating the fact that Morrison was out of the country while it burnt. Morrison had told McCormack he was going to take a holiday about a week in advance. One of the prime ministerial media aides told McCormack how to obfuscate: “I do remember having a conversation about, if asked where the PM is, what I should say,” says McCormack. “I had the security [detail], that would raise the question if I was acting PM,” he says.

The PM’s staffer said, “Do you need to say anything at all?” evidently hoping he’d simply stonewall and refuse to explain why, suddenly, he was protected by a phalanx of plainclothes federal police bodyguards with their distinctive lapel badges and unnatural bulges under their jackets.

“I said, ‘If I’m asked, I will say I am acting prime minister.’” According to McCormack, the Morrison aide thought it unlikely that it would come up at all.

But he pressed on: “And I said, ‘If they ask where he, is I will say he is overseas. And if further pressed I will say the US.’”

The Morrison press office went further than mere obfuscation and crossed over into coercion.

A keen-eyed member of the travelling public snapped a pic of Morrison in Hawaii and posted it to Twitter. Reporters who phoned McCormack’s office to ask if he was the acting prime minister were not given an answer but told to phone Morrison’s press office.

The Australian Financial Review’s political editor, Philip Coorey, followed up by asking Morrison’s senior media adviser, Andrew Carswell, whether the PM had headed overseas for a holiday.

Carswell told him it wasn’t a legitimate matter of public interest. If Coorey wrote about it, he’d cut off the supply of privileged information to the AFR and favour a competitor, instead. Today, Carswell says he doesn’t recollect the conversation. This attempt at suppression rankled Coorey and his editors so much that they decided to publish a story they might not have otherwise.

The paper ran a small piece on page 2 the next day noting that Morrison was on leave overseas, without mention of Hawaii.

The story quickly built into a national rage at Morrison. The Daily Telegraph, typically a Coalition cheerleader, reported: “The famous slogan Tourism Australia rolled out when Scott Morrison was its boss was trending on Twitter yesterday as the nation asked where the bloody hell was its prime minister.”

A fire crew is overwhelmed at Orangeville, south-west of Sydney, on December 5, 2019. The prime minister returned to Sydney later that month.Credit: Nick Moir

Scott Morrison, then prime minister, on holidays in Hawaii.Credit: Twitter / @parso81

Protesters demanding an answer appeared outside a vacant Kirribilli House. Morrison says it wasn’t his idea to try to hide his Hawaiian holiday; privately he has blamed his staff for being over-zealous.

When two firefighters died, a sheepish Morrison cut short his vacation. But he continued to fumble. He expressed his “deep regret” to radio station 2GB but then, in a bid to make excuses, added his most infamous utterance: Australians knew that “I don’t hold a hose, mate”.

Thirty-four people died in the fires. More than 2000 homes were destroyed. The smoke rendered the air hazardous to human health for millions as the blazes burnt uncontrollably; an estimated 80 per cent of the population was affected directly or indirectly by the fires. A total of at least 24.3 million hectares burnt, an area greater than the total land surface of the UK. The fires started in winter 2019 and burnt through summer until torrential rain fell in February 2020, so long that US fire historian Stephen Pyne called them the “forever fires”.

After such a profound failure of leadership, Morrison’s efforts at political recovery backfired. His attempts at empathy were rejected when people of the devastated town of Cobargo refused to shake his hand; his attempts at excuse-making fell flat when, instead of accepting responsibility, he said he’d taken the trip because he’d promised to take “Jen and the girls” on a holiday; his efforts to then exploit the fires for Liberal party advantage were desperate.

Morrison starred in a Liberal party advertisement, posted to social media, that spruiked his government’s fire response, portraying it as some sort of success.

The ad linked to a Liberal party bushfires webpage featuring a prominent button marked “donate” – not to bushfire victims but to the Liberal Party. When this caused instant outcry, the button was removed.

Morrison would later describe himself as “a bit of a bulldozer”. The country would have welcomed a bulldozer prime minister to lead a national mobilisation against the fires and against the aggravating factor of climate change. All it got was prime ministerial bull.

To this day, some Liberals continue to defend Morrison’s conduct. A Morrison cabinet minister and now backbencher, Stuart Robert, says: “Dutton and I were available as the decision makers, as the cabinet ministers responsible. The PM was able to go on leave as the decision-making ministers were on deck and we knew what to do.

“Everything got lost as they went after Scott for being in Hawaii but the ministers running the show were here.”

The political effects that were instantly obvious were bad enough for Morrison. Albanese moved ahead of him to become preferred prime minister for the first time.

Less obvious at the time? Morrison’s fire failure began the structural break-up of the Liberal Party’s support base, a historic rupture that would later take form as the so-called “teal revolution”.

It was the culminating point for Liberal voters frustrated with the party’s go-slow on climate change policy.

The ABC reporter Zoe Daniel had no intention of entering politics: “I was in northern California covering the fires in late November 2019. Normally the firefighters from there would be in Australia by then”, but were detained by the unusually long fire season in the US.

Retired Australian fire chief Greg Mullins was in California observing the blazes, Daniel relates: “I did a story for 7.30 – he’d been trying to get a meeting with the Morrison government to warn them that this massive fire season would soon be upon us and he couldn’t even get a meeting.

“It was exactly as he predicted. That was a real moment for me. It was infuriating. My kids, 13 and 15 years old, had been waiting for someone to step up and do something about climate change. I could either feel incredibly frustrated and shout at the TV and the radio, or get involved.”

She launched her campaign as an independent teal candidate in the Melbourne seat of Goldstein, supposedly a safe Liberal seat, two years later. It built momentum like “a rock rolling downhill”, she says.

“There was already a sense of unrest in the electorate and, once you put an independent from the sensible centre in the frame, people said to me, ‘Suddenly there’s someone to vote for!’ A lot of people in Goldstein won’t vote Labor.” She won the seat with a 12 per cent swing against the incumbent Liberal Tim Wilson, double the size of the national average shift away from the Liberals.

In another supposedly safe Liberal seat, northern Sydney’s Mackellar, the bushfires were the tipping point for Sophie Scamps, a doctor and Olympic middle-distance runner.

Independent Sophie Scamps defeated Liberal MP Jason Falinski in Mackellar.Credit: Nick Moir

Scamps was incensed when she opened her letterbox to find a survey card from her local Liberal MP, Jason Falinski. It asked her to choose from a list of her top priorities for federal government action. There were 15 to 20 issues on the list, she says. Climate change was not one of them.

“We had just had these terrible fires and smoke was still hanging in the air over Sydney,” she recalls.

Her first recourse was to appeal to the Liberal party. She spoke to Falinski at a community meeting: “Jason, people are upset and we would like to see the government representing us,” Scamps relates. “We hear [Liberal MP] Craig Kelly and [Nationals senator] Matt Canavan blaming greenies for the fires and using every excuse but not climate change. Where’s your voice? If you are a moderate, we need to hear your voice.

“He looked uncomfortable, looked at the ground and said, ‘The difficulty is you can’t mention climate change in the party room because the Queensland MPs will jump up and down.’” Scamps says she replied:“You can’t face up to the biggest issue facing humanity and you can’t even mention it!” That, she says, “was the moment I decided to do something about it”. She stood as an independent teal candidate and took the seat with an 11.6 per cent swing against Falinski.

Falinski says he has no record or memory of ever speaking to Scamps prior to her declaring as a teal candidate. He denies the exchange with Scamps ever took place. And he did frequently speak out publicly – and in the party room – in favour of stronger climate action and more ambitious emissions targets.

“What she says makes no sense, at the same time Sophie is claiming I was unwilling to have a private conversation about climate change on a street corner, I was on Sky News with Sharri Markson arguing that we needed to adopted net zero, updated 2030 targets and have stronger policies to combat climate change,” he says.

“The same with the community survey. This was the third survey. Previous ones had asked about climate change. Everyone knew it was an issue. The question was what people thought we should do about it, and there were five questions about that. Only one person raised this with me as an issue, when I pointed this out they said that it made sense.”

Falinski was one of a handful of members who succeeded in campaigning for the Morrison government to adopt net zero as its policy and more ambitious emissions targets at COP26 in Glasgow.

Silently watching this farce was an incredulous Albanese. “Morrison texted me to say he was taking a holiday. I kept it to myself.” It was an emblematic moment. Albanese did nothing. He allowed Morrison to fail on his own terms.

Morrison was the story, not Labor. The pressure on Morrison was intense. Some of his cabinet ministers concluded that his prime ministership was terminal just eight months after he’d won the 2019 election.

“I couldn’t see a long-term recovery and maybe he couldn’t either,” says a Morrison ally. “But then the pandemic came along.”

This is the first of a three-part series examining the Morrison years. Parts two and three will be available to subscribers only. You can subscribe to the Herald at subscribe.smh.com.au/ or The Age at subscribe.theage.com.au/.