A rattled Morrison keeps the falsehoods coming thick and fast

When Crikey first assembled the long dossier of Scott Morrison’s lies and falsehoods, we noted that he resorted to deception much more when he was under pressure — and at times of great stress the lies would rapidly accumulate.

Clearly Morrison is currently feeling the heat from the shambolic vaccine rollout, his forced U-turn on lockdowns and the humiliation of seeing Daniel Andrews vindicated and Gladys “gold standard” Berejiklian struggling with a months-long lockdown of Sydney. The lies and falsehoods are piling up fast.

Just yesterday, as Morrison struggled to dismiss Anthony Albanese’s proposal for a cash vaccination incentive — Morrison being the proud personal author, at News Corp’s direction, of a cash incentive for vaccination via the no jab, no pay/no play policy — he misled Parliament about the opposition leader. “He could start by talking to General Frewen who he has not yet sat down with — not once — since he came into the job … He hasn’t even bothered to talk to him,” Morrison told question time.

In fact, as Albanese later explained, he’d been trying to talk to Frewen — the stuffed uniform deployed by Morrison as political cover for the vaccine bungle — since late June and it was the government that had put off any briefing until later this week.

Albanese also asked Morrison about a now oft-repeated claim of Morrison’s that the notorious phrase “not a race” was only used by Morrison — at the instigation of health secretary Brendan Murphy, he insists — in relation to the approval process for vaccines, when Morrison clearly used it in relation to a question about the slow pace of the vaccine rollout on March 31. Morrison stuck resolutely to the lie.

That’s come on top of Morrison bizarrely claiming Berejiklian never raised the issue of additional vaccines for NSW in national cabinet when she said she had “argued my little heart out” on the issue and been rejected — with Frewen fingered as having spoken to her with “derision”, an outrageous insult to a democratically elected leader by a bureaucrat and a military man to boot — sufficient that, if true, the general should have been sacked on the spot and kicked out of the meeting.

There were a succession of lies and falsehoods from Morrison throughout July — on ATAGI’s AstraZeneca advice, his favouritism toward Sydney, and that whopper about there being no vaccine schedule that would have made a difference to the current Sydney outbreak.

This is the psychology of a man who despises and fears accountability — even for his own words, which he frequently denies having said despite them being on the public record, on the transcripts on his own personal site.

With no relief in sight for a beleaguered non-leader hemmed in by his own bungling and politicking, how many more lies will be racked up by the end of the year — let alone in the run-up to the election? We’ll be tracking them all at the ever-growing dossier.