scott morrison
(Image: Private Media)

One of the dead giveaways that Scott Morrison is lying — no, not that his lips are moving, smarty — is that he ardently insists he didn’t say something. The phrase, or some variation of it, is usually a strong pointer to the fact that he did indeed say what he insists he didn’t.

Asked about his ridiculing of electric vehicles in the 2019 election last November, Morrison was forthright: “But I didn’t. That is just a Labor lie.” Asked why his government was full of climate denialists who rejected the link between climate change and bushfires back in 2020, he was adamant: “That has never been in dispute.”

“At no stage,” Morrison said, “has there been any suggestion” that if the vaccine rollout had gone to schedule the east coast outbreak last winter would have been more easily handled — despite personally launching the vaccine rollout schedule last March that indicated exactly that.

Nor did he ever comment on the EU blocking vaccine supplies, despite the previous day declaring “we all are aware of the situation in Europe and other places that has frustrated that supply”.

Most famously, he denied he’d ever lied about Save the Children making false claims about children held on Nauru and using them in protests — even when read his exact remarks, even when his own department was forced to make a large compensation payment to Save the Children.

Last week Morrison found himself in a difficult spot when the normally friendly, pro-Coalition Ben Fordham politely inquired about refugees in the same hotel as Novak Djokovic. “It’s not clear that to my information that someone in that case is actually a refugee,” he said. “They may have sought asylum and been found not to be a refugee and have chosen not to return.”

Except that’s certainly not the case. More than two dozen people found to be refugees are detained on an ongoing basis in the Park Hotel in Melbourne. That was lie number one. But we got a much treasured bonus lie two days later when Morrison was challenged on his claim about there being no refugees at the hotel: “I didn’t make the statement that every single person was who was [sic] in that place was not a refugee … The suggestion that I said they were all not found to be refugees is not true. That’s not what I said.”

And who are you going to believe, anyway? Morrison, or your own lying ears?