Playing whack-a-mole with norm breakers like Morrison won’t work

The immediate outcome of Solicitor-General Stephen Donaghue’s advice on Scott Morrison’s multiple ministries will be a change to the publication arrangements for ministerial appointments, with the possibility of a legislated change to that effect, according to Prime Minister Anthony Albanese. An inquiry will also occur examining what Morrison did and how he did it, in a form to be determined.

That all follows Donaghue’s advice that what Morrison did was legal, but the result was “the principles of responsible government are fundamentally undermined”. Morrison, in another of his bizarre defences yesterday, seized on the legal bit and justified his actions by invoking the pandemic. Still, he generously admitted, “some of these decisions will be reflected upon now and lessons learned”.

That’s more than you’d ever get from Donald Trump, admittedly, and perhaps the penny is dropping in Morrison’s mind about just how damaging his actions were — if not to Australian democracy than to his own party and whatever scattered debris remains of his legacy.

One of the questions being asked about how Morrison did what he did is why there was no pushback from his own office, from the governor-general’s office, or from Prime Minister and Cabinet (PM&C). For those of us who like their governors-general to follow the advice of their prime minister, David Hurley’s actions were unexceptionable — it was not for him to publish something his prime minister wanted kept secret, if there was no legal issue with that.

The lack of pushback from Morrison’s office is a political issue. And, frankly, if they didn’t baulk at smearing the partner of an alleged sexual assault victim, or Morrison’s incessant lying, or his relentless pork-barrelling, or his stacking of board appointments, there’s no reason to think they would have batted an eyelid at his multiple ministries.

Prime Minister and Cabinet is a different story. If pushback was to come from anywhere, it should have come from PM&C — senior officials there, and the secretary, should have pointed out that what Morrison wanted undermined responsible government.

But PM&C was fatally compromised, because it was controlled by a long-term Liberal Party staffer, Phil Gaetjens, who was repeatedly used as a political prop by Morrison in response to scandals and embarrassments.

That is, one trashing of a political norm was enabled by another: the gross politicisation of the Australian Public Service helped the undermining of responsible government. It’s not illegal to appoint a veteran political staffer to be head of PM&C any more than it’s illegal for a prime minister to secretly hold multiple ministries. But it is a convention, a norm — one that, like so many others, has been trashed in recent years.

Should we now have legislation to prevent the politicisation of the public service too? What about other norms that have been trashed? For example, misleading Parliament isn’t illegal, it’s just a norm for which you lose your job. Or used to be — Scott Morrison blatantly misled the House of Representatives as PM and nothing happened. Should that, too, be formalised?

Formalising and legislating norms defeats their purpose: they are meant to be universally agreed standards within a group that enable that group to function effectively, not rules imposed and administered by those in power. Democracies accrete norms and conventions that enable them to work effectively and that have been proven by long practice. They’re not set in stone, they’re somewhere between Manchu court-style ritual and chaos, capable of evolving, but only by agreement of the whole group.

Faced with a determined norm-breaker like Scott Morrison, who readily tramples on conventions that impede his own personal interests, formalising norms is like whack-a-mole. There’ll always be some other norm that he will break to get his own way. The record of the Morrison government is one that assiduously looked for ways around rules and norms to get its way — the sports rorts program that was put in an agency beyond the ambit of Commonwealth grant guidelines, the programs designed so that ministers could simply decide what they liked about where money went and still be compliant with the rules.

Until the Coalition accepts that trashing norms is unacceptable, the same problems will occur next time it is in government. Likely, the same problems will occur if Labor remains in power for any substantial length of time. For all our back-slapping talk of what a successful democracy we are, the fact is we have outsourced politics to a small class of professionals, have few basic protections built into our system of government, and rely on a highly concentrated media that struggles to play the role of watchdog on power.

Perhaps the only genuine solution is the disruption of major party politics by independents who can force governments to adhere more strongly to norms. It certainly isn’t by trying to legislate our way back to responsible government.

Do we need to rethink our approach to political norms in Australia? Let us know your thoughts by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication. We reserve the right to edit for length and