Parliamentary convention is dead for the Coalition. Long live denial and deflection

There are few things Scott Morrison does better than obsessive secrecy, smug condescension and national gaslighting, though righteous hypocrisy is undoubtedly one. 

In answer to the robodebt royal commission’s withering indictment of him last week, this embarrassing melange of narcissism and naff sought predictable sanctuary in his labyrinth of lies and denial, recasting himself as nothing more than the jealous guardian of taxpayer funds.   

The policy rationale undergirding the (malevolent and illegal) scheme, he insisted, was well-intentioned and honourable, turning on a desire to “prevent billions of dollars in overpayment of welfare benefits” in the “interests of taxpayers”. Or so said his rambling monologue from Italy. 

Bearing in mind the budget savings originally envisaged under the policy were not “billions”, as claimed, but more precisely $1.7 billion — and even that figure was revealed as gross nonsense — it becomes almost possible to quantify the scope and weight of this particular variant of Morrison deceit. 

This, after all, is the man whose government allowed profitable businesses and entities to retain some $40 billion in JobKeeper overpayments. The same man who presided over various self-serving, multibillion-dollar rorts, such as the urban congestion fund, who breezily billed taxpayers some $185 million for a photo opportunity on Christmas Island before the 2019 election, and who as prime minister spent a combined $11,000 of taxpayer funds jetting off to Lachlan Murdoch’s Christmas party and visiting his family during lockdown on Father’s Day. This list has no ending. 

His cynicism, from this vantage point, is boundless; his distortion of reality, obscene.

And yet, the moral wreckage that is Morrison’s time in Parliament, including the interminable denouement before us, continues to debase both the country and his party. Rather than recognising Morrison for the mendacious reprobate he is and insisting on his resignation, the Coalition appears intent on reducing his political accountability for one of the most disgraceful scandals in Australian history to a chimera. 

Within hours of the royal commission report’s release on Friday, for instance, Opposition Leader Peter Dutton once again cast doubt on the integrity of the inquiry, flatly accusing Government Services Minister Bill Shorten of having “politicised” robodebt from “day one”. 

It didn’t matter that facts, as ever, weren’t on Dutton’s side. He sounded a warning against the “glee” he claimed to discern in the Albanese government, calling Shorten a “political animal”. He declared he would on no terms call on Morrison to resign, pointing to the dangers of a “trial by media”. 

And though “sorry to those people adversely affected” by robodebt, he championed himself as the defender of due process, the “presumption of innocence” and the wrongly accused, claiming Morrison had “refuted” the findings of the royal commission. 

Nationals Leader David Littleproud echoed this sentiment, telling Channel 9 that Morrison “won the election fair and square”, pointing out the commission hadn’t recommended that implicated ministers resign.

None of this burgeoning moral indignation, of course, was or is particularly genuine — it echoes little more than the usual deflection that has come to characterise the Coalition when confronted with scandal from the vasty deep. But it was nevertheless crass and grossly insensitive.

No one caught in rododebt’s web of cruelty, for instance, was afforded a semblance of procedural fairness, with the onus reversed and retrospectively placed on recipients, who were provided with little to nothing in the way of information to assist them in disproving the unlawful debt. 

Nor were these 430,000 people given easy and automatic access — as were Morrison and his former ministers during the royal commission — to taxpayer-funded lawyers to defend their position. And still less were they spared the spectre of “trial by media”, as then-human services minister Alan Tudge’s ugly and undisguised campaign of intimidation against various robodebt victims attests. 

On the contrary, the scheme summoned all of the might and malice possible of a government intent on introducing new depths to the unconcealed disdain with which it held the “undeserving poor”, meeting its mission with deadly precision. 

It should never be forgotten in this connection that between July 2016 and October 2018, more than 2000 people died after receiving a robodebt letter, with many such letters emblazoned with the logo of not only Centrelink but the federal police and warnings of imprisonment. Even allowing for the fact correlation doesn’t prove causation, it’s notable that one-fifth of those were under the age of 35.

Some of the families of these deceased, it later emerged, were themselves harangued for the same unlawful debts, and many thousands more who fell victim to the lawlessness of robodebt became indelibly marked by the trauma wrought by the relentless pursuit of debt collectors, the spectre of jail and what they called a “gross betrayal” by government. 

Notwithstanding these veritable truths, Dutton would now have us believe the four-and-a-half-year scheme ended at the first hint of trouble. “When the problems were brought to the attention of the government at the time,” he told reporters on Saturday, “the program was stopped.” 

What’s fascinating about this particular lie is its audacity. It’s witless, easily disproved by reference to the thousands of media reports on the scheme beginning late 2016, the well-publicised nature of some of the suicides, and various Senate inquiries. 

There were also repeated warnings from organisations such as the Australian Council of Social Service and the Commonwealth Public Sector Union, not to mention the hundreds of first-tier rulings levelled against the government in the Administrative Appeals Tribunal (AAT). The fact the government repeatedly chose not to appeal these rulings, in what former AAT member Terry Carney told ABC Radio National was an outrageous “gaming by government” of the tribunal to avoid public scrutiny, reveals at best suspicion and at worst knowledge as to the scheme’s unlawfulness and a desire to conceal it. 

But in a nod to his morally emaciated state, Morrison says none of this is his fault. Putting aside his rejection of all the adverse findings against him, he bizarrely felt it noteworthy the commission’s conclusions as to his conduct were — on his reading — confined to his “role as minister for social services”, which he served for nine months between December 2014 and September 2015.  

The difficulty with this minimalist position, of course, is it ignores the enduring quality of the central finding against him — namely that he misled cabinet, having failed to make the “obvious inquiry” as to why the lawfulness of retrospective income-averaging would suddenly not require legislative change after being told by public servants that it did. 

Plainly enough, it runs contrary to common sense to suppose his complicity in the illegal scheme ends at the point at which he becomes treasurer or prime minister. If anything, it deepens it, given the seniority of those positions. 

But untroubled as ever by ethical considerations and constraints, Morrison’s venture into unreality didn’t stop there. On his reckoning, the twin notions as found by the commission, that his divisive and heavy-handed anti-welfare rhetoric contributed to “easy populism” and a “certain atmosphere in which any proposal responsive to his request would be developed”, were false. 

To agree with the commission, he says, would be to arrive at the perverse conclusion that the basic conventions upon which responsible government rests failed the nation. Never mind that’s precisely what the commission found.  

All of which brings us to a noteworthy address Morrison delivered at the Institute of Public Administration in 2019 on the role of accountability in our democracy, the true significance of which he said lies “only [with] those who have put their name on the ballot”.    

“I know you [public servants] might feel sometimes that you are absolutely right in what you are suggesting,” he said, “but I can tell you when it is you that is facing the public and must look your constituents in the eye, it gives you a unique perspective … That is why under our system of government it must be ministers who set the policy direction.”

The true irony of the current moment, of course, is that Morrison has since flipped this insistence, reverting to the convention of ministerial reliance on frank and fearless advice but not the convention of resigning in the face of scandal. 

To some extent, his lies and shameless norm-torching persist out of habit. But in large part they continue because his own party sees collective respect for facts in this post-truth age as malleable — something that bears political exploitation. Partisan advantage, on this equation, mandates loyalty to Morrison, with no room left for old-fashioned ideas such as the public interest. 

And though the full cost of this Faustian bargain is unclear, there can be little doubt that within its limits lie damaging outcomes for the health of our democracy, including, not least, the spectre of a repeat scandal like robodebt. 

In the words of David Littleproud this week: “The intent [of robodebt] was right.” It was only its “execution” which “was poor”. Or so he claims. 

Has the Coalition normalised a certain kind of parliamentary process? Let us know 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 clarity.