Child-rearing to retina-searing: Scott Morrison’s greatest hits

The end has finally come for a man whose addiction to easily spotted lies and falsehoods, grasp of tone and profound, baseline absurdity gave this column so, so many gifts over the years.

From the time he couldn’t stop himself chucking a shaka in a Hawaii beach photo while Australia burned and his media team obfuscated about his whereabouts, to his use of The Croods to woo Western Australian voters, it’s almost impossible to pick a favourite Scott Morrison moment. But it’s probably that time he accidentally squished a kid during what was supposed to be a fun kick-about.

Let’s look back at some of the great moments Morrison gave Tips and Murmurs over the years:

September 2018: Very early in his tenure as PM, Morrison tweeted: “QT was fire. Good work team”. This was accompanied by a video of his MPs (except Julia Banks, for reasons that would later become clear) raising their hands in unison, looped so that it synced up with the call and response chorus of early 2000s banger “Be Faithful” by Fatman Scoop — “If you got a 20 dollar bill put your hands up, if you got a 50 dollar bill put your hands up”.

Unfortunately for Morrison, like many songs encouraging one to throw their hands up, it doesn’t stop there. The song goes on to inquire: “Who fuckin’ tonight?” Morrison swiftly deleted the post and apologised.

February 2022: The footage of Morrison visiting Specialised Welding & Engineering in the Northern Territory in February 2022 sums up his time in office just as surely as Tony Abbott’s stewardship came to be represented by the image of him tearing into a raw, skin-on onion like a dog being offered an ice cream. Having a go at some welding, he decided to get a closer look at his work, leaning in and lifting his protective mask as the white-hot sparks spat in his direction.

Morrison’s vacant grin, the hand that you could see in the wider shot desperately and helplessly trying to indicate the correct way to wear the mask — it was truly hypnotic…

May 2022: In the lead-up to the 2022 federal election, Morrison posted a photo of two dishes and some rice to his personal social media platform and captioned the image: “Nice to have a night at home. So curry it is. Sri Lankan Tamarind Eggplant and Okra Curry and a classic Chicken Korma. Strong Curry. Strong Economy. Stronger Future.”

It was a great way to shoehorn an election slogan into a family meal — except that punters were quick to point out that Jen and the girls had better have strong stomachs because it seemed like dad had forgotten to actually cook the chicken in the chicken korma.

August 2022: Alarm bells must have started ringing when Tony Abbott was asked for a comment on the revelation of Morrison’s secret self-appointment to various ministries and Abbott called it “unusual, unorthodox and strange”. You know something is very awry when Abbott, long regarded as the undisputed gold medallist for weird-unit PMs, looks at what you’ve done and thinks “… bit odd”.

Indeed, many people who didn’t even think what happened was a monumental scandal were struck by the sheer weirdness of it being kept secret.

This being Morrison, however, the weirdness was not done, not by a long shot. Presumably deciding to take advantage of the free time the loss of six jobs afforded him, he spent a long evening on Facebook reply-guying more or less every dodgy bit of Photoshop anyone had made about him. He seemed very keen for everyone to know how funny he found the situation. It was… well, it was weird.

August 2023: “I played no role and had no responsibility in the operation nor administration of the robodebt scheme,” Morrison told the robodebt royal commission, talking about a disaster of which he seemed to consider himself the primary victim. It occurred to us at the time that you could write a fairly detailed recent history of Australia via disasters that Morrison insisted were not his fault and jobs he insisted were not his to do:

• Australia’s tendency to knife its leaders midterm between 2007-18: “I was not the one who sought to change [the party leadership].”
• Australia’s hardline policy towards refugees: “It’s not my job to be an ethical theologian or any of these things. It’s my job to do a job, and my job was to stop the boats and that’s what we did.”
• On rape and sexual harassment: “Well, that is a matter for the police. See, I’m not the commissioner of police.”
• On COVID-19, part 1 — Australia’s insufficient vaccine supply: “The simple explanation is that … 3.1 million vaccines never came to Australia“; the Australian Technical Advisory Group on Immunisations “had been very cautious and that had a massive impact on the rollout of the vaccine program, it really did. It slowed it considerably and put us behind — and we wish that wasn’t the result, but it was”; “It’s the pandemic, that’s the reason why these things are happening, and happening not just in Australia but in all places around the world.”
• On the crisis in aged care: “We regulate aged care, but when there is a public health pandemic … then they are things that are managed from Victoria.”
• On COVID-19, part 2 — secretly appointing himself to several ministries: “Had I been asked about these matters at the time at the numerous press conferences I held, I would have responded truthfully about the arrangements I had put in place.”