Morrison’s boat stunt on election day shows he was a grub until the very end

It was so apt that a rotten government — one that trashed governance norms, politicised the public service, and saw governing entirely through the prism of the next media release — went to its death trying to force public servants to breach caretaker conventions and publicise an election-day press release about a boat.

The Home Affairs report into how Scott Morrison’s office and that of former Home Affairs minister Karen Andrews tried to force that department to act as an election propaganda arm of the Coalition offers an insight into just how desperate the Liberals were on election day.

The first convention they trashed was their own: it was Morrison who, as immigration minister, invented the idea of “on-water matters”, which necessitated silence about everything to do with boats of asylum seekers or illegal immigrants.

As the report indicates, the Operation Sovereign Borders (OSB) public information protocols that Morrison put in place remain nearly 10 years later. Indeed, the report goes to the trouble of citing a 2013 op-ed by Morrison himself that “nor are we going to run a shipping news service for smugglers”. But they were suddenly very inconvenient for Morrison and Andrews: they wanted an announcement that a boat from Sri Lanka, called SIEV 915, had been intercepted.

Had the protocols ever been breached? “No instances have been identified of the Commander Joint Agency Task Force — Operation Sovereign Borders publishing information about people smuggling ventures outside of the regular monthly update.” That is, there were occasional ministerial announcements about OSB, but OSB officials had never published information.

Now Morrison and Andrews wanted them breached ASAP. At 11.58am on election day, Andrews’ staff called the office of Rear Admiral Justin Jones, the Commander of the Joint Agency Task Force, and told them Morrison himself wanted Jones to issue a statement about the boat. Clearly Morrison knew Andrews talking about a boat would be dismissed as politics as usual — they needed someone in uniform.

And they wanted a statement in 15 minutes. Why the rush? Morrison had a presser scheduled for 1pm.

After Jones’ office told the department that Morrison wanted Jones to issue the statement, the department called Andrews’ office to check — obviously aware this would be the first time one of the core protocols of OSB would be breached. Andrews’ office told them yes, it was to be Jones’ statement — and hurry up.

Then a problem cropped up: the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) realised it would have to brief Labor, as required under the caretaker conventions. It could breach that convention, but that would create a precedent for Labor to refuse to brief the Coalition if it were in government. The PMO rang Home Affairs secretary Mike Pezzullo and told him to arrange a briefing for Labor via Andrews’ office.

Andrews’ office was getting antsy. It rang the department at 12.31pm to find out where the statement was. Meanwhile, Labor had said it wanted a briefing before any public statement was made. Andrews’ office agreed to that request. Then her office finally got the statement, made some changes and sent it back to be approved by Jones because, remember, it’s his statement.

But just a statement isn’t enough: the PMO and Andrews’ office want the statement emailed to selected journalists. When Pezzullo learns about this, he tells his officials not to. When Andrews’ office asks for Australian Border Force to tweet the statement, it gets knocked back again. Pezzullo has made clear the statement is only to be published on the department’s website.

The statement gets uploaded at 1pm — just in time for Morrison, who is starting his press conference, with journalists worded up to ask him about the boat.

Except, the statement takes a few minutes to go live after being loaded. An Andrews staffer loses their shit and demands to know why it isn’t online when Morrison starts speaking. “What on earth is the issue?” they demand, frantically refreshing the Home Affairs site. “A lot of people are furious.” The hapless Home Affairs bureaucrat can only lament that there’s nothing they can do to speed up the Home Affairs page refresh. It makes it online at 1.09pm.

Meanwhile Andrews has taken her sweet time approving the opposition being briefed — she doesn’t do so until well after Morrison has started speaking. With Labor available to be briefed, the task falls to Jones to brief them. Everyone’s on the teleconference ready for him at 1.30pm. Jones still hasn’t come on the line 15 minutes later. It turns out he was in a “secure area”, conveniently, and couldn’t be contacted by phone. Labor doesn’t get a briefing until 2.30pm.

The Liberal text message trying to use the arrival to scare voters is soon on the way — or as Home Affairs now calls it, the “LiberalNSW text spam text message”.

Pezzullo insists no caretaker conventions were breached by the department, after he resisted pressure to “amplify” the statement. He also argues that the decision to breach the communication protocol didn’t amount to a breach of caretaker conventions, because it wasn’t important enough to meet the threshold of being subject to them. Readers can make up their own mind on that point, but it’s a tough sell, as the Home Affairs report itself makes clear.

Either way, Morrison and his cronies went to their political graves in the same manner as they’d lived — doing everything they could to trash the most basic standards of governance in federal politics. The fact that it was all in the aid of the core product of the Morrison prime ministership — a press release — which violated Morrison’s own rules established when he was first a minister, only adds to the irony of a grubby government dying a grubby death.