The title of this piece is a bit misleading in that it gives the impression I could possibly consider voting for a Morrison government. I could not do so even if I was a billionaire, as I retain some self-respect. This piece was begun soon after Adam Jacoby asked, on Twitter:
“Leading into the election I would like us to start a thread about why we won’t vote for the Morrison Govt. Please comment here with your reason using the hashtag #WhyIWantChange
Time to make it clear for the media. I will kick it off below”1
He continued: “I care deeply for this country but I want it to be fairer, more democratic, less divisive and have a greater vision for what we could be. The Morrison govt is a visionless cesspool of corruption and lies and my kids futures deserve better than that”2
To this question of why I could not vote for the Morrison government, I replied:
“The constant lies, misogyny, racism, idiocy, petulance, corruption, pork barrelling, religious nutjobbery, hatred of expertise, shirking of responsibility, shifting of blame to the blameless, the stealing of credit from the creditable. #WhyIWantChange”3
While it is very easy to list a series of derogatory statements such as that above, there is evidence which backs up each of these. I and others have spent the last five years documenting much of the evidence behind these statements. I elaborate below.
Lies
The constant lies are well known even by the mainstream media, it is just that so few of them are game enough to detail them. Even the fact checkers are gutless in calling such lies ‘misleading’, ‘incorrect’ or ‘false’. Most people in their daily lives only ever have to deal with the barefaced lie, or false advertising, but there are many ways politicians and others lie4. Here are a few examples of Morrison’s lies. He lied about obtaining an agreement with AstraZeneca regarding access to their Covid-19 vaccine5. He lied about Australians being first in line for vaccines. He lied about the testing of batches of vaccines6. He lied about the rate of vaccination of Australians7. He lied about reading the dossier sent to him by friends of Christian Porter’s alleged rape victim8. He lied about when he learned of Brittany Higgins’ alleged rape in parliament house9. He lied about cutting $1.2 billion from aged care funding10. He lied about the number of countries providing free Rapid Antigen Test kits to their people, while Ruston and Joyce lied about their availability in Australia and worldwide11. Morrison lied about the national debt12. He lied when it was revealed he suggested the government use community fear of Muslims to their political advantage13. He lied about the government always accepting the science of climate change14. He lied when he said Australia is taking real action to address greenhouse gas emissions15,16. He lied about electric vehicles and then lied when asked if he had lied about them17. He lied by omission about trying to get Hillsong’s Brian Houston into a White House dinner18. He lied about the Medevac legislation19. He lied (via his office) as to his whereabouts when he was in Hawaii during the horrific bushfires in December 201920. While these are just the Morrison lies I have written about, others have listed many more21-23. As if this was not appalling enough, Morrison was asked on radio whether he had ever lied while in public office, and he lied when he said he hadn’t24. In addition, these are mostly the lies attributed only to Morrison. There are many other lies from other members of the Liberal and National parties.
Misogyny
Morrison’s misogyny is also well known, as male headship is one of the tenets of his religious cult. He once said: “we’re not about setting Australians against each other, trying to push some down to lift others up… We want to see women rise, but we don’t want to see women rise only on the basis of others doing worse.” This is a statement that could only come from a person who is either unaware of the fact that the number of parliamentarians is finite, or he believes that women are naturally inferior25,26. If a member of the Liberal Party is the target of misogyny, members of the Liberal Party are rightly appalled. However, if that misogyny is directed at a member of the Labor Party, such as former Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, or Annastacia Palaszczuk, it is perfectly acceptable27-29. This misogyny was again on show when Grace Tame gave a stony face to the Morrison photo-opportunity the day before the 2022 Australian of the Year awards ceremony. The general consensus from the boys’ club, including the intellectually challenged Senator James McGrath, and assorted Murdoch hacks like Peter Van Onselen, was that she should have been pleasant and toed their line30. Then there is the bizarre Andrew Laming, who trolled two women and accused one of misappropriating funds from a charity31. The experiences of Liberals Julia Banks, Ann Sudmalis and Jane Prentice are instructive. All have all been subjected to undermining and bullying by blokes, and this, coupled with the reluctance of the Liberal Party to seriously consider gender quotas clearly demonstrates that misogyny is endemic in the Liberal Party32. This attitude to women was perhaps epitomised by Scott Morrison refusing to meet with the women’s March For Justice except in a controlled environment where he and his minders could call the tune and manage the photo-opportunities. Morrison said the women should be grateful that they can demonstrate and not be met with bullets. This is perhaps one of the strangest things I have heard Morrison say: That women, in addition to needing to protect themselves from rape by not going out, getting drunk or being alone, should now be grateful for not being shot at for demonstrating33.
I was going to do this all in one rant, but the instances of the government’s lack of integrity and appalling behaviour are so numerous, if I was to list them all in one go this would end up being far too long. So, I’ve broken it up into rants of moderate length.
Sources
- https://twitter.com/adamajacoby/status/1505667378331664384
- https://twitter.com/adamajacoby/status/1505667783400771584
- https://twitter.com/BlotReport/status/1505693435176448005
- https://blotreport.com/2017/02/10/how-politicians-lie/
- https://blotreport.com/2021/08/18/the-morrison-nightmare/
- https://blotreport.com/2021/01/08/first-or-last/
- https://blotreport.com/2021/04/02/morrison-likes-it-both-ways/
- https://blotreport.com/2021/03/03/morrison-porter-and-endemic-lying/
- https://blotreport.com/2021/02/17/did-morrison-almost-tell-the-truth/
- https://blotreport.com/2018/09/17/scott-morrison-as-sergeant-schultz/
- https://blotreport.com/2022/01/15/rats-lies-from-joyce-ruston-morrison/
- https://blotreport.com/2021/05/19/morrisons-budgetary-hypocrisy/
- https://blotreport.com/2019/03/24/morrison-reimagines-history/
- https://blotreport.com/2020/01/10/liar-morrison-2/
- https://blotreport.com/2019/09/29/liar-morrison/
- https://blotreport.com/2018/10/10/morrisons-per-capita-lie/
- https://blotreport.com/2021/11/10/morrison-lying-about-lying/
- https://blotreport.com/2019/10/21/morrison-and-houston/
- https://blotreport.com/2019/02/12/morrison-goes-full-trump/
- https://blotreport.com/2019/12/20/pet-journalists/
- https://independentaustralia.net/politics/politics-display/morrisons-top-10-bare-faced-lies,15787
- https://www.crikey.com.au/dossier-of-lies-and-falsehoods/
- https://chaser.com.au/national/top-7-times-scott-morrison-fucked-up-and-then-lied-about-not-being-warned-before-hand/
- https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/nov/12/scott-morrison-says-he-believes-he-has-never-told-a-lie-in-public-life-was-that-a-lie
- https://blotreport.com/2019/03/08/misogyny-morrison/
- https://blotreport.com/2021/03/13/international-womens-day-2021/
- https://blotreport.com/2020/07/31/one-way-street/
- https://blotreport.com/2017/02/28/the-right-has-a-woman-problem/
- https://blotreport.com/2019/12/29/coalition-attacks-on-women-continue/
- https://blotreport.com/2022/01/28/earning-respect/
- https://blotreport.com/2021/11/29/piss-and-wind/
- https://blotreport.com/2018/12/10/quotas-for-blokes/
- https://blotreport.com/2021/03/16/women-are-lucky/
This week at a vote buying ceremony for the mooted Hells Gate dam, Morrison made the statement that “nobody has ever tried to tear down a dam”. The journalists both at the time, and later, have simply allowed this extraordinary and incredibly weird statement to just pass them by. It is either extraordinarily stupid or an extraordinarily brazen lie. The USA alone has decommissioned and torn down hundreds of dams in the last few decades. This has been done for many reasons but significantly much has been to restore environmental flows to rivers to ensure that, among other things, salmon can continue to breed. So his statement is simply false. But even more simply anyone with half a brain, and a bit of historical knowledge would know that in WW2 there were a group of people who became very famous, and eventually had a very famous film made about their exploits, called the dam busters. So his statement is simply stupid, and easily shown to be stupid. Despite the very simple and obvious fact that he made either a completely false, or totally stupid, statement, it has been allowed, as usual, to pass unchallenged by most of the media. This is similar to the statement he made not much more than a week ago about how unemployment in Australia is now at its lowest level for 50 years. He did get picked up on that by some journos but still tried to claim that it was basically true, even though, in fact, it was the equal lowest level since 2008. This Trumpian facility to make huge generalised false statements for his own benefit is enabled by the compliant media. It is a disgrace, and an embarrassment, that we have a leader who is so loose with the truth, and that we have a significant chunk of the media that allows this type of dishonesty to flourish.
Mark,
Spot on. I am constantly amazed by the poor quality of the media cohort. There are of course a few outstanding journalists, most of whom seem to be women, and there are some male journalists who seem completely unable to do their job. Many of the latter have huge reputations for no apparent reason. I do despair.
There are some people out there that would rather kneel before Herr Morrison and kiss his feet instead of taking note of what he has done to this country. He does not care about anyone but himself.
If he wins in May, that means we have to deal with these bastards for 3 more years.
Glenn,
If he wins the election, it will be the end of this nation. We will end up as being what Lee Kwan Yew suggested: the poor white trash of Asia.
I have never voted Liberal in my life, because they broke away from their core beliefs, and they kill everything that would have benefited this country.
You don’t have to answer this if you don’t want to, but if the Morrison government wasn’t in charge, would you consider voting Liberal?
Glenn,
Most definitely not. I have voted Liberal, once, decades ago, and I regret it still. The problem goes much deeper than Morrison and extends back to before he even entered parliament. The Fraser government, at least to some degree, adhered to the ethos expressed in Menzies ‘forgotten people’ speech. Fraser was a decent man (I knew someone who worked in PM&C) and he dealt with the Vietnamese boat people without torturing them (I went to uni with a couple of them), and he dealt with Apartheid in South Africa by trying to make them a pariah state. That wouldn’t happen now, as we all know. The neoliberal economics (‘trickle down’ of Thatcher & Reagan) was effectively adopted in Australia under the Hawke-Keating government, and has got worse ever since. Howard started shovelling money to the wealthy, and that has continued in spades ever since, until today where it is simply money laundering and other forms of corruption. This country can not afford to have the Liberals in government. It is not just economics, either. The Liberals have largely been taken over by religious nutters, except in Tasmania and SA, although they are trying in the latter. They want to legislate their creeds and their bigotries, and if they get re-elected, they will.