Opinion: Captain Morrison refuses to walk the plank | michaelkoziol
There can be absolutely no doubt Scott Morrison saw himself as captain of Australia. And the first mate. And the engineer. And the deckhand.
The hour-long affair was a tour de force of vintage Morrisonisms, almost as if the former prime minister felt compelled to trot out his greatest hits for fear of not getting another opportunity.There was the comfortable defiance of a man convinced he has not done anything wrong; indeed, that the things he was accused of doing were actually selfless acts in service of his country - for which he was inexplicably now being asked to apologise.
Rather, as Morrison told us, “I was administratively sworn in”. Yet at the same time, “the suggestion of co-administration of departments is 100 per cent false”.Morrison’s combative streak returned in spades, especially in his terse exchanges with Sky News’ Andrew Clennell, who found the former PM’s logic puzzling. “It may be puzzling but that would be as as a result of [you] not having walked in my shoes, Andrew,” Morrison rebuked.
Nor did he explain exactly what calamity he feared when he assumed these reserve powers - the incapacitation of a minister, he implied - or why the normal process for appointing a replacement could not have been followed. Morrison explained he made these unprecedented moves because the public, the media and the opposition expected him to take responsibility “pretty much for every single thing that was going on” during the pandemic. And yet at no point did he reveal he would fulfil those expectations in the most literal way possible.
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