Essay excerpt – James Ley, 9 May 2022
The Parable of the Amen Snorter and the Rotten Fish
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Of course, trying to parse Morrison’s public statements is something of a fool’s errand. He has never shown any interest in what words actually mean, or even the conventional ordering of their syllables. He has a fair claim to the title of the most inarticulate Australian political leader since Joh Bjelke-Petersen — and that is up against some stiff competition. Transcripts of his press conferences present a stupefying wasteland of ungrammatical babble. He struggles to get through a sentence without garbling at least one word. He is the only member of the most recent parliament whose mush-mouthed outpourings reliably overtop the tremulous illiteracies of One Nation senator Pauline Hanson, the authentic frontier gibberish of Queensland independent Bob Katter, and the slurred ramblings of his notoriously flatulent deputy Barnaby Joyce.
For Morrison, words are just distracting noises that come out of a hole in his head. They are not connected to any logic or fact or principle. They are not constrained by anything he has said or done in the past, nor do they commit him to any future course of action. To expect otherwise is to make a categorical error.
Morrison’s political career provides no grounds for believing that he will ever give a straight answer to any question, offer a cogent and consistent argument, explain himself in any way, or do anything he says he will do. He has never baulked at any hypocrisy, small or large. He speaks in order to make the very act of questioning him an exercise in futility, addressing no concrete reality beyond the immediate imperative to generate static. It is a form of anti-oratory: the rhetorical equivalent of avoiding an awkward conversation by starting up a leaf blower.
Morrison’s incoherence can thus be interpreted as tactical evasiveness, and as such be taken as evidence of his political cunning. One of the key insights of Sean Kelly’s recent book The Game: A Portrait of Scott Morrison — which devotes several pages to an attentive reading of Morrison’s maiden speech — is that the Prime Minister’s chief and perhaps only political skill is his ability to manoeuvre and avoid responsibility. He is a superficial politician adapted to the superficiality of contemporary politics; his overriding concern is always the ‘game’ of politics as an end in itself.
There is much in this interpretation that rings true. Kelly reads his subject, shrewdly, as a work of fiction: a ‘flat’ character in the sense defined by E.M. Forster. Morrison has cultivated a vacuous public image that might have been dreamed up by the world’s most dimwitted focus group, and probably was. He is the avatar of an intellectual nonentity. He appears to have no clearly articulated policy agenda or ideological viewpoint beyond that standard neoliberal banalities. The incoherence, it seems, goes all the way down. As Bernard Keane wrote in response to another speech in which Morrison sought to outline his core principles: ‘it offers no guide for anything — and thus, inevitably, a justification for everything’. The political historian Judith Brett described the same speech, only slightly more charitably, as ‘contentless’ and ‘rather nebulous’.
Read the full essay here: James Ley on Scott Morrison | Sydney Review of Books.
