Peter Strempel, 7 February 2023
Apparently, the Commonwealth house of representatives speaker, Milton Dick (ALP, Oxley QLD) thinks that former PM Scott Morrison cannot be considered to have deliberately lied to the house about appointing himself to multiple ministries.
Does that mean he lied in an undeliberate way? By omission?
Dick’s cowardice in this matter is probably predictable. Where would we be if we expected honesty from politicians, and censured them for being dishonest?
What politician could survive that test?
Nevertheless, Morrison is well known as a compulsive liar, so much so that during a single interview in which he mistook the two Chinas policy for something else, he flatly denied what he said, live to air, just minutes earlier.
It isn’t the sole example of Morrison’s insistence that reality be altered to suit his own bizarre fantasies about it, and most of his lies have been plainly brazen, premeditated, and self-serving. He got away with being a thoroughly dishonest politician because our journalists are unprincipled cowards, and our parliament protects its own by never punishing politicians for misdemeanours and crimes that would careers in the real world.
I suppose Dick’s defence here is that no one directly asked him whether he had appointed himself to multiple ministries, and therefore he never denied it.
That’s a soft shoe shuffle, isn’t it? Dick being a dick, as applicable anywhere but in parliament.
It’s actually a favourite trick of politicians from all sides when it comes to FOI requests. If you want some secret information released, you first have to know it exists, meaning it can’t really be secret in the first place.
Good to know that parliament really holds itself and its grubby MPs to a higher standard. So high you can slither below the bar thus set, as if you were a dung beetle on shit. As if?