I don't hold a biro, mate
A review of Scott Morrison's biography. Or at least, of the first chapter
Should I or shouldn’t I? Can I or can’t I? Will I or won’t I?
I am having flashbacks to the first time I climbed the diving tower at the Olympic swimming pool in Canberra when I was kid and contemplated hurling myself into what looked like an impossibly small wet handkerchief neatly laid out in a rectangle on the concrete a hundred miles below me.
Scott Morrison’s biography has somehow shown up on my Kindle app and I find myself on the same precipice. I must’ve preordered it last year in a fit of duty to the readers of this newsletter, telling myself it might be valuable-fun-interesting-helpful to write a review of #scomosbio. But now that it is actually here, available and demanding to be read, I am not so sure I can do it.
Should I jump in?
The best I can promise is this: a review of the first chapter, or more precisely, the twenty-page Preface. Tell me if you want me to keep going and I will do my best.
I noticed Guy Rundle saying a few challenging things to those of us inclined to be dismissive of Mr Morrison’s comments about his mental health challenges, and even those who scoff at his (Morrison’s) stated religious beliefs. GR writes:
The reaction has been less than sympathetic, to say the least. First an exasperation that this man is still here, still up in our business. Second, there is a deep desire not to believe that ScoMo has something as inner-city/elite/woke as anxiety. ScoMo manages to take the gloss off of an affliction making you feel like jumping out of your own skin. This was followed by frank distrust. Morrison is pumping out his own weird book Plans For Your Good, straight out evangelism, arguing the active role of God in our lives….
Well, that was the ScoMo I thought we knew, the devout man in a religion that many of us found rigid and literal-minded. He was the annoying guy who was always sneaking a chance to proselytize, as if this was a more important job than being prime minister. But one had, well I had, some respect for his faith. The sneering progressive understanding of this sort of Christianity as “the prosperity gospel” was a measure of progressivism’s inability to believe in anything transcendental.
Fair enough, I guess, though I would add that Mr Morrison was also a bully who bullied and gaslit the whole country on enough occasions that some of us had our own mental health issues, and I don’t say that lightly. I was playing news avoidance big time during the later part of his prime ministership, unable to face the ongoing barrage of his smarmy presence and basic incompetence telling me black was white and up was down and that he didn’t hold a hose.
It’s a little hard to forgive the bully who frames his repentance—as Morrison did the other day—as forgiving the haters. And while I am sure some hate was directed his way, the framing is self-serving and typical of those who are inclined to see all criticism as abuse.1 Maybe if he tried figuring out the true nature of the criticism he faced (the hate, if you prefer) and accepted some responsibility and offered some repentance, I’d be more inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt.
Having said that—as politely as I was able—I will admit that I misjudged the sincerity of his religious belief. I was one of those who saw it as cosplay, or at least, as a spirituality of convenience, and I now withdraw.
I’m still not seeing the “transcendence” that Rundle mentions, and my idea of Christianity remains rooted in the idea Christos Tsiolkas makes central to his novel Damascus, his fictionalised account of St Paul2, that Christ’s people were and are the poor and no-one but the poor. He gives the words to the character of Ananias:
‘What else did he preach to you that day?’
‘Many things. I will tell you in time. But the three most important were that the Lord’s kingdom belongs to the poor and cannot be entered by the rich, that we must be as passers-by and not seek influence in the world, and that the greatest commandment of our Lord is to love the stranger.’
Tsiolkas, Christos. Damascus (p. 127). Allen & Unwin. Kindle Edition.
So, I acknowledge that the opening pages of Morrison’s book, if nothing else, show someone genuinely emersed in his faith and what I accept as a real search for personal meaning. You don’t rattle off this much scripture without serious commitment, and even if I wished Mr Morrison would lean into Ananias’s definition of Christianity a little more than the Americanised version he prefers, I concede he is on a path.
If that sounds a bit condescending or begrudging, okay.
Anyway, if we are all going to keep reading the remaining 252 pages of Plans for Your Good: A Prime Minister’s Testimony of God’s Faithfulness, you need to be aware what you are committing to, and Mr Morrison spells it out:
Most politicians write books about what they’ve done. This book is my story of what I believe God has done for me through His faithfulness in all my life’s circumstances and how I came to truly understand God’s promise in Jeremiah 29:11. It’s also a book about what God can do in your life. His promise is not just for me, and it’s not just for good times. It’s for you and whatever you’re facing today too.
But there is another matter here that hits you over the head like, well, a Bible, from the moment that you start reading the Introduction written by Trump’s Vice President, Mike Pence, all the way to the end of the Preface. What I am about say might seem incredibly obvious but I think it is an observation worth making. See if you can make out what I mean from this collection of quotes:
President Truman is rumored to have said, “If you want a friend in Washington, get a dog.”
We live in Australia in a place called “the Shire.” There are no hobbits or tiny houses carved into the hillside, like in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. The Shire is a beautiful group of beachside suburbs in southern Sydney, with gum trees (eucalyptus) lining the streets. The Shire is the kind of place you never want to leave. It’s where our children, Abbey and Lily, were born; where we go to church as a family; where I support my local rugby league team, the Sharks; and where I walk Buddy along the beach. It was this community that first elected me to Australia’s national parliament in 2007. We love it here.
When he came to visit me at the prime minister’s residence in Canberra, called “The Lodge,” we would walk around the grounds together.
In Australia, and especially in the Shire, when we want to say how excited or happy we are about something or someone, we turn it into a rhetorical question. We might say, “How good are the Sharks?” after my local National Rugby League team has had a great win, or “How good is Jen?” or just “How good?” When we won the miracle election in 2019, I became famous for saying on that night, “How good is Australia?” Well, “How good is God?” sums up how I feel about His impact on my life. It is a question God answers positively for me every day.
That last quote makes it particularly obvious, I guess, but let me spell it out. Our Scotty is writing for an American audience. An evangelical audience too, but first and foremost, an American audience.
He has had an American VP write his Foreword; he quotes a US President in the book’s opening line; explains things no Australian needs explained to them, such as what the “Shire” is, or what the Lodge is, or the idiom of “How good is…”
He even uses American spelling throughout, as “rumored” tells us in that first quote.
Think about how odd this is, and how revealing. This may be the first political biography written specifically for a foreign audience and not for the people he represented when he was a member of parliament and a prime minister. Does this not strike anyone else as incredible?
Yes, you can lean on the cynical explanation that he is chasing the American dollar, using the book as a calling card for future engagements on the evangelical circuit in the Lower 48, and I’m sure that is true. But nonetheless, this is Australia’s former prime minister explaining, recording and justifying his years in power—including four years as head of government during an incredible moment in world history—and he is not speaking to the people he represented but to the citizens of another country.
After all these years, and all of his forgiveness of the haters, and all his supposed honesty about his mental health issues, Mr Morrison still lacks enough confidence in his relationship with the Australian people that he presumes that his message and his story will find traction with Americans in a way that it never will with Australians.
Has any politician ever admitted to such a complete disconnect from his fellow citizens? Such a failure to relate?
I can’t be the only person to be struck by this, can I?
See also: journalists and social media
One of the great Australian novels, just quietly.
Time after time, Morrison uses his religion as some kind of get out of jail free card. His thin-skinned narcissism and belligerent attitude towards anyone who would challenge his actions hardly smacks of the grace and humility of someone who would turn the other cheek. His smug references to religion are simply a total abrogation of any personal responsibility or genuine self-reflection.
With this book, so clearly pitched at the next audience for his opportunism having sensed that the last mob he tried to con and found him out, he simply makes plain his tone-deaf charlatanism. Always failing upwards, one town ahead of the posse, eye on the next opening for a quick buck, he’s on his way to a nation where the breathtaking hypocrisy of the pseudo-religious hustler is well-rewarded.
Morrison represents the very worst of Australia: the stubborn ignorance, the casual incompetence, the refusal to take genuine responsibility, the crass entitlement of the privileged, the cruelty and bigotry of the morally indignant.
That his choice of religious brand to run interference for his manifest personal moral failings should be the weirdo cult of prosperity Pentecostalism is no surprise. It’s about as far removed from the actual teaching of Jesus as you could possibly get. If his meanness of spirit, crass narcissism and crude incompetence hadn’t blighted so many Australian lives he’d merely be an oafish laughing stock. Instead, he handsomely earns his reputation as a massive piece of shit.
Forgive me if I remain unmoved by ScoMo's revelations of his struggles with anxiety. And I say that as someone who has, in the past, struggled with anxiety and clinical depression myself. For one thing, if I had as many schemes in play and had to keep track of as many lies as ScoMo did when he was in power, I'd have anxiety too. You are right to point out that he was the cause of much anxiety in many in the electorate. Also, ScoMo is a narcissist and just because he believes that he is God's friend doesn't make him less of a narcissist (more of one, if anything). Being a narcissist means that he could still be prone to anxiety (he has a wounded ego to protect, after all) but it means that he isn't prone to ethical behaviour. During his time in politics he gaslit (as you said), flat out lied, and looked after the interests of himself and his corporate sponsors ruthlessley. Why on earth should I care about such a relentlessly self-serving creature? Your observation that he may well be writing for an American public is an interesting one, and would fit in with his narcissistic behaviour. He has moved on to looking for a fresh audience and a new source of narcissistic supply, as well as lucrative speaking engagements. I'm not going near his biography; I don't want to reignite my own anxiety and rage now that the Australian electorate is rid of him.