Malcolm Turnbull’s New Memoir Paints Scott Morrison As A “Control Freak” (And A Whole Lot More)
The messy bitch returns.
With Malcolm Turnbull’s memoir A Bigger Picture arriving next Monday, media previews have emerged pulling out some of its most revelatory or incendiary moments — including sections which paint Liberal party leader and Prime Minister successor Scott Morrison as a “control freak” who is “brittle emotionally and easily offended”.
In the life-spanning memoir, Turnbull describes Morrison as a smart player during the Liberal party’s 2015 and 2018 leadership spills. As per Guardian political editor Katharine Murphy’s summary, Turnbull says Morrison was excellent at “playing a double game”.
Turnbull says that in 2018, Morrison repeatedly gave the then-PM his support, but was clearly working behind the scenes to get party-mates to support Peter Dutton (who lost the vote, but saw Turnbull step down and Morrison win a second spill between him and Dutton).
“It was, of course, precisely what he’d done in 2015 when he said he’d voted for Abbott in the leadership ballot but worked closely with me to ensure his supporters voted against Abbott,” he writes.
“The idea that they did that without his knowledge is fanciful. Scott is a control freak and I’d seen before in the ballots in 2015 how he’d publicly vote one way while ensuring his supporters voted the other way.”
He later describes Morrison as “brittle emotionally and easily offended” but a savvy marketer, and that, as per The Australian‘s preview, that Morrison’s “cringe-worthy dag dad” persona is exaggerated — likely to the benefit of the 2019 election.
Turnbull also criticised Morrison’s policy-creation, saying it was “reverse-engineered” via intentional leaks or by ‘floating ideas’ to the tabloids to gauge public reaction.
“The biggest problem with Scott’s preferred approach of reverse-engineering economic policy via the front pages of the tabloids was that once an idea was in the public domain, no matter how good or bad it was, you couldn’t put the genie back in the bottle,” he writes, as extracted by the Sydney Morning Herald.
According to Turnbull, this became an issue when Morrison was Treasurer from 2015 to 2018. Long-standing Finance Minister Mathias Cormann reportedly lost trust with Morrison, wanting to cut him out from policy meetings to avoid leakings.
Turnbull also casually says that the Coalition did not “deserve” to win the 2019 election due to the August spill. Turnbull, famously, is a messy bitch, and once called Morrison the ‘Steven Bradbury of Australian politics’.
A Bigger Picture will be released Monday 20 April.