Morrison: A Portrait of Scott Morrison by Sean Kelly

Author:Sean Kelly [Kelly, Sean]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781760643119
Google: XZNkzgEACAAJ
Publisher: Black Incorporated
Published: 2021-11-15T23:32:45.229989+00:00

Morrison was applying a marketing man’s expertise to what he said was largely a marketing operation. Some had enjoyed the irony of Morrison’s different careers: as a tourism guy, he had wanted boats to come; now he wanted them to stop. This joke missed the deeper truth, which was that Morrison saw both jobs through the same lens: each was a question of marketing. Now, Morrison was telling the assembled journalists that what the law actually did mattered less than what people smugglers would say it did.

This was similar to the logic that had allowed ScoMo the character to take the place of whoever was there before. If a fiction was put forward strongly enough, then it could take the place of fact. This was the central, unspoken aspect of Morrison’s political career, and so it was interesting that he was now saying the same thing quite openly: in the face of effective marketing, reality itself – the facts that Murphy was attempting to insist upon – fell away.

This became clearer still in what Morrison did next. Responding to his parliamentary defeat on the Medevac legislation, Morrison announced that the Christmas Island detention centre would be reopened – both to deal with the flood of arrivals the government was hysterically predicting, and so that sick asylum seekers could be treated within the new law but without being taken to the mainland. He would, he said, be engaging in some ‘very clear messaging that my government is in control of the borders’.

Morrison flew to Christmas Island to reopen the detention centre himself. He took members of the media with him. The reopening, with the reinstatement of staff and security, cost $180 million. Two months later, it was revealed that the government intended to close the centre in July, after the election. Many people used the Medevac legislation, which had been passed – under its authority, at least 150 people were transferred to the mainland for urgent care – but there was never any flood of boats. Even after the election, the government continued to try to scare people about the coming impact. It never came.

The reopening of Christmas Island had been another show staged by the prime minister. Reality was being slowly crowded out by the images that Morrison chose to present.

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