It’s been a horror couple of weeks for the Morrison government.
Firstly, there’s the crisis of the Omicron wave. A health and aged care system on the brink, the distinct lack of rapid antigen tests available to Australians, and a disrupted food supply chain that’s left supermarket shelves bare for weeks.
Then, there’s been damaging leaked text messages, and rumours swirling about which Liberal minister could have called the prime minister a “complete psycho” in a text conversation with former NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian during the bushfire crisis of 2019-2020.
Then, on Friday night, it was revealed the Nationals leader and Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce had sent Brittany Higgins, through a third party, a text message that labelled Morrison a “hypocrite and a liar”.
“I have never trusted him, and I dislike how earnestly [he] rearranges the truth to a lie,” the text message from Joyce reads.
Now, former NSW premier Bob Carr has alleged it is Defence Minister Peter Dutton who is the mystery Liberal minister at the centre of the leaked text messages involving Berejiklian.
According to the text exchange, exposed by journalist Peter van Onselen at the National Press Club last week, Berejiklian labelled Morrison a “horrible, horrible person”. Dutton has vehemently refuted the allegations he is the minister who called Morrison a “complete psycho”, responding that Bob Carr’s claim, made via Twitter, was “baseless” and “untrue”.
Nevertheless, with just months until a federal election and so many blunders under his belt, questions about how secure Morrison’s leadership is, have begun. A leadership spill remains very unlikely. Then again, anything can happen in politics. Many see Peter Dutton, an experienced and powerful minister as the only likely successor, should anything eventuate.
So while we wait to see what unfolds in the coming days, here’s a refresher on the track record of the two men the Coalition see as the best candidates for running the country (particularly in light of their dismal records on women and gender equality).
Dutton
Back in 2016, Peter Dutton was forced to apologise for labelling journalist and then political editor of the Sunday Telegraph, Samantha Maiden, a “mad fucking witch” in a text message he mistakenly sent to Maiden herself.
Then in 2019, he said the asylum seeker women on Nauru were rorting the “medevac” laws by making false claims of rape.
“Some people are trying it on, let’s be serious about this,” Dutton told Sky News at the time. “There are people that have claimed that they’ve been raped and came to Australia to seek an abortion because they couldn’t get an abortion on Nauru.”
“They arrived in Australia, and then decided that they were not going to have an abortion. They have the baby here, the moment they step off the plane their lawyers lodge papers in the federal court which injuncts us from sending them back.”
“In some of those cases, I think you could question whether or not people needed medical attention. That’s the reality,” he said.
And then last year, Dutton described the alleged rape of Brittany Higgins inside parliament house as a “he said, she said” affair. He said this right before revealing he had tipped off the Prime Minister’s office about the incident at Parliament House on February 12, but the information had somehow not been relayed to Morrison by his staff.
Morrison
Morrison, who has allegedly been branded a “horrible, horrible person” by Berejiklian and a “complete psycho” by one of his own ministers, as well as a “hypocrite and a liar” by Barnaby Joyce, has had a shocking couple of weeks for a leader looking for an election victory in a few months’ time.
After Grace Tame refused to smile at a photo opp with the Prime Minister, he went on to say that Tame, a survivor of child sexual abuse, had had a “terrible life ordeal”.
Last year, Morrison made the admission that the only way he had been able to understand what Brittany Higgins had been through after she alleged she had been raped inside parliament house, was when his wife, Jenny, had told him to frame it in the context of him being a father of daughters.
Then, let’s not forget that in March 2021, he told parliament that women who attended the March 4 Justice rally in Canberra in the wake of Higgins’ allegations, were lucky not to be met by bullets, like protestors are in other parts of the world.
Morrison now goes into a sitting parliamentary fortnight with damaging questions about his character at the forefront of the public’s minds.
And whichever way you look at it, the bar for leadership in Australian politics has just hit a new low.