Why Scott Morrison's King's Birthday honour boils my blood

These are the reasons why the Governor-General of Australia bestowed upon former PM, Scott Morrison, highest honour in the land - the Companion of the Order of Australia on the King's Birthday weekend.

I don't know about you, but when I heard this, I had to go to the official website to confirm because frankly, I just couldn't believe it.

Neither could my 16-year-old son. When I mentioned the award at dinner, his first response was "isn't he the idiot who crapped his pants outside McDonald's that time?"

Not, "oh wasn't he the PM before Albo?" or even "was he the one you were writing so much about during COVID?" This is what the kids these days remember him for.

Says it all, really.

During the pandemic, he deceived the nation by secretly appointing himself to five - FIVE - ministries. The secrecy of these acts undermined democratic accountability and violated principles of responsible government.

The Ministers of State Amendment Act 2023 was passed to prevent this from happening again. Does this smack of "eminent service to the people and Parliament"?

On the topic of COVID, let's acknowledge his total failure to secure sufficient vaccine supplies early on which led to delays in distribution.

Then, when he finally started to get his act together, his over-reliance on AstraZeneca despite the concerns about rare blood clot risks, led to hesitancy and confusion about the safety of vaccines.

Unlike the other world leaders who personally lobbied Pfizer executives to secure Pfizer, Morrison chose not to and as such, our early access to the Pfizer doses was limited.

Hardly a worthy contribution to global leadership.

Then there was the public education campaign around the vaccine that failed to effectively communicate its benefits, and his "it's not a race" messaging, which added fuel to the confusion fire, resulting in misinformation and anti-vaccine sentiment.

As a result of all this, we were literally left lagging behind other OECD nation's in our COVID response.

While he did instigate JobKeeper, I found it incredible how JobKeeper overpayments to corporations went unchecked, giving them a choice to pay back the additional funds, but overpayments for JobSeeker?

Phew - send out the debt notices!

Talking of debt notices, the scandalous, harmful robodebt scheme was launched under his leadership when he was the social services minister, and he was the PM at the time of its very timely conclusion. He never took responsibility for it. Instead, he complained that he was a victim of "political lynching".

In my opinion, this program represents the most shameful episode of Australia's political history. I was ashamed of my government then. I remain so.

You know, maybe what won the award for him was the way he kindly and compassionately considered the very real needs of our most vulnerable Australians (note the sarcasm). His "you have to have a go to get a go" response to people struggling below the poverty line on Centrelink, demanding they pull themselves up by their bootstraps - despite them not having the money for said bootstraps - could conceivably be understood by the overprivileged elites as "good leadership".

In reality, it's an entirely different story.

Personally, it was when he divided the nation into "the taxed" and the "taxed nots" that had my blood truly boiling; like our worth as a person is counted only in what the government gets out of us.

And even then, like we don't all pay tax and excise on petrol, registration and GST. Now there's an example of eminent service to the people.

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Perhaps the award should have read "for eminent service to the wealthy people."

Don't even get me started on the Brittany Higgins case and his failure to even recognise the gravity of the situation until his wife talked to him about it.

This is the man who Council for the Order of Australia appointed the highest honour in the land. In my opinion, it's the one case where tradition should have been set aside.