Another way of putting that is to say that he wanted the power as a minister so that he alone could act unilaterally. Morrison had explained that he needed the extra powers because some ministers could take unilateral decisions without consulting Cabinet, so he said he needed the power to intervene in such a case.
But the prime minister alone has no legal power to instruct a minister how to exercise powers conferred by statute on that minister.’ ‘The Cabinet could reach a collective decision about a policy issue, including how a minister’s power should be exercised in relation to it, and the minister would be bound by collective ministerial responsibility to act consistently with that decision. On the prime minister’s power to act unilaterally, she said: Writing in The Conversation, Professor Twomey was perplexed about how reports about Morrison swearing himself in could be true when her understanding was that a minister could only be sworn in by the Governor-General. The news of former PM Scott Morrison's deception has shown us how fragile our democracy can be. Scott Morrison - the man behind the swindle “We were and still face a pandemic that threatens a great loss of life, but we have a system of government that frankly did not require the concentration of power of this kind for the Prime Minister.”
The University of NSW convened an expert panel to discuss the matter, at which Professor Williams acknowledged: Prime Minister Anthony Albanese instructed the Solicitor-General to report to him on the matter by early next week and constitutional law professors Anne Twomey and George Williams, along with other academic lawyers, expressed bewilderment over the matter without claiming what he did was necessarily in violation of the law. One post observed his behaviour was not so much about ‘jobs for the boys’, but ‘jobs for the boy’. Twitter was alight about what had been revealed, many suggesting we had missed a bullet on 21 May, a curious observation when Morrison had been firing bullets as Prime Minister for nearly four years. She no doubt recalled the predicament with which she was faced when Morrison insisted on her making public the information that an asylum boat had obligingly arrived in Australian waters on the day of the Election. Former Home Affairs Minister Karen Andrews was white hot with anger over the revelation that Morrison had been secretly sworn in to her portfolio and called for him to leave the Parliament. Others in Morrison’s Liberal-National Party and in wider legal and political circles saw the appointments as “bizarre” and “weird”, and a number were happy to go on the record expressing those views. So, Scotty the Dictator secretly took over all the portfolios of the key ministers around him. They had known about the secret appointments for long enough to include them in a book that hadn’t been written last week or last month, but saw them as sufficiently unremarkable to keep mum about them until they launched their book.ĭictator Morrison and the ‘you made me do it’ defence His usual allies in the Murdoch and mainstream media appeared a little puzzled, but seemed content to accept the revelations in the same routine way that The Australian writers, Simon Benson and Geoff Chambers, had done in their book, Plagued. He didn’t explain why he had been secretive about being sworn into the positions but he adopted his customary innocent victim pose and insisted his motives were as pure as the driven snow and he shouldn’t be called upon to account for himself to a bunch of hindsight heroes in what had become a feral press pack.
Former PM Scott Morrison's incompetence mirrored that of his political idol, Donald Trump, writes Paul Begley.ĪUSTRALIAN BACKBENCH politician and former Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, fronted a press conference on Wednesday to insist that there were no substantive issues with his assumption of multiple ministerial portfolios during 20 because, with one exception, he didn’t actually exercise the powers vested in him by the appointments.