It’s just recently broken. During the pandemic, PM Morrison had the GovGen appoint him to the position of five different ministers, without telling the other holders of those offices that he was now a co-minister.
Calls for him to resign his seat in Parliament.
Where’s @penultima_thule and our other Oz dopers? What’s the buzz?
I’d be glad to see him go as he seemed to be spellbound by Trump and God however does a minister ever go against the will of the PM, exactly what difference did it make. There are about a hundred more important things the govt should be worried about.
This has been like 50% of the news here for the last few days; an inquiry by the Solicitor-General today found that while not strictly illegal, the fact it was not made public (most of the duplicated ministers didn’t know, the heads of their departments didn’t know, and of course the voting public didn’t) was inconsistent with the conventions of responsible government. No doubt there will be further inquiries in and out of parliament and this loophole will be closed soon.
The GG wasn’t technically required to publish these appointments either, but the fact he chose to announce giving a blue ribbon to a sheepdog on the same day as one of these appointments but NOT the appointment is not sitting well. I doubt he’ll see his term out (~2 more years).
Exactly that happened - he overruled one of his own ministers while in his role.
And what contribution did having 2 health ministers make to the serial stuff-ups in handling the early covid response?
I don’t know why people are making such a big fuss about it. He wasn’t doing the one job that we knew that he had. He could have easily not done any number of other jobs as well.
OK, I’ll ask the boneheaded question: did he get paid for the five secret roles (in addition to his regular salary)?
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If that had occurred that’s be a scandal that everybody could understand.
This one, not so much.
I’m a bit of a meh about this.
On the contra I’m largely with @don_t_ask. If you had to have a minister with multiple portfolios I would probably not give the gong to ScoMo. And yes, not informing the original minister of the job sharing was rather juvenile. Though it would just have sparked a spat over portfolio responsibility during the early stages of the pandemic which would have been an unseemly distraction.
But it’s not as if Prime Ministers aren’t above making policy decisions overriding those made by the responsible minister and their department. ScoMo didn’t need to be joint Industry Minister to overturn Keith Pitt’s approval of the Pep-11 gas project. Might have been a good call on numerous grounds. Might have even helped ScoMo in his electorate (Cook)
There are too many bums in the Cabinet seats and most have got that role for political expedience reasons rather than competency. States, and factions, and gender, and hairdos, and seniority, and political favours or revenge and whatever else comes into the consideration of the political balance needed. There are currently 23 Cabinet Ministers, 7 in the Outer Ministry. 15 of these have responsibilities for multiple portfolios. It seems that if you win re-election you get a ministry as part of the remuneration package.
Any private sector management consultancy employed to conduct a departmental reorganisation would push them into about a 1/3rd the number of piles.
The Nats are ropeable because ScoMo didn’t trust their nominations to Cabinet. ScoMo might have been right there too. The Nats are notionally the party representing regional Australia but they have evolved into the political lobby of the mining industry.
The first Whitlam Ministry (Dec '72) was:
Gough Whitlam:
… who made some truely momentous decisions in the couple of weeks they were Cabinet whilst the 36 faceless men of the ALP picked Whitlam’s 2nd ministry … and didn’t they pick some doosies, dropkicks and failures in exchange for length of service to the cause.
I’m curious how this was accomplished. He was the Prime Minister; hardly an anonymous figure. Didn’t anyone notice he was holding all of these positions?
And if it was all being kept secret, what was the point? What was the point of Morrison being the Minister of Finance, for example, if nobody in the government knew about it? He couldn’t give out any orders about financial matters unless he revealed he was in charge of the people he was giving orders to.
Was this nothing more than a money grab for Morrison to collect multiple salaries while not doing any of the work of the offices he was holding?
Our beloved former Prime Minister and his entirely self-initiated brain fart to serve his own political expedience at the expense of transparency in administration is now being ridiculed internationally. Let’s hope his name becomes a punch-line in the political jokes of history.
That was very explicitly an interim post-election ministry pending the [weird and vaguely surreal] Caucus processes of the Australian Labor Party. But, even then, you knew who had authority over which portfolio or for making decisions pursuant to the provisions of the Wombat Harvesting Act.
Morrison secretly duplicated the ministerial roles, presumably [because his explanation is completely inconsistent with reality and garbed in bullshit] to be able to quickly reverse or over-ride any decisions his ministers made that he thought were electorally damaging. Certainly it was the case in the only [known] occasion he used them.
I would expect that every company that got a decision from one of these tainted ministries will be getting shit-hot legal advice about whether they can appeal this as an administratively flawed decision and get a second go or compensation.
Morrison’s win at any cost [even at the expense of the credibility of the democratic process] fortunately failed, but his many acolytes still lurk.
I’ll stand corrected but there has been no claim, even an apocryphal one, that ScoMo was drawing multiple salaries. This about use/abuse of executive power, not about trousering some extra cash.
All true.
Was also the most coherent and effective Cabinet of the Whitlam years.
On the days it happened, so far as we know only he and the Governor General knew. He told his Health minister he’d done it, with apparently no push-back. The other 4 occasions (over a year) were not told, no. The government did not publish this in its official Gazette. And the GG did not publish it in his daily diary. Whether the GG advised against it but was ignored, or suggested it at least be published and was ignored, or just let it through without comment, we do not yet know.
Presumably the head of the Dept of Prime Minister and Cabinet knew, but we don’t yet know who else in the public service did - not even the heads of the departments he was now co-responsible for knew!
He also said explicitly that leaving some of his ministers with sole responsibility was a nation security risk. His own freakin’ ministers who he’d selected! If he really thought that he should have fired them of course.
Yeah, the cover-up/lack of transparency stinks more than the actuality though YMMV.
Albo might want to appoint a new GG, unless he sees advantage in these arrangements.
Yeah, but then he’d have to replace them from the residuals at the frothy end of the political gene pool. Ergo my position that there are too many of them.
If he’d discussed with (Minister for Health) Greg Hunt and agreed that there was a necessity in the early days of the pandemic for clear and preferably singular voice with the highly fluid state of decision making, I’ll let that one go through to the keeper.
That a year later he thought he’d like to double down on his own breach of convention and assume veto rights over the Industry portfolio, then I’m not in that way of thinking. Moreover why do it that way? If ScoMo thought he needed to intervene, the usual way is for the PM to exercise that prerogative as the PM.
I guess authoritarians need to authoritate.
“Ex-PM Morrison”… So we’re just going to take his word for it that he’s left office?
You’re a more tolerant person than I then. There was simply no excuse for even that one … there was already a junior Health Minister who could have stepped up, OR if Hunt had got covid (the ostensible rationale) he could have appointed someone else within a day, as is normal if any minister is out of action for any reason.
So…no one can say if he was drawing salaries for each of these secret positions he’d assumed? How is that even possible? Surely there’s a gatekeeper of government salaries being paid, how much, to whom, etc.
How is it possible this fact is still unknown?
This is a matter which has piqued quite a bit of interest here, yet the question of drawing multiple salaries has not been raised in the media. Which gives one pause to consider how outlandish they must consider the proposition to be. Malcom Farr one of the press gallery doyens rightly sinks the boot in on any number of issues but no hint of double/triple/quadruple/quintuple dipping.
Baring news to the contrary, rather than (predictable and humorous) internet memes Ministers with multiple portfolios draw one salary.
Following the Solicitor Generals report that the appointment to five additional portfolios was legally valid, Prime Minister Albanese (Albo) is running with this hard. As he should.
So what are Albo’s sound bites?
If Albo had ScoMo bang to rights and in the cross-hairs with a rolled gold easy to sell political scandal over corruption/embezzlement you think he’d be asking ScoMo to simply apologise?
What has occurred is that Scomo’s salary as Prime Minister of $549,250 (USD 378,000) has dropped to the standard salary for a opposition backbencher of $211,250 (USD 145,000). Apparently there is a line of thought that as an avid Pentecostal at Horizon Church he’ll resign and join the Christian speaker circuit in the US. A problem shared is a problem halved, no?
[bugger me, I’ve wasted 25 minutes of my life defending ScoMo … the world is sure a weird place.]
I’m still unclear on how this would work. How can you be Minister of Industry if nobody knows it?
Let’s say Joe Biden decides to appoint me the co-Secretary of State, alongside Antony Blinken. But Biden and I don’t tell anyone, including Blinken and the rest of the State Department.
So what happens when I send an order out telling my subordinates to form a new policy regarding Taiwan? My order will be ignored because none of them know that I’m their boss. They all think they just work for Blinken.
If Biden decided to appoint himself as co-Secretary of State, it would have a somewhat different effect. If Biden sent out an order to the State Department, it wouldn’t be ignored. But they’d be paying attention to his order because he’s the President, not because he’s the secret Secretary of State.
The same situation applied to Morrison. What advantage did he gain by secretly being the Minister of Industry beyond what he already had by being the Prime Minister?
Sometimes a statute assigns power to a specific minister. By being appointed minister, Morrison could exercise that statutory power directly, rather than indirectly by raising the issue with the relevant minister.
Why he would think he needed to do that is a bit of a mystery.
But how could he exercise those powers if nobody knew he was the Minister?