I’ve sometimes observed in the past that the Canadian press does not follow political affairs in Canada’s sister Dominions as closely as we ought. But I don’t think I have ever felt this as strongly as I do now — thanks to this month’s controversy in Australia over incredible constitutional shenanigans perpetrated by Scott Morrison, the country’s Liberal prime minister from 2018 until May of this year. A couple of weeks ago, it was revealed that PM Morrison had, on a series of occasions between March 2020 and May 2021, asked the governor general to appoint him co-minister for several portfolios, including health, finance, and resources.
What’s extraordinary about this is that the appointments were carried out in secret and never gazetted; even the person who was pretty sure he was Australia’s (only) finance minister throughout the period, Mathias Cormann, was never told. Morrison says he had a need to centralize power during the COVID-19 pandemic, but he did use his position as secret co-minister of resources to thwart a controversial offshore oil project that the department was going to wave through.
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