Writing a book about Scott Morrison: ‘the fact he seemed boring wasn’t an obstacle’
In 2018, I was approached about writing a profile of Scott Morrison, the new prime minister. I read everything I could and talked to as many people as would talk to me. Then I began to cut and paste snippets into folders on my computer: “Immigration”, “Religion”, “Ambition”, “Mr Average”.
I stared at these facts for a long time. Politicians are very often catalogued by their beliefs. This makes sense: it is arguably the most important thing about them. In Morrison’s case, it was hard to know what to say. He had, over a period of decades, said little definitive; on the occasions he had made clear statements, he had undermined them elsewhere. His language tended to the general, so that it was hard to take away anything clear.
Finally, I had one of those moments that every writer hopes for, when you realise that what you thought had been blocking your way is, in fact, the thing you have been looking for all along. This apparent lack of definition was the defining characteristic of Morrison’s public life. The profile was published with the title Leave No Trace.
I thought that was it for me and Morrison – and when a publisher asked me about writing a biography, I wasn’t keen. The man wasn’t that interesting, and I wasn’t convinced I could sustain an entire book about him.
But then I had a similar revelation. The fact he seemed boring wasn’t an obstacle: it was the opening. Here was a man who was on display all the time, yet we knew so little about him – and nobody seemed to want to know more. And he had become prime minister! How had he pulled off this trick?
Of course, no one can avoid leaving traces altogether. In order to write this book, I looked very closely at everything Morrison had said and done over decades in public life. Because he hadn’t done very much, this meant examining in detail what he’d said: the gaps, the contradictions, the startling swerves, the patterns.
This close examination is precisely what Morrison does not want.
The book that resulted is not a straight biography. My approach, at times, veered closer to literary criticism than political journalism. If that sounds odd, it’s worth remembering that, for most of us, politicians are not that different from characters out of books. What do we know about them other than what we are told by the people who craft the news bulletins that we watch and listen to, and who write the articles that we read?
While I doubt Morrison would put it in those terms, this is something he understands better than any politician in the country. When there was first a hint that he might become prime minister, in 2015, he set about creating a very simple character: Sco-Mo, who cooks curries once a week and likes footy. To put this another way: he knew that the journalists who wrote the story of his life would need material, and he set about providing it. He gave them other elements, too: he was pragmatic and – this seems almost implausible by now – “authentic”. That was, more or less, enough to win him an election.
This brought another implication with it. If each politician is like a character from a book, then journalists are, in effect, the collective authors of that book. Any examination of the character that Morrison had created would have to look closely at the journalistic habits that made his success possible. The notion of objectivity is important, but often is used as an excuse for uncritically repeating what politicians say. Too many in the media too readily treat politics as a game, with political cleverness admired more than substance.
Along the way, I considered writing a different type of book. Every author does this. Every book that is written, like every life that is lived, has ghosts hovering behind it, of the things it might have been but, finally, was not.
For a long time, I thought the aim of the book would be to discover the “real” man behind the performance. With time, I decided that this was, in a sense, searching for some sort of alibi for Morrison, as though what he had done in public did not matter. Hadn’t Morrison been visible to us for some time, provided you were willing to pay attention?
What, at this stage, might dramatically shift our sense of him as a prime minister? That he was kind in private? Or, alternatively, what might we learn from discovering, say, that he had some secret religious belief that the climate crisis didn’t matter? What would that change?
Establishing facts is important. But, as Eve Sedgwick argued decades ago, there are times when a hunt for the hidden story can distract us from seeing what is in front of us.
While I did not ultimately write that other book, considering such questions gave me the final element of this one. If many of us have not been willing to look closely at Morrison, why is that? This tells us something about Morrison, but doesn’t it tell us something about ourselves as well? He fought his way to the top of some of Australia’s most powerful institutions. Then he convinced many Australians to vote for him. Why were many of us willing to accept the stories he told us and the image he presented?
Looking closely at the ways in which Scott Morrison has succeeded – and the ways in which he has failed – can tell us a lot about politics, and journalism, and Australians. Whether most of us want to know those things is questionable. So much of Morrison’s career – the character he has created, his practised avoidance of scrutiny – has been built on the knowledge that, most of the time, we don’t.
The Game – A Portrait of Scott Morrison, by Sean Kelly (Black Inc. Books), is out now