Scomo Dundee:
Long before he faced the wrath of the Australian public over his inept handling of this summer’s bushfire crisis, Scott Morrison was stoking a political firestorm in New Zealand. Bevan Hurley reports.
Scott Morrison was barely 30 when he was headhunted by then tourism minister Murray McCully to head a brand new government department, the Office of Tourism and Sport.
Within weeks of his arrival in Wellington in 1998, the future Australian prime minister had plunged headfirst into a messy political saga – dubbed by media at the time as ‘‘the Tourism Wars’’.
‘‘Like a cross between
Rasputin and Crocodile Dundee,’’ was how former Dominion Post political editor Nick Venter described Morrison after the extent of his involvement in the scandal was revealed.
‘‘Here he is, whispering into the minister’s ear about the board,’’ wrote Venter. ‘‘There he is, crashing through the undergrowth without regard for reputation or bureaucratic convention.’’
Scomo’s fingerprints were all over the ousting of the chairman, deputy chair and chief executive of the New Zealand Tourism Board. The three men received nearly $1 million in secret payouts.
A damning auditor-general’s report later found Morrison had enthusiastically overstepped his remit by recommending their dismissals.
The fallout would eventually force McCully to resign, and a series of embarrassing missteps by prime minister Jenny
Shipley’s handling of a connected scandal arguably contributed to her Government’s election loss to Labour in 1999.
According to interviews with tourism and political figures who dealt with him, Morrison had a jarring Aussie swagger that didn’t sit well with the beige brigade of the late 1990s Wellington civil service.
Morrison would return to Australia a year before his contract was up, with the insults of a future Speaker of the House ringing in his ears.
100% PURE FARCE
In 1998, a nascent tourism industry in New Zealand had yet to hit its groove.
With Auckland due to host the America’s Cup and Apec in the coming years, McCully dreamed of transforming his home town into a major eventfriendly mecca.
He looked longingly across the ditch at how Melbourne had woven sport and tourism into the fabric of the city, and decided to form the new Office of Tourism and Sport to work alongside the New Zealand Tourism Board (NZTB).
First order of business was to find a chief executive. Enter Scott Morrison.
Looking young for his 30 years, Morrison had already held senior roles at the Australian Tourism Task Force and Tourism Council.
By the time the solidly-built, former front-row forward arrived in 1998, McCully was already agitating for change at the top of the NZTB.
McCully had, according to a media report at the time, demanded reviews of costs, overheads, executive marketing skills, and board leadership.
Within weeks of his arrival, Morrison was quietly advising the minister of ‘‘serious misgivings’’ about the board. After four months in the job, he had commissioned what would be a highly critical report from PricewaterhouseCoopers to review the board’s structure and costs.
‘‘I intend that this review be undertaken quietly and discreetly,’’ Morrison wrote in an email to then chief executive Peter Winter.
When the report was delivered weeks later, Morrison believed there was sufficient fault to get rid of NZTB chairman Bryan Mogridge and deputy chair Michael Wall.
Mogridge, Wall and Winter were soon gone, at a cost to the taxpayer of more than $900,000.
Adding to the toxicity was confusion around the role of the new tourism body that Morrison was heading.
An auditor-general’s report, titled the Inquiry Into Certain Events Concerning The New Zealand Tourism Board, would later find that from the beginning of Morrison’s tenure, there was no clear direction of
resigned, Shipley appeared at a glitzy bash in London to launch a new tourism campaign to promote this country.
The ‘New Zealand On The Edge’ marketing campaign had been born out of a parallel political saga.
Shipley had close ties to
Kevin Roberts, the Kiwi who headed Saatchi & Saatchi’s worldwide operations. The communications and advertising agency had been awarded a $30 million contract to market New Zealand to the world.
At the same time, McCully was taking a blowtorch to board expenses, and board members were complaining that Saatchi & Saatchi had made little progress on its campaign.
Shipley faced questioning in Parliament over her relationship with Roberts, and in particular, a dinner they had together in August 1998. She at first denied the meal had taken place, then said it did happen but tourism was not discussed, and finally admitted tourism was discussed but not Saatchi’s contract.
Then a letter from Roberts to the tourism board surfaced, dated shortly after the August dinner, in which he confirmed the contract was discussed. He later retracted those comments and Shipley made a personal statement on the steps of Parliament, denying she had misled the House.
Barely a year out from a general election, it was a public-relations disaster for the Government.
‘New Zealand On The Edge’ may have aptly summed up the civil war engulfing the tourism industry but, as a global marketing campaign, it didn’t stick.
In March 1999, with new leadership in place, Saatchi & Saatchi was fired by the tourism board. It found the final proposals would cost too much and would not necessarily bring more tourists to New Zealand. ‘NZ On The Edge’ was ditched.
Boult recalls briefly stepping in as acting chief executive and acting chairman of the board.
One day he received a call from the boss of their new ad agency M&C Saatchi, who simply said to him: ‘‘When the dust settled, I’ve got a good idea for you.’’ That idea was ‘100% Pure New Zealand’.
Legend has it that the slogan was conceived by three admen on a flight from Australia to
New Zealand. But McSweeney recalls that Scott Morrison also tried to take the credit.
In March 2000, with a new Labour Government in power, Morrison resigned with a year to go on his contract, and returned to Australia.
In a parting shot, then shadow sports minister and now House Speaker Trevor Mallard laid the blame for problems at the Office of Tourism and Sport squarely with Morrison.
‘‘Australian standards of public sector behaviour ‘are lower than ours’,’’ Mallard told the NZ Herald at the time. ‘‘My experience with Australian politicians is that rules and ethics are not as important to them as they are to New Zealanders.’’
When asked this week if the comments were a fair reflection of his opinion at the time, Mallard said: ‘‘I’m not making any comment.’’
That year, the Office of Tourism and Sport was quietly folded into the brand new Ministry of Economic Development, and eventually became part of Sparc.
Morrison went on to lead Tourism Australia, where he again was credited for coming up with a catchy tourism slogan. ‘‘So where the bloody hell are ya?’’ implored tourists in 2006 to visit the Lucky Country.
Morrison became a Federal MP in 2007, a Cabinet minister in 2013, and prime minister in 2018.
Then in December 2019, Australia experienced its worst bushfire season in decades. As scores of wildfires burned out of control, and hopelessly underequipped volunteer firefighters battled bravely over Christmas, Morrison departed the crisis-hit country for a Hawaiian holiday.
The ‘‘where the bloody hell are ya’’ slogan was deployed by his critics to devastating effect.