Angus Taylor should stand aside as minister because it’s the right thing to do

Extract from The Guardian

Angus Taylor

Innocent or guilty, Taylor should have temporarily stepped down as soon as he was facing a police inquiry – or Scott Morrison should have asked him to

Katharine Murphy Political editor

@murpharoo

Tue 26 Nov 2019 20.35 AEDT Last modified on Tue 26 Nov 2019 23.11 AEDT

Angus Taylor and Scott Morrison during question time in parliament on Tuesday. Katharine Murphy writes that Taylor vacating his ministerial post temporarily because of the police investigation into an altered Sydney city council document should have happened without fuss. Photograph: Lukas Coch/AAP

It is entirely possible the New South Wales police will investigate Angus Taylor and the origins of an altered city council document – and find there is nothing to see here. Taylor is entitled, as everybody is, to a presumption of innocence.
But what should have happened on Tuesday is entirely clear.
Taylor, whether innocent or guilty, should have stepped aside from his portfolio, temporarily, as soon as it was confirmed he was facing a police inquiry.
If Taylor was reluctant to take a restorative spell on the backbench because he feels misunderstood and set upon unfairly by a hostile universe, then Scott Morrison should have asserted some authority and asked him to step back for the good of the government, because lost in the wash of “Angus said” and “Clover said” are the serious questions to answer about this dodgy document, and the fact is none of these questions have been answered satisfactorily to date.

Taylor vacating his post temporarily should have happened without fuss, just because it’s the right thing to do.
Old fashioned, I know, to invoke the basics of right and wrong when this is politics and it’s all meant to be busted. But I still believe in right and wrong, and I reckon politicians would boost their standing with a sceptical voting public (and they’ll be watching this) if they believed in it too.
But even if we are inclined to view right and wrong as superfluous, and irrelevant, if we view Tuesday’s events just through the lens of intra-day political management, Morrison’s decision to stand by his man doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.
In standing behind Taylor, Morrison has given Labor a hunting license to keep pursuing the embattled minister every day of the final parliamentary sitting fortnight for 2019, and Labor seems entirely disposed to doing just that.
As the means to the end of standing by his man, Morrison also took matters into his own hands shortly after question time, speaking to the NSW police commissioner himself to inquire (as he later told parliament) “about the investigation and the nature and substance of their inquiries”.
So in his haste to stand by Taylor in time for the television news, or whatever arbitrary timetable he felt he was up against, or to vanquish Labor and their annoying persistence in this matter (see, fellas, you are not getting this bloody scalp, so there), Morrison spoke to the cops, the people currently pursuing inquiries into one of his ministers.
That feels like overreach.

There was even a preamble to this conversation. Before he spoke to the commissioner, Morrison told parliament that while everyone would be cooperating, this was all a storm in a teacup that would likely come to naught. He noted that Labor referred things to the police all the time and “they’ve all ended up going absolutely nowhere at the end of the day”.
Going nowhere.
Over.
Morrison likes to crack on. It’s his natural inclination. When he took the leadership from Malcolm Turnbull in frenzied and wild circumstances he doesn’t like to talk about, he borrowed a quote from an American general, Norman Schwarzkopf: “When placed in command, take charge.”
So it’s not news that Morrison likes to present himself as a doer and a problem solver, relentless at the front of the queue, doing all the things.

But in this instance, discretion, or at least a degree of separation between himself and an investigative process in which he has an interest, might have been the better part of valour.