Extract from ABC News
Analysis
There's a school of thought that suggests Scott Morrison had no need for a cabinet room, let alone ministers to sit at the table alongside him.
A man with autocratic tendencies, his Messiah instincts were fuelled when he single-handedly defied the odds and won the unwinnable election in 2019.
It set the tone for a government driven for three years by central command with a tight inner circle. In the 2022 election he gave those tendencies a name — the bulldozer.
A former cabinet minister once joked that the backbench was only told about decisions that had been taken when ministers were ready for it to be leaked to the media.
But as today's revelations have shown, there were deep-seated secrets that even those in-the-know cabinet ministers didn't know.
That Morrison had himself sworn into the health and finance portfolios in the dark days of a deadly pandemic was one thing. Having himself sworn in as a resources minister more than a year later is in a league of its own.
Nationals leader David Littleproud, a former cabinet minister and his party's deputy leader during the Morrison era, couldn't hide his disdain as he poured a bucket on the former PM.
"That's pretty ordinary," he said on Monday morning.
Littleproud said it was a matter for Morrison to explain his actions, insisting he and former deputy prime minister Barnaby Joyce were not told Morrison had been secretly sworn into the Nationals' resources portfolio.
Back in the early days of the pandemic in 2020, Australians faced an uncertain future. The nation's leaders had few answers as a deadly virus crept through the community, quietly infecting, incapacitating and killing thousands.
Sources have told the ABC that then-health minister Greg Hunt agreed to Morrison joining him as health minister as a safeguard in case he was incapacitated by COVID-19.
As health minister, Morrison would be able to take decisions under the immense power afforded to that position in the Biosecurity Act — powers a prime minister can't otherwise access.
Mathias Cormann, the finance minister, wasn't afforded the same respect.
He had no idea Morrison had the Governor-General swear him in as finance minister too, taking on joint responsibility with Cormann.
There are plenty of lessons Australia has learned from the pandemic.
Morrison too looks to have learned a thing or two — and not just about tackling a virus.
A little over a year after he secretly became the health minister, he added to his portfolios, getting the Governor-General to swear him in as joint resources minister in April 2021.
This additional power would allow Morrison to overrule National Keith Pitt and block a petroleum exploration licence off the NSW Central Coast in early 2022.
The ABC has confirmed Pitt was told sometime in 2021 in a meeting with Morrison, then-deputy PM Michael McCormack and senior members of their offices.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has ordered urgent legal advice and briefings from his department, describing Morrison's actions as "extraordinary and unprecedented".
"This is the sort of tin-pot activity that we would ridicule if it was in a non-democratic country," he said.
Pitt on Monday told the ABC he found it "unusual" but ultimately accepted the decision.
Constitutional law expert professor Anne Twomey, from the University of Sydney, went further, calling the secret swearing-ins "bizarre" and "utterly inappropriate".
"What an earth was going on, I don't know, but the secrecy involved in this is just simply bizarre," she told the ABC.
"I mean, you know, you just wonder what is wrong with these people that they have to do everything in secret and they can't 'fess up to what they're doing.
"Because if they had done it and made it public, [it] probably would have been seen [as] pretty reasonable. But hiding it? That's the weird thing."
Littleproud agreed.
"As far as I'm concerned, if you have a cabinet government, you trust your cabinet," he said.
"You create an environment in the cabinet room to have those discussions."
It turns out Morrison didn't need a cabinet room to have those discussions with his ministers.
He just needed a mirror.
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