Opinion
Accused PM faces the judgment of voter impressions
Waleed Aly
Columnist, co-host of Ten's The Project and academicPolitics is a game of impressions, not evidence. That’s especially so on questions of character and skullduggery such as those arrowing the Prime Minister’s way about his treatment of Michael Towke in a 2007 preselection contest.
Voters are not judges, soberly sifting through sworn statements and dispassionately assessing the credibility of each witness. Often, as in the Towke case, they are presented with little more than blunt allegations and equally blunt denials. The public has no forensic way of adjudicating on it, even if it had the interest to do so. An impressionistic judgment is really all that’s left.
Michael Towke (inset) accused Scott Morrison of “racial vilification” in a Liberal Party ballot more than a decade ago.Credit:Jon Reid, Rhett Wyman
In the Towke case, that presents difficulties for Morrison. The central charge is icky: that he was involved in a racially charged smear campaign against Towke, telling Liberal preselectors they should reject him as a candidate because he’s Lebanese, and (wrongly) rumoured to be a Muslim. But that’s not Morrison’s real problem. His real problem is that the charge now sounds familiar. It immediately recalls those media reports, refreshed this week, of Morrison suggesting to the Liberal Party room in 2011 that it should exploit anti-Muslim sentiment to question multiculturalism, and the “inability” of Muslims to integrate.
In both these cases, Morrison’s denials could hardly be more vehement. For him, they are “repugnant lies” or “malicious slurs” by disgruntled colleagues grinding their own political axes.
The apparently baseless smear campaign against Towke is not in doubt. It was plastered all over Sydney’s Daily Telegraph (and to a lesser extent The Sydney Morning Herald) and resulted in a substantial defamation settlement. What is contested is the extent (if any) and nature of Morrison’s involvement in it. What seems undeniable is that at least some senior Liberal figures were quite prepared to treat Towke with egregious brutality.
And again, that presents difficulties for the Liberals. The Towke allegations immediately reminded me of the Ed Husic saga in the 2004 federal election. Husic was then Labor’s candidate in the western Sydney seat of Greenway, and would have become the first Muslim elected to Federal Parliament had he won. As polling day approached, Husic started hearing that Liberal Party workers handing out how-to-vote cards were asking why he wasn’t using his “real” name. Husic’s full first name is Edham, and the implication of raising this was clear. Ed’s “real” name proved he wasn’t a “real” Aussie. To hide this was to be a wolf in sheep’s clothing.
What followed made that explicit. Anonymous campaigners dropped fraudulent leaflets, carrying a fake Labor logo, into Greenway’s letterboxes. “Ed Husic is a devout Muslim,” they declared. “Ed is working hard to get a better deal for Islam in Greenway”. Husic lost the election by 800 votes, suffering a swing roughly double the national average.
That presaged Anne Aly’s experience in the 2019 election: more fake flyers distributed in her Perth seat of Cowan, using her full Arabic name and accusing her of supporting “banning any criticism of Islam – just like Saudi Arabia”. And that story took me back to the 2007 election in the seat of Lindsay, where Liberal Party volunteers distributed a fake leaflet from a non-existent Islamic organisation thanking the Labor Party for supporting the Bali bombers, and declaring Labor would support construction of a new mosque. “Ala Akba”, it signed off, in exactly the way a Muslim organisation wouldn’t.
In the Lindsay case, the Liberal candidate’s husband was caught handing out those leaflets. In the Husic and Aly cases, they cannot be traced back to the Liberal Party. It’s not evidence of anything in Towke’s case. But if you’re inclined to see a pattern, and form the impression this is a subterranean Liberal way of doing business, you’ll probably feel inclined to dismiss this week’s Liberal or prime ministerial protestations of innocence, too.
But it would be folly to assume impressions run only one way. This week, Assistant Treasurer Michael Sukkar reminded us of his own Lebanese heritage, to demonstrate that Lebanese Australians can rise within Liberal ranks. Morrison referred us to a series of Lebanese community allies, each denying the charge of his anti-Lebanese prejudice.
But perhaps the most substantial thing that may be said in Morrison’s defence is that of all the Coalition prime ministers this century, he remains the one who has played race politics the least. He isn’t John Howard, who frequently interrogated the Australianness of Muslims in the febrile atmosphere of the “war on terror”, ran a concerted campaign against multiculturalism (eventually dumping the portfolio), and invented the asylum-seeker politics that is now bipartisan. Morrison doesn’t have an equivalent of Tony Abbott’s “Team Australia” rhetoric, in which he suggested Muslims who condemn terrorism don’t really mean it. Malcolm Turnbull took a much more unifying position on Muslims – and held Australia’s only prime ministerial Ramadan Iftar – but he also ran a moral panic on Sudanese gangs (having earlier disingenuously torched the Uluru Statement from the Heart).
Morrison hasn’t run anything like those sorts of campaigns. His transgressions have been in the form of sporadic comments (mostly on Indigenous history), but they aren’t a concerted theme of his prime ministership. Occasionally, he returns to prosecute Howardian asylum-seeker politics, but only fleetingly because the issue has receded from the political contest. The worst examples tend to come from his time in the immigration portfolio rather than the Lodge.
Perhaps that’s a reflection of the times – a post-Christchurch world defined by pandemic and climate catastrophe rather than, say, Islamic State. But the difference is observable, and it might be what Morrison has in mind when he appeals to track record.
Does that absolve him in the Towke case? No. It’s possible he used Towke’s heritage against him because it worked in that moment, in a way that style of politics wouldn’t for a prime minister. It’s possible his politics on race has changed in the intervening 15 years. Or it’s possible Morrison’s denials are genuine – which, to be clear, wouldn’t make Towke a liar because he claims only to have been told of Morrison’s manoeuvres by others.
This is, and remains, a matter of impression. Accordingly, it’s far from clear this whole episode will have changed – rather than merely confirmed – anyone’s view of Morrison. But if it does damage him, it will be a cumulative effect. It will mean there were finally too many bad impressions left for denial to remain sustainable.