Morrison's Mission: How a beginner reshaped Australian foreign policy

When he became Prime Minister in 2018, Scott Morrison was a foreign policy amateur confronted by unprecedented challenges: an assertive Beijing and a looming rivalry between the two biggest economies in world history, the United States and China. Morrison lunged into foreign and security policy by making highly contentious changes that will be felt for decades, not least the historic decision to build nuclear-powered submarines.

Featuring interviews with Morrison and members of his cabinet, this book tells the story of the Prime Minister’s foreign policy convictions and calculations, and what drove his attitudes towards China, America and the Indo-Pacific.

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Preface

This Lowy Institute Paper is an account of Scott Morrison as a foreign policy prime minister during a period of unpredictable change. Its primary task is to outline the contours of his policy, examine how it evolved and understand the distinctive features of his thinking and style.

This follows an earlier Lowy Institute Paper I wrote in 2006 on John Howard's foreign policy, titled Howard's Decade. While there are parallels between Howard and Morrison, the contrasts are also noteworthy given the different eras in which they governed and the different challenges they have faced.

The deadline for this paper was extended to allow coverage of the AUKUS agreement between Australia, the United Kingdom and United States. But it could not be stretched to include a full assessment of climate change and the 2021 UN Climate Change Conference in Glasgow, in a rapidly changing world as this no natural termination point for a rapid account of foreign policy.

In preparing this paper, I conducted a series of interviewed and drew on others that I conducted during the year for my columns in The Australian. I conducted a long interviewed for the Paper with Scott Morrison followed by further discussions and assistance from his office. I also conducted on-record interviews with Marise Payne, Alex Hawke, Dave Sharma, Mike Burgess, Duncan Lewis, Dennis Richardson, Richard Maude, Allan Gyngell, Peter Varghese, Linda Jakobson Bruce Miller and Marcus Hellyer.

I drew up several discussions with Malcolm Turnbull, Joel Frydenberg, Simon Birmingham and Penny Wong that I conducted when writing my weekly columns. In addition, I spoke off record with many people still in the ‘system’ and involved with Morrison’s foreign policy agenda.

I thank the Executive Director of the Lowy Institute, Michael Fullilove, for this opportunity and Sam Roggeveen from the Institute for his assistance.

I also thank Editor-in-Chief at The Australian, Chris Dore, and the Editor, Michelle Gunn, for their ongoing support.

Chapter 1 - Morrison and the Australian Identity

Scott Morrison’s self-identity originates with the arrival of Europeans in Australia. One of the 11 ships of the First Fleet was the Scarborough with 208 convicts aboard, including William Roberts, who hailed from the tiny village of St Keverne near Cornwall and was transported for stealing five-and-a-half pounds of yarn worth nine shillings. Arriving on 26 January 1788, Roberts began a new life. He would become fifth great-grandfather to Australia’s thirtieth prime minister.

The second Fleet of six ships arrived to a near starving colony on 3 June 1790 with one of its ships, the Neptune, bringing 78 female convicts, including Kezia Brown, a gardeners’ labourer transported for stealing clothing. A few years later, Brown married Roberts at St Phillips Anglican Church in Sydney, the oldest Anglican church parish in the country. They raised a family in what is now Western Sydney. Brown would become Morrison’s fifth great-grandmother. She and Roberts are buried together at St Matthews in Windsor.

Morrison traces his ancestry to both the First and Second Fleets. On Australia Day, he honours not just the national day, but the inception of his family line. His family narrative runs in parallel with the narrative of European settlement on the Australian continent. This vests Morrison with an ancestral claim on the contradiction at Australia’s heart – pride in European civilisation and anguish at the devastation wrought on the indigenous peoples.

At the 2007 general election, Morrison was elected to the House of Representatives for the electorate of Cook, which spans middle-class suburbs spilling onto often spectacular beaches and bays, the seat named after Captain James Cook, credited as the first European to discover and map the eastern coast of Australia in 1770. Morrison is tied to Cook by history and location in a bond that precedes by 18 years the First Fleet’s arrival under Governor Arthur Phillip.

The first landing of the British on Australian soil occurred at Botany Bay (Kamay) on the Kurnell peninsula headland, now a conspicuous feature in Morrison’s seat. On 29 April 1770, Cook’s ship the HMS Endeavour anchored in the bay for eight days with the initial landing party challenged by two natives. ‘James Cook was a man before his time’, Morrison said in his first speech to the House of Representatives. ‘Against a backdrop of brutality and ignorance, he displayed an amazing empathy and respect for his own crew and the people and lands he visited. He should be revered as one of the most significant figures in our national history’.

For Morrison, the modern Australian story begins with Cook, the navigator of the Pacific. The next phase follows with the First Fleet under Phillip. The imaginative force of these events lives with Morrison. ‘I like my history in high definition, widescreen, full, vibrant colour,’ he said.

This history pervades Morrison’s prime-ministerial office in Parliament House. When Morrison rises from his desk and walks beyond the foyer, he enters what he calls the ‘Pacific room’. It is not an ‘America room’ or an ‘Asian engagement room’. It is filled with photographs of Morrison with Pacific leaders: Fiji’s Frank Bainimarama, PNG’s James Marape, Solomon Islands’ Manasseh Sogavare, New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and former prime minister and president of Timor-Leste Xanana Gusmao. The room has two framed engravings of Captain Cook, a drawing of Cook’s ship HMS Resolution, and gifts from Pacific leaders. The room Is private, and expression of Morrison’s identity and a declaration of neighbourhood and family.

The first Christian cleric in Australia was the Reverend Richard Johnson, a graduate of Cambridge where he absorbed evangelical principles. His 1786 appointment as chaplain of New South Wales owed much to the influence of the charismatic parliamentarian and opponent of the slave trade William Wilberforce, who wanted to see an evangelical Chrisian assume the post.

Morrison has quoted Johnson’s description of the miserable humanity that emerged from the Second Fleet ships after a voyage during which a quarter of the convicts died: ‘They were wretched, naked, filthy, dirty, lousy and many of them utterly unable to stand or even to stir hand or foot.’ Kezia Brown was among them. Morrison called it ‘the worst of beginnings’, yet Johnson represented the British commitment to a divine mission in the new land. It is another continuous threat, from 1788 to the present, running through Morrison’s life as a Christian.

In his first speech, Morrison said his parents, John and Marion Morrison, along with his grandparents, ‘laid the foundations for my life’. Religion was at its heart. ‘Growing up in a Christian home, I made a commitment to my faith at an early age,’ Morrison said. ‘My personal faith in Jesus Christ is not a political agenda. As Lincoln said, our task is not to claim whether God is on our side, but to pray earnestly that we are on His.’

Explaining his family’s religious journey, Morrison said his parents ‘started in the Presbyterian Church and then they went Uniting, and I went to a Christian Brethren Assembly, which my brother was going to - and that’s where I met Jenny – and ended up a Pentecostal, so that’s quite a journey.’ Morrison said an alternative life as a religious, not a political, minister had been a ‘pretty close’ call for him.

It was faith that his parents transmitted to Morrison, and faith that led Morrison to Jenny Warren. Morrison was 11 years older when they met. ‘We didn’t start going out till I was 16,’ he said. Apart from a two-week break, they have been together ever since. They married in 1990 when Morrison was 21.

His personal life has largely been touched by the social and sexual revolution of the 1960s. Morrison’s conservative outlook, has been remarkably divorced from the tidal wave of personal progressivism that altered family life over the previous two generations.

Australian identity and cultural tradition are the driving forces in Morrison’s political creed. ‘I do not share the armband view of history, black or otherwise,’ Morrison said. That means celebrating our achievements and acknowledging our failures ‘at least in equal measure’. Morrison said that when you trace your family history back to when settlement began’, then you feel a bond with the story of European engagement with indigenous Australians ‘in all its history and its brutality and dispossession’.

Yet, for Morrison, the ‘wonder’ of Australia is that hardship and cruelty bequeathed a national that is decent, fair and prosperous. He sees Australia – not the United States – as the model of democracy. His family ties anchor him to the redemptive transformation that saw a collection of convicts and miliary officers seed a new democracy.

Welcoming people to a citizenship ceremony on 26 January 2019, Prime Minister Morrison drew the link between these newest Australians and his personal ties with the oldest European Australians.‘I am glad William and Kezia made the journey, he said. ‘And I’m glad you have, too.’

At this ceremony, he quoted historian and former Liberal politician David Kemp on Australia as ‘the ideal place to experiment with such radical ideas as broad individual liberty and equality, universal education, freedom of the press, freedom of religions, and new land without slavery, the rule of law, the classless society, private enterprise and later, the political and social equality of men and women.’.

Morrison’s sense of Australian identity is buried deep in a thicket of family, nation, history and location. This is how he sees and operates in the world – these things are real, not abstractions. They coalesce in a conclusion: faith in the Ausralian project and belief in the Australian character. This fount of identity lies at the heart of his dealing with the world – whether that is with America, China, Japan or India, or chairing the National Security Committee of Cabinet (NSC).

In his 2017 book The Road to Somewhere, British author David Goodhart described the fundamental cultural divide in Britain – and the West at large – as being between the ‘anywheres’ and the ‘somewheres’. The former are mobile, elitist, cosmopolitan, successful decision-makers, global in mentality, liberated from traditions of faith, flag and family. The latter – who prioritise place, so typically live near where they are raised - are socially conservative, value tradition, habits, nation, religion and tribal ties, and are often assailed by progressives of being irrational and reactionary. As a foreign policy prime minister, Morrison is obligated to be a globalist, yet in his essence he is a ‘somewhere’ leader.

This suggests a foreign policy anchored in national identity, conservative values and domestic political needs – and that is what Morrison delivers.

Morrison said his faith is not a political agenda - an essential qualification given leaders operating in the temporal world can ever match biblical injunctions. However, he nominates William Wilberforce and South Africa’s Desmond Tutu as Christian leaders who ‘transformed their nations and, indeed, the world’.

‘By following the convictions of their faith, they established and reinforced the principles of our liberal democracy upon which our nation is built,’ Morrison said. He draws the nexus between his faith and liberal democracy. Morrison’s faith informs his view of the world.

The proposition here is not that Morrison has a superior morality or that morality governs his politics. It is that he brings his sense of Australian identity, conservative tradition and values to his formulation of foreign policy. He does not wear them on his sleeve, since that is the Australian way. But as Prime Minister, dealing with the world, Morrison carries his identity and values before him in three distinct ways.

First, he anchors his foreign policy on Australian identity. Everything begins and ends with identity. Australia, he asserts, is a strong nation, his constant refrain being: we know who we are; we know what we believe; we know whose side we are on.

Second, in ties closest to home – his relations with Pacific leaders – Morrison frames his policy as an extension of family values. Families can disagree but possess a shared bond.

Third, Morrison sees the contest between China and the West not in power terms, but as a moral encounter between China’s quasi-capitalist authoritarianism and the Enlightenment legacy of liberal democracy: For him, it is a competition power and morals.

Morrison became Prime Minister in August 2018 after an abrupt party crisis that produced a surprise result. He assumed the highest office just 11 years after entering the parliament and, in the view of many, before he was fully prepared. He was steeped in neither foreign policy experience nor international diplomatic practise. Indeed, such inexperience suggested an amateur in the field raising the possibility that something might go seriously wrong.

But Morrison arrived with attitude. This was a deeply grounded political leader with entrenched views about Australia, sure of his own identity and carrying passionate beliefs. He would inject them into Australian foreign policy amin a world in transition.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Paul Kelly is Editor-at-Large at The Australian. He writes on politics, public policy and international relations and is a former Editor-in-Chief at the paper. Paul has covered 10 prime ministers from Gough Whitlam to Scott Morrison.

He has written or co-authored 12 books on Australian politics and history. The books for which he is best known are The End of Certainty (1992) on the politics and economic reforms of the Hawke-Keating era, The March of Patriots (2009) offering a re-interpretation of the Keating and Howard prime ministership and Triumph and Demise (2014), an account of the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd era.

Morrison’s Mission follows his 2006 book for the Lowy Institute on Howard’s foreign policy titled Howard’s Decade.