Everyone might have been distracted yesterday, but Christian Porter remains a minister of the Crown, a patently untenable position for a man who claims, in effect, to have had someone pop a briefcase full of $100 notes on his doorstep and kept it.
Prime ministerial hire-a-hubby Phil Gaetjens’ inquiry into whether Porter has broken even the shoddy standards of the Morrison government, which should have taken a good two minutes, is into its second day — perhaps someone in PM&C can’t print off the statement of ministerial standards for putting in the rounds up to Big Phil’s office, or Gaetjens is having trouble finding section 2.21.
Is Porter desperately hoping his anonymous benefactor will step forward to unmask themselves, relieving him of the burden of having to either return the money to the creatively named “Legal Services Trust” or step down? Is the prime minister waiting for the weekend when Porter will be offered a pistol, a bottle of whisky and pointed to the study? Or does Scott Morrison think his nuclear-powered distraction will make everyone forget about the industry minister?
Porter’s colleagues, however, must be wondering how he will next display his staggering lack of judgment. With a prime minister seemingly entirely uninterested in historical rape allegations against Porter, which he strongly denies, Porter had weathered the storm earlier this year, but then thought it was a good idea to pursue the ABC, using someone else’s money, in a case he was going to struggle to win with a lawyer he shouldn’t have engaged.
It was a misjudgment so bad it made his idiotic backing of Clive Palmer to reopen Western Australia to infections look relatively trivial. The “I found all this money and I don’t know whose it is” declaration is just the grace note on a series of bad decisions by a man whose lifelong privilege and immunity to consequences convinced him he was prime ministerial material.
Every day that passes without Porter’s resignation merely confirms that this is a government without even the pretence of accountability, led by a prime minister with a pathological hatred of it. Indeed, to be fair to Porter, he is merely following Morrison’s example. The prime minister started his career with a complete refusal to accept basic scrutiny — “on water matters”, misleading the public about the murder of Reza Barati, lying to Barrie Cassidy about his statements aimed at Save the Children — and as leader has made lying a core part of his political persona in a manner unprecedented in Australia.
If Porter does depart over the weekend, it will only be because Morrison regards him as an impediment to winning the election. The prime minister throws so many people under the bus there’s a Greyhound coach on permanent stand-by outside the ministerial wing. Porter might be able to hear the engine revving later this afternoon.
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