(Image: Hardie Grant/Private Media)

It’s important to understand that Scott Morrison not merely doesn’t lie — as he insisted to Neil Mitchell on Friday — but he’s never wrong either. Unlike the rest of us, he never makes a mistake, or misspeaks — or if he does it’s for wholly understandable reasons that applied at the time, such as journalists confusing him with their questions.

So back in May when Morrison told Mitchell about Taiwan, “We’ve always understood the one system, two countries arrangement and we will continue to follow our policies there … One country, two systems, I should say,” he hadn’t make a mistake. He hadn’t confused Hong Kong — where we have a one-country, two-systems policy — with Taiwan, where we don’t recognise its status as an independent country but only “acknowledge” China’s claim to the island.

Despite his own office briefing journalists that he’d made a mistake and was referring to Hong Kong, when asked by SBS if he’d made a mistake, Morrison said he hadn’t erred at all.

It would have been straightforward for Morrison to admit he’d got confused and only the churlish would have had a go at him over it. But instead he doubled down and lied — and in the process, made another mistake, saying: “What we know is that we have a situation with China in which we’ve recognised how they see these relationships in the region, and particularly in relation to Taiwan and Hong Kong and things of that nature.”

Australia of course does not recognise China’s claim to Taiwan — indeed, lately it seems gung-ho for military assistance for Taiwan in the event China seeks to reclaim it.

Lying’s one thing — but spoiling your own militaristic anti-China narrative along the way is particularly careless.

Join Bernard Keane tonight in conversation with Janine Perrett and The Ethics Centre’s Dr Simon Longstaff as they launch Keane’s new book Lies and Falsehoods: The Morrison Government and the New Culture of Deceit.