(Image: Private Media/Zennie)

Welcome to Crikey‘s 2022 end-of-year awards, the most glorious and prestigious in Australia — probably the world.

The first and by far the most coveted is Crikey‘s Arsehat of the Year, the gong that goes to the person who did the best work in being the worst.

Read the 2022 Arsehat of the Year nominees below, and then cast your vote here!

Vladimir Putin

After years of convincing the Russian people they are the victims of a humiliating series of wrongs that must be put right, years of menacing the country’s neighbours, years of making sure his critics end up in jail or dead, Putin launched his deadly (and seemingly doomed) invasion of Ukraine. He has isolated his country, violated international law and caused thousands of Ukrainian and Russian deaths. 

Elon Musk

Musk must be one of the few people in history who could cut such a pitiful figure the same year he became the richest person on earth (a title he’s now lost). His $44 billion purchase of Twitter — which he was forced into after attempting to pull out and facing a legal struggle — didn’t go great.

“Comedy is legal again,” he announced upon the purchase, and then suspended accounts that made jokes about him. He fired thousands of employees. Advertising drained from the site like a bath. Use of slurs spiked while he cosied up to far-right figures. Summing it all up towards the end of the year, he got on stage with Dave Chappelle, a comic whose audience more than any other would be primed towards Musk’s meme-laden edge-lord schtick, and he could barely get a word out for the booing.  

Scott Morrison

We hate to kick a guy when he’s down, but if this list is to mean anything, Morrison simply has to be on it again. Leading the Coalition to crushing defeat and squishing that young lad was bad enough. But then via his need for control, secrecy and desire for an uncomplicated hagiography, he brought about a fresh, gleaming, gigantic scandal.

It was revealed after the election that he had hoarded the job titles of five of his ministerial colleagues. He finished the year as the first former PM to be censured, and gave us another display of virtuoso shrugging evasion during his grilling at the royal commission into robodebt, one of the many policy disasters he managed to be at the heart of.

Linda Reynolds

Reynolds had a bad enough 2021, horrifically mishandling the alleged rape of her staffer Brittany Higgins — calling her a “lying cow” was just the grotesque peak of it. This year just got worse: she was accused of “leaking privileged information to the paper” by Higgins’ partner, and was subject to complaints from the ACT’s most senior prosecutor for her “disturbing” conduct during the trial, including texting the accused’s defence.

When Reynolds was asked why she did that, the former defence minister told the court she hadn’t been through a trial before and, mind-bogglingly, figured it was fine.

Boris Johnson 

Finally the set collapsed and Johnson, the man who built a career on his skills as an entertainer, exited the stage. Having won a landslide in 2019, within three years much of his backbench — and a good 50 of his ministers — forced him out after a truly dizzying number of scandals.

Chief among them was “partygate”, where the Tories partied and got off with each other while ordinary Britons were prohibited from seeing dying relatives. Then came the assault allegations levelled at the party’s deputy whip, and it was all over. The chaos didn’t stop there of course, and after 44 days of his replacement Liz Truss, the Tories had to go through it all again. 

John Barilaro

It was a truly remarkable achievement from the former NSW Nationals leader and deputy premier. After years of burning through the oxygen available to his Coalition partner while in office, the Libs in NSW could have been forgiven for thinking once he left office he’d be less of a problem.

But with the scandal surrounding his post-politics appointment to a plum US trade commissioner role, despite the earlier appointment of a qualified and less-conflicted woman, he only went and produced his masterpiece from beyond the political grave, possibly cruelling the Perrotett government’s chance of reelection next year.

Who do you think deserves the coveted Arsehat of The Year? Vote here!