Professor Mark Kenny's review of 'Bulldozed' by Niki Savva in the Australian Book Review.

Luck has always been a potent force in politics, good and bad, but for Scott Morrison, Australia’s thirtieth prime minister, it almost single-handedly drove his unheralded ascent.

Luck, specifically his, explains how voters acquired a new prime minister in 2018 without an election – one whose personal ambition overshadowed any record of achievement or demonstrable expertise. The joke in Canberra was that Morrison had risen without trace. Even Liberals chortled about it.

Morrison had his backstory, but few knew much about it. Had his colleagues done their due diligence, they would have found little in the way of policy depth or management prowess to suggest he was leadership material. Quite the reverse. His previous advances appeared to have resulted from premature departures from previous roles, notably as head of the New Zealand Tourism Board (following which there had been audit criticism) and then of Tourism Australia, where he was sacked by the Howard government.

Women, required to be better than their male peers simply to be equal, must marvel at alpha males like Morrison who soar eagle-like above their last terrestrial failure. Now that it is over, Morrison’s religio-suburban assault and what we might call his bland ambition are plainer to see, if no easier to justify.

When the acrimonious Abbott–Turnbull wars finally flamed out in 2018, Morrison was on hand – Scotty from Marketing, the office bore, seen as sufficiently unaligned by all sides, and tasked with putting a floor under the sinking stock ahead of a hostile AGM (otherwise known as the ‘unwinnable’ 2019 election). Who could have known he would then wow the shareholders with his folksy ‘Trust me, I’ve got a plan’ patois? It was surely a miracle, even if he had to say so himself. Which he did. Immediately.

Peter Dutton, the right’s head-kicking head boy, had been the one to end Malcolm Turnbull’s offensively cosmopolitan insurgency government, but Dutton’s hopes of rightward correction under his own muscular leadership were considered by his colleagues to be, well, unthinkable. They opted instead for Morrison. He might have been a bully, but he was neither a Turnbullian élitist nor a soldier of the hard right. He was chosen not for who he was but for who he wasn’t – less by distinction than by contradistinction.

More strokes of luck followed, among them Bill Shorten, Labor’s unpopular leader, who bravely advanced an expansive platform in 2019. Again, Morrison campaigned successfully on the basis of who he was not. This leadership thing is a doddle, he must have concluded. Promoted by colleagues for being neither Turnbull nor Dutton, Morrison was now preferred by voters simply for not being Shorten. The Liberals in office had cycled through Dr No (Tony Abbott) and Mr Harbour-side Mansion (Turnbull), and had finally landed on the winning formula: a Mr Nobody promising nothing.

His luck held, though he had been elected without an agenda. The sense of drift coupled with his severe dereliction of duty (and candour) during the bushfires would have destroyed him politically but for Covid-19. Suddenly, Morrison had a purpose. But when luck is all you have, a change of fortune leaves you dangerously exposed.

Niki Savva’s much-anticipated book, Bulldozed: Scott Morrison’s fall and Anthony Albanese’s rise, gets inside this hollow marketing manifestation, this religiously odd ersatz leader intent on taking his country nowhere.

Savva’s great skill as a journalist combines with sharp commentary and her vast experience to deliver a powerful analytical coda to Morrison’s pointless premiership.

Having worked for Peter Costello as treasurer, and John Howard as prime minister, Savva brings credibility to the task of describing the Liberal project, the better to expose its contemporary ills.

A key strength of Bulldozed is the way Savva convinces the key players to talk, including some of those closest to Morrison. Here too, luck played a role in that as she was making those calls, news broke that Morrison had secretly gone about acquiring duplicates of the ministerial powers of his most senior colleagues in 2020 and 2021. It was a colossal betrayal that said everything about Morrison’s arrogant and egocentric leadership style.

Savva says it was the final straw for many. ‘Although all the people who mattered, including those closest to him, already knew all they needed to know … knew he was secretive and that he lied: that he was stubborn; that he bullied people; that even if he sought advice, he seldom took it; and that he had little interest in policy.’ The reader is led to a familiar conclusion: Liberals enabled him and got what they deserved. ‘Few dared challenge him … that reluctance ruined them, and left the Liberal Party in its worst state since it was founded by Robert Menzies in 1944.’

Savva casts the government as a series of mistakes, shocking prime-ministerial judgements, and galloping vanities – most of them Morrison’s and all of them adding up to a prime minister who should never have held the reins.

The book takes its name from its subject, who lamely tried to explain his penchant for being both unaccountable and a ditherer, as (a) a virtue, and (b) merely a misconception by voters. ‘You know, over the last three years and particularly the last two, what Australians have needed from me going through this pandemic has been strength and resilience,’ he boasted. ‘Now, I admit that hasn’t enabled Australians to see a lot of other gears in the way I work. And I know Australians know that I can be a bit of a bulldozer when it comes to issues and I suspect you guys know that too.’

A shorter Morrison might have read: ‘I don’t boast enough. I’m too dedicated, too effective, and I’ve erred in not telling you sooner.’

The ‘you guys’ to whom Morrison was ‘confessing’ were the press gallery tribunes, many of whom had been co-opted into Morrison’s prime ministerial shtick or had followed team orders to polish his helmet. As luck would have it, the bashful ‘bulldozer’ was about to give his new tag an indelible visual form by flattening a child on a soccer pitch while campaigning in Tasmania.

While some post-defeat accounts of governments can be works of justification, explanation, fiction, or regret, Bulldozed is predominantly a work of schadenfreude. Savva makes no attempt to hide her disdain for the former leader and his skill at escaping blame.

Where it is not explicitly conveyed, Savva’s contempt for Morrison’s disregard for the party’s secular liberal traditions is written between the lines. She ties Morrison to the emergence of the teals in the Liberal heartland, citing Labor’s Chris Bowen, who likened the Liberal crisis in inner-urban strongholds to the rise of the Democratic Labor Party in the 1950s that kept the ALP out of office for more than two decades. ‘The great Liberal split may yet come if the irreconcilable differences between the religious right, the conservatives, and the moderates can’t be resolved,’ Savva writes. Her prediction, though qualified, still seems unlikely, given that moderates have shown no real spine since John Howard stared them down in the 1990s. In truth, the only ones likely to split away are the zealots on the religious right, which, if anything, might help the remaining party to reconnect with mainstream Australian voters.

Savva’s heart is with the moderates, but her frustrations are clear. She notes that they ‘spurned’ Julie Bishop to block Dutton with Morrison and then failed to extract a price – ‘he owed them, and yet they stayed mute … even when it became obvious they had been manipulated, even when it became obvious he wasn’t up to the job. They held back at critical points until it was too late to extract concessions that might have saved them, saved him from himself, and saved the Liberal Party from near oblivion.’ Instead, Savva explains, they dug in and cheered on an emperor ‘who was not only stark naked but, as they later discovered, stark-raving mad’. These are all valid criticisms, but they rely too heavily on the notion that the so-called moderates agree even among themselves on matters like quotas for women, voluntary assisted dying, the need for a religious freedom bill, a republic, the Uluru Statement, marriage equality, RU-486, even the environment.

Morrison’s self-serving religiosity has probably only hastened the journey to oblivion that Savva canvasses. The Liberal Party he led is losing its purchase externally because it has forgotten its philosophical framework internally. While Abbott was able to leverage doubt for his own political purposes, voters have now moved beyond such short-sightedness. Mainstream Australians can no longer be relied on to ignore climate change, women’s justice, and governmental accountability. These problems have grown in profile under such leaders.

Morrison’s rise and fall suggests that power for its own sake will only hold a party together for so long. Eventually, the multiple policy failures, the divisive stunts such as the ‘captain’s pick’ selection of Katherine Deves in Warringah (the second-highest yes-voting Liberal seat in New South Wales in the 2017 marriage equality survey), and the duplicity become too apparent. ‘Morrison’s invitation to [Josh] Frydenberg to stay at The Lodge with him during Covid helped Morrison and damaged Frydenberg. Frydenberg couldn’t see it then, although he did later, even before he knew about Morrison’s secret takeover [of ministerial powers including those of Treasury].’

Savva reveals that Morrison was determined to neutralise Frydenberg as a potential challenger and was gripped by the threat posed by a possible challenge from Dutton and by backbenchers’ preference for Frydenberg. ‘He was panic-stricken,’ she writes, citing Morrison lieutenant Alex Hawke, who told her: ‘He flipped.’

There was a febrile atmosphere within the governing party as 2021 drew to a close, Savva explains. ‘Morrison was expecting Dutton to do to him what he – Morrison – had done to Turnbull. Wait for the other guy (Frydenberg) to make a move, and then come through with less bloody hands and crush with the numbers.’

The book is at its richest in these moments when the author’s venom seems least restrained. They construct a damning picture of Morrison as the ultimate political huckster, devoid of the personal principles he demanded of others, while depicting his party as supine and feckless in the face of his overweening authority.

If the retrospective narrative flags in places, it is when Savva indulges in speculative commentary about the future, such as her ruminations about Frydenberg’s electoral chances in Kooyong or neighbouring Higgins in 2025. Her assessments are shrewd, but feel slightly out of place in this book. Less explicitly, Bulldozed serves as a timely warning against the weaknesses of in-house media, a neutered public service, and witless Cabinets. Together, these elements contributed to the kind of incurious presidentialism that Morrison paraded, rather than the more collectively oriented Westminster parliamentary government Australians need.

Morrison, Savva rightly concludes, was always unfit for office. To that we can add that his party failed the nation by electing as their leader a man who wasn’t Turnbull, wasn’t Dutton, and quickly turned out not to be a prime minister either. One thinks of William Hughes Mearns’s famous poem: ‘Yesterday, upon the stair, / I met a man who wasn’t there! / He wasn’t there again today, / Oh how I wish he’d go away!’

Well, if they wished, they never acted.

Bulldozed will not be the last word on Morrison’s dismal premiership, but it will surely influence future accounts according to the degree to which their authors concur or disagree with Savva. It is a superb insight into a government in terminal moral decline, a regime with little purpose other than the burning career aspirations of its members.

One can only speculate that had such intrigue been afoot in a Labor government, after-the-fact detail of the kind in Bulldozed would have found its way into the public realm contemporaneously. That might say something about Labor, but it also speaks to the failure of the media to get under the defences of a government that was plagued with stuff-ups and that ultimately stood for nothing. Morrison, supposedly, didn’t crave a legacy, as Savva reminds us. But he has got one now – as the world’s first self-burying bulldozer.

Spot of bad luck, that. 

Mark Kenny is a professor at the ANU Australian Studies Institute and host of the Democracy Sausage podcast.