Photos: (clockwise from top left) The Guardian, David Rowe (AFR), The Driven, GetUp (digitally altered).

Ears pricked up in psychiatrists’ rooms across Melbourne on Friday, when 3AW’s Neil Mitchell asked Prime Minister Scott Morrison whether he had ever lied during his time in public life.

“I don’t believe I have, no,” Morrison replied. For qualified shrinks, indeed anyone with even a rudimentary understanding of the PM’s track record on honesty and integrity, the retort must have been pretty uniform: “Does ScoMo even know he’s lying?”

Indeed, does Morrison really believe he‘s a paragon of integrity? Or was the PM’s Friday answer merely a case of doubling down with yet another of his many fibs? Note the wriggle room Morrison gave himself: “I don’t believe I have (lied), no.”

In the hope of refreshing the Prime Ministerial memory, here’s a heavily-abridged summary of his falsehoods, including cases where Morrison’s denials might be seen as lies in and of themselves (a more comprehensive list can be found here).

Deluded or deliberate? You be the judge:

1. Electric vehicles (EVs)

Campaigning before the 2019 election, Morrison claimed EVs “won’t tow your trailer … tow your boat (or) get you out to your favourite camping spot with your family”. Asked about these comments on Tuesday while releasing his new, pro-EV policy, Morrison replied: “But I didn’t (bad mouth EVs). That is just a Labor lie.”

Morrison’s belittling of EVs in 2019 is on the public record. On Thursday, when David Koch and Natalie Barr of Sunrise called him out on this, the PM went off on a typical tangent: “They were going to put up the price of fuel.” In fact, then-Labor leader Bill Shorten had called for pollution standards for conventional vehicles and subsidies for EVs – neither of which would have impacted the price of petrol.

2. Submarines

Morrison denied he’d deceived France when its president, Emmanuel Macron, accused the PM of lying after Australia walked out on a $90 billion submarine deal. Private text messages were leaked to refute French claims, revealing that Macron had asked: “Should I expect good or bad news for our joint submarines ambitions?”

Far from muddying the waters on who’s to blame for the bilateral row, the texts show that, 48 hours before Australia canned the deal, Macron was still in the dark.

At the height of the dispute, Morrison said he would not “cop sledging at Australia”, but Macron’s gripe was clearly with the PM alone. He also falsely accused reporters of “taking selfies” with the French president.

3. “It’s not a race”

As Australia’s vaccine rollout stalled in mid-2021, Morrison backpedalled on his comments that it was “not a race”.

“When … I made those remarks, we were talking about the regulation of the vaccines,” the PM told Sunrise in July.

In reality, his “not a race” comment came in March, after both Pfizer and AstraZeneca’s COVID-19 vaccines had been approved, meaning there were no more regulatory barriers to their distribution when he said this. The delays in vaccine rollout were largely the result of a lack of supply, and an over-reliance on AstraZeneca vaccine, which many Australians were hesitant to take after a blood clot scare.


Does ‘flow brain’ (above) explain the PM’s sketchy memory? Image: Harper Perennial Modern Classics (digitally-altered)

It would be easy to pigeon-hole the PM as simply the latest (and perhaps most formidable) liar to come out of Canberra, but some analysts have done a deeper dive. In an interview with Katharine Murphy for Quarterly Essay, Morrison copped to having a terrible memory. “I have a flow brain,” he told her.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the psychologist who first identified ‘flow brain’, explained that in this state, you are completely absorbed in an activity, especially one which involves creative abilities. “You don’t think,” he wrote.

The mental resources at your disposal are utterly devoted to a task, with no energy for secondary functions like, say, committing something to memory. Applying the same logic might also help explain how, to quote Sean Kelly, the PM also “forgets that he is acting”.

“Someone who has known Morrison since his early career told me (that that PM) makes himself genuinely believe (whatever message he is conveying) … because he can seemingly convince himself of things aggressively,” Kelly wrote. What he wants to be real becomes real; he is, in a sense, sold on his own propaganda.

Murphy and Kelly are, respectively, suggesting that Morrison’s utterly submersing himself in the task at hand may come at the expense of both his memory and, perhaps, his grasp on reality itself.

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Last week, I summarised some of the Morrison traits outlined in Kelly’s new book, The Game. Kelly compares the PM to King David from Old Testament times, a man considered by some to have been a narcissist.

“Narcissism starts with the belief that the whole world is at your feet, there solely for you to manipulate,” cultural critic Jacqueline Rose explained. Kelly repeats these words in respect of our PM: “The whole world was at (Morrison’s) feet.”

In The Game, Kelly refers to a manipulative, Machiavellian quality which contributed to “the blameless way in which (Morrison) benefited from the destruction of (Liberal Party opponents) Michael Towke, Tony Abbott and Malcolm Turnbull” on his path to The Lodge.

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) says narcissistic traits include a belief that you are special and unique: a sense of infallibility, a notion that what you seek to achieve is right, and justifies whatever means you use to bring it about. Those means can be cunning, ruthless or worse: Narcissus, meet Machiavelli.

In this context, lying (whether or not the PM knows he’s doing it) is simply another means to an end (be it stopping the boats, repelling China or winning an election) which Morrison considers ‘right’, and morally justified.

In fairness, the above are just theories about Morrison, put forward by seasoned observers. I leave it to you, the reader, to decide if they ring true.

That said, to be brutally clear, the DSM I’ve been using as a reference point for Morrison’s traits is a catalogue of mental disorders, with all the disturbing implications that entails. Were our PM to exhibit enough DSM traits to be diagnosed with an actual disorder, he’d join an illustrious cast of former world leaders that includes Henry VI, the Emperor Caligula and his close ally, former US president Donald Trump.


Could Scott Morrison simply be a pathological liar? Image: Medicinenet.

It could be that flow brains, jaundiced reality or a perceived infallibility that justifies any outrage don’t define Morrison. He could, merely, be one of the most accomplished bullshit artists ever to emerge from a Canberra cesspool that’s famous for them: a man who not only lies like others breathe, but then doubles down on his lies when asked if he’s lying.

There is another diagnostic term that might help unravel this: pathological liar, someone who’s traits often include exaggerated feelings of self-importance, incessantly lying to get their way and (wait for it) believing their own bullshit. It is said that the traits of a pathological liar can also be found in conditions such as (drumroll) Narcissistic Personality Disorder.

Does any of this ring a bell?

I personally have a tough time reconciling the notion that Morrison “forgets” stuff he’s said in the past, because during election campaigns he’s repeated it, over and over, like an Antipodean Goebbels.

From a propagandistic point of view, the purpose of repetition is to insert an idea into the subconscious and make recalling it automatic. Both messenger and audience can be inculcated via that repetition.

How many times in 2019 did Morrison tell us how EVs can’t tow boats or trailers? Too many to count, and too many, I venture, for Morrison to forget.

Then there’s the aforementioned annexation of wriggle room during the Mitchell interview: “I don’t believe I have (lied), no.” If Morrison genuinely believes he doesn’t lie, why insert such a slippery disclaimer?

Apparently, Hugh Riminton’s not buying into flow brains and the like, simply describing Morrison, in a sledge for the ages, as Iess chameleon than oiled seal. “If slipperiness defines him, it is also his primary political skill,” Riminton wrote.


Photo: The Australian

Whether or not he belongs in the same diagnostic ballpark as Caligula or Henry VI, Scott Morrison remains a dangerous and prolific peddler of damaging misinformation, his message amplified by a compliant and complicit commercial mass media.

Whether or not he buys into the delusional myth he shared with Neil Mitchell, or the myth itself is yet another of his lies, Australians should be rightly perturbed by the fact they let someone who’s either ill-suited, or just plain ill, ascend to Australia’s highest political office.

Yet Morrison may survive the looming election, propped up by people like Riminton’s neighbours: “They like (the PM) because ‘he’s moderate’; she doesn’t like (Opposition Leader Anthony Albanese) because ‘he’s snarky’ and doesn’t seem to do anything. She had to be helped to remember his name,” he wrote.

“(It’s) a reminder to us all that elections are decided by the unengaged.”