As background it’s worth understanding that “Morrison’s Christian faith on his prime ministership “drove him, made him immoveable, more resistant to logical explanations”.
“I have been mocked every day because of my faith because I am a Pentecostal,”
“I have surrendered this battle to God now. I have said, over to you.” – Niki Savva, a columnist for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, writes in her new book Bulldozed
Morrison believed it was a miracle from God that won him the 2018 election. No doubt, he was expecting another such miracle in 2022.
It’s only a small step from this type of delusional thinking to believing everything he does is God’s will.
From there, any justification he makes for his actions becomes acceptable, at least in his own mind.
The danger to our democracy was the abrogation of these powers to himself constituted the first steps towards the dictatorship.
Had the government won the election, quite possible in Morrison’s mind given God was on his side, the centralisation of power within cabinet would have continued.
As defacto Minister in a number of key Ministries, Morrison would then argue that he was entitled to an extra Cabinet vote for each ministry. Pretty soon, he would have had a personal majority in the Cabinet voting process. His dominance of the Parliamentary party would be complete.
This power grab would be justified by an argument that, with God’s help, he was the only person who could take on the burden of government.
The next stage would be to subvert the public backlash against such actions.
A manufactured crisis around a pandemic, a threatened invasion, or internal terrorism would be sufficient for suspending the next election ostensibly to avoid instability and lack of confidence in the government.
A parallel and orchestrated program of disinformation would discredit the Opposition.
Nothing ever goes quite to plan in politics and Morrison may not have the intellectual and political acumen to have thought events through in this level of detail.
Besides which, when the election came, either God let him down badly or simply wasn’t paying attention.
But we must be clear, what he did was take the first steps towards establishing a dictatorship in Australia.