Daisy Edgar-Jones: Scott Morrison’s Illegitimate Secret Cabinet Committee with only ONE permanent member – Morrison

Scott Morrison’s secretive cabinet committee of one had hundreds of meetings, FOI documents suggest

Exclusive: Transparency advocate Rex Patrick says body established by former PM with only one permanent member – Morrison – was ‘an abuse of process’

Scott Morrison’s secretive cabinet committee of one permanent member appears to have met hundreds of times in the last term of parliament, documents released under freedom of information have revealed.

The cabinet office policy committee (COPC) – of which Morrison was listed as the only permanent member – created 739 sets of minutes from meetings, the information released by the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet (PMC) showed.

It has sparked fresh warnings from the former senator Rex Patrick that the body was an “abuse of process”, and prompted calls to release its documents, or to expand the inquiry into Morrison’s multiple ministries, as proposed by the Greens.

But Anthony Albanese’s criticism of the “cabinet committee with one member on it” has spurred a response from Morrison – who has claimed through a spokesperson the deputy prime minister, treasurer and finance minister “were co-opted on to all meetings of any COPC [that is] an automatic participation”.

In 2019, Morrison was on the hunt for new policies and ordered his ministers to conduct policy “deep dives” to find them through consultations with stakeholders, including business.
In Senate estimates, Labor discovered this was achieved through the establishment of the COPC, a body PMC confirmed had just one permanent member: Morrison. Until now, nothing has been known about how often it met.

In response to Guardian Australia’s FOI request for “all minutes” of its meetings from 2 July 2019 to 11 April 2022 (excluding duplicates), the department said the “requested documents, [comprise] 739 minutes of the former government’s COPC”.

These included the minutes of meetings of subcommittees of the COPC, including the national cabinet, which met 66 times in the last term, and women’s safety taskforce, which appears to have met eight times.

That leaves as many as 665 sets of minutes unaccounted for, implying hundreds of previously undisclosed meetings, even if some may have had multiple note-takers.

A PMC spokesperson said meetings “may have multiple minutes” but declined to answer questions about how many times the COPC met. “It is inaccurate to equate the number of minutes to the number of meetings.”

Patrick, the transparency campaigner and former senator who has been locked in a dispute seeking dozens of minutes from national cabinet, said Morrison’s establishment of the COPC “was an abuse of process”.

“A committee of one is not a committee,” he said. “It allowed Mr Morrison the ability to meet with anyone, including his gardener, and wrap a 20-year secrecy blanket over what was discussed.

“Thankfully Mr Morrison has been ousted from office, but a repeat by some future PM can’t be ruled out and is a worry.”

The Greens justice spokesperson, senator David Shoebridge, said Morrison’s behaviour was “deeply anti-democratic”.

“It’s time for the Albanese government to comprehensively distance itself from these sneaky tactics, and commit to releasing the minutes of these meetings of what is at best a pretend cabinet.”

ScoMo Welding

In August, Albanese said he “cannot conceive” how the former prime minister had been allowed to centralise power by creating the COPC.

The prime minister told Studio 10 the mechanism allowed Morrison “to avoid scrutiny for meetings” and to “pretend they were cabinet subcommittee meetings”.

He told 4CA Radio it was “to avoid [FOI], designed so that any meeting that Scott Morrison was in he could say, ‘Oh well, that was a meeting of this cabinet committee of which I was the only member.’”… More

Daisy Edgar-Jones

English actress Daisy Jessica Edgar-Jones was born on May 24, 1998. She gained fame most notably for playing Marianne Sheridan in the television miniseries “Normal People” (2020). She has also appeared on “Cold Feet” (2016-2020) and “War of the Worlds” (2019-2021) on television. She appeared in the crime miniseries “Under the Banner of Heaven,” mystery drama picture “Where the Crawdads Sing,” and comedy-thriller movie “Fresh” all in 2022.