Former prime minister Scott Morrison, who this week announced his retirement from politics, deserves our respect and praise for being the architect of the Aukus agreement, the still-developing military alliance between Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States. From Aukus many things should grow. Thanks to ever-closer ties between these three pillars of the Anglosphere, and the nuclear subs sitting in the Aukus check-out, Australia will eventually embrace nuclear energy, leading to a global nuclear industry and perhaps even enabling us to arm ourselves with nuclear weapons (hopefully in time) to deter communist Chinese or any other future military aggression as the century unfolds. So if the price for putting up with ScoMo’s numerous failings is an eventual nuclear umbrella for Australia, then future generations should remember him favourably.

As is clear, the Americans were impressed by, in particular, Mr Morrison’s strong stance against China. Not only did he demand an inquiry into the origins of Covid, he refused to cave in to barley and wine sanctions, and, perhaps even more significantly, he cancelled Victoria’s ‘Belt and Road’ deal with China.

On the latter, it is intriguing to note that it was the editor of this magazine who brought Dan Andrews’ signed deal with the communists to the attention of then-US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, for whom the Belt and Road Initiative was a particular bête noire. On Sunday 24 May, 2020, in an interview with Mr Pompeo, Rowan Dean on his Outsiders program on Sky News Australia alerted Mr Pompeo  to the fact that Victoria had signed up to Belt and Road. A clearly taken-aback Mr Pompeo immediately responded that he was unaware of the deal but if it were to compromise Five Eyes, the US would ‘simply disconnect’ from those involved. Scoffed at by the ABC and others, this interview led to what the Guardian breathlessly reported as a ‘diplomatic storm’ caused by a ‘fringe TV show’. By day’s end US ambassador Arthur Culvahouse – who presumably should have been the man to alert Mr Pompeo as to what the Victorians were up to – had dragged himself off the golf course to ‘set the record straight’. But the cat was now out of the bag.

Within months, the Morrison government had introduced a new law allowing it to cancel any arrangements between states, territories or public universities and foreign governments; the first victim of which was Victoria’s Belt and Road deal with China, cancelled in April 2021 as ‘not in the national interest’. Not such a ‘fringe show’ after all, then.

Intriguingly, Mr Morrison has now been offered a job working as a global strategic and defence consultant with Mr Pompeo and former Trump security adviser Robert O’Brien. It is hard to imagine that Mr Morrison’s cancelling of Belt and Road did not play a key factor in that appointment.

Also noteworthy on Mr Morrison’s CV would likely be the moment in February 2017 when, as Treasurer in the Turnbull government, he leapt to his feet in parliament brandishing a shiny black lump of coal, taunting the startled opposition benches: ‘This is coal. Don’t be afraid. Don’t be scared. It won’t hurt you!’ It was Mr Morrison’s finest moment in politics.

Sadly, it also represents Mr Morrison’s lowest point – the complete abandonment of that principled stance when he disgracefully adopted net zero at Cop26 in Glasgow in November 2022. This was a complete betrayal of the neutral climate position he had won the 2019 election with and, deservedly, within six months Mr Morrison was turfed out of office.

Which brings us to Covid. In what can only be an astonishing lack of self-awareness, Mr Morrison points to his management of Covid as a high point in his prime ministerial career. Nothing could be further from the truth. Apart from the correct action of closing the borders in the early days of the ‘pandemic’, every subsequent step Mr Morrison took was a disaster for the wellbeing of the people and the democratic processes of this nation. Let it never be forgotten that under Mr Morrison’s prime ministership, Australians were shot at with rubber bullets, families were divided, people lost their jobs without compensation or justice, and individuals were treated as lepers by a hostile, uncaring and tyrannical medical bureaucracy. No other Australian prime minister has been responsible for allowing such egregious assaults on our liberties and democratic rights. The excuse that power lay with the states and the ‘national cabinet’ – a creation of Mr Morrison’s to avoid Covid accountability – is not only disingenuous and slippery but misses the point: namely, that the prime minister has a moral obligation to safeguard our democratic rights and freedoms. That Mr Morrison for two years of Covid ignored the concerns and the evidence – even from his own backbenchers like Craig Kelly, not to mention from this magazine – regarding the alternatives to and risks of mandatory vaccination, the dangers of lockdowns and school closures, the futility of masks and so on, is his true legacy. This was a man who put the interests of globalists, Big Pharma, bureaucracy, petty premiers and mandarins ahead of the interests of individual, hurting Australians. For that he stands condemned.

And finally, the tax cuts. In what is symptomatic of his leadership, he played tricky politics, delaying the most important cuts despite the pleas by many that he implement them all in one hit rather than in ‘stages’. Now, of course, ‘stage 3’ is being abandoned, as predicted.

We wish Mr Morrison all the best in his new venture. But his legacy is, alas, not all he cracks it up to be.