We must ban politicians from receiving honours

Scott Morrison receiving a Companion of the Order of Australia was always going to elicit outrage, with memories still fresh of his disastrous stint as prime minister. When Tony Abbott received one for a shorter, but arguably even worse, time in office, it was 2020 and the intervening years, and pandemic, dulled any reaction. But visceral hate still lingers for Morrison — and there’s no denying his awful and tragic record while in power, from robodebt to the horrific death toll in aged care facilities.

That he was awarded such a gong after a royal commission found that he “allowed cabinet to be misled” and “failed to meet his ministerial responsibility” also suggests PM&C and vice-regal staff didn’t bother reading the report.

But that’s the problem with honouring politicians. Anyone who has accrued an extended period in public office is unlikely to have avoided at least some controversy, or been party to a shocker of a decision. Morrison — a liar whose primary “skill” was constantly devising announcements — is simply the worst example.

The rejoinder is that every prime minister is offered the honour, and it merely reflects that they served in that role. That might be true, but it makes a mockery of the entire honours system. Paul Keating understood this. He was offered an AC by the Howard government in 1997 and declined it, noting the awards system should be for recognising people whose contributions had gone unnoticed.

For declining the award, Keating was attacked by conservatives, as if such an act was somehow un-Australian. But then, conservatives attacked literally everything Keating ever did, and if he’d accepted the AC, he would have been attacked for that, too.

But if you have an award system supposedly based on merit, you can’t automatically give them to someone just because they occupied a particular office.

The honours system already lacks credibility. Why are prominent business figures awarded gongs? Bruce Gordon, the Methuselah of Australia’s media moguls, received an AO. Australia’s media industry is a cartel that perverts and distorts public policy and political debate — membership of the cabal is hardly evidence of achieving public good. And if business leaders who have spent a lifetime enriching themselves shouldn’t be awarded, what about business shills? Jennifer Westacott, long-time head of the Business Council of Australia, also received an AC. If the gong was for services to endlessly demanding that the company tax rate be cut, the GST be lifted and worker protections removed for the benefit of giant corporations, sure — bring back Abbott’s knights and dames for that.

One “Dale Cartwright” received an OAM for “service to greyhound racing”, presumably to offset the awarding of an OAM to Jennifer Hunt for animal welfare. Several sports people were gonged for playing sports: crossfit and weightlifting, squash, rowing, rugby union, lawn bowls and AFL — there were eight awards for AFL, and just two for rugby league (albeit one was Gene Miles, for services to running over the top of opposing centres while carrying the ball one-handed like a deadset legend). Baz Luhrmann even got one for making his unwatchable dreck.

In total nearly 600 people received an award in the general classification, on top of 150 awards to public sector people and 100 military honours. That’s in addition to the more than 700 who got a gong on Australia Day. The idea that the system is finding and rewarding people who make a genuine and significant contribution to Australia but who would otherwise be uncelebrated is hard to sustain.

There are scores, hundreds, of people recognised for their work in the community, or in health, or welfare, or for a lifetime of achievement in a discipline that improves life for the rest of us. They should be in a separate category from the sports people, and writers, and dancers, and filmmakers, and businessmen and women, and lobbyists, who might touch lives in other ways but don’t have direct community impact.

And politicians should be out altogether. They are remunerated generously, and received a very good superannuation package, and most senior politicians go on to lucrative careers after politics. They don’t need letters after their names denoting they are to be considered in the same category as people who have directly improved the lives of Australians in fields often neglected, or even demonised, by those very politicians.