Former Australian Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, secretly became the head of five ministries at once during the coronavirus pandemic. Anyone of those ministers did not know about it.
The Guardian and BBC write about it.
In the period from March 2020 to May 2021, in addition to the premiership, Morrison became the minister of health, finance, treasury, interior and natural resources. At the same time, not only the Australians did not know about it, but sometimes even the ministers themselves. There were no official announcements about this, and very few people in Morrisonʼs own government knew that he actually had unlimited powers.
All of this came to light after two journalists from Australiaʼs News Corp began promoting their book about Australiaʼs response to the pandemic. There they told about the fact that Morrison secretly headed several ministries.
The information about the former prime minister receiving such powers caused a significant response in Australia. Now Morrison is being asked to resign from the parliamentary seat. Even his former associate and head of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, Karen Andrews, publicly supported it.
Morrison himself does not deny that he actually received the authority of a number of ministers. He defends this decision by the fact that it was necessary in the conditions of the pandemic, especially due to the fact that any of the ministers could become infected with the coronavirus and lose the opportunity to work. Now he says that such a decision really turned out to be unnecessary, and over time he completely forgot about it.
The current prime minister of the country, Anthony Albanese, called Morrisonʼs actions "an unprecedented defeat of our democracy." He has already stated that he will seek legal advice on whether such decisions of the ex-prime minister violated the law.