Scott Morrison receives country's highest honour for leading Australia through crisis
The 30th prime minister has been appointed a Companion of the Order of Australia (AC) for his "eminent service" to the country and direction of the national COVID response, as part of the King's Birthday honours.
Mr Morrison was prime minister for just over three and a half years — between 2018 and 2022 — a period in which he said, "we were hit with pretty much every crisis you can imagine".
"From natural disasters to a global pandemic, once in a hundred years, and of course the threats we faced in our region, and a recession caused by that global pandemic," he said in a sit-down interview before his appointment was publicly announced.
"Through all of this Australians were just incredible and the one assumption I made is that that's how they would be — their character would pull them through and that's the basis on which we built the policies that helped us to achieve that."
The AC is the highest award in the King's Birthday Honour List, designed to recognise achievements "in service to Australia or humanity at large". Former prime ministers are typically appointed, but the time between their service and the recognition varies.
Mr Morrison's appointment — three years after he lost the prime ministership — also notes his contributions to international engagement, economic initiatives and national security, particularly through his role in securing the AUKUS agreement.
The latter was named by the former prime minister as one of his proudest achievements in office, among other work he said his government undertook to strengthen Australia's sovereignty.
"The resilience and sovereignty of the country, whether it was building our resilience against disasters of the future, having dealt with them at the time, our economic resilience, incredibly important, the way we bounced back after COVID was incredible, and we had invested heavily in our small business sector in particular," he said.
"It really was about protecting our sovereignty and building that up so we could deal with the significant challenges into the future."
Mr Morrison's term coincided with the height of the COVID pandemic, when international and state borders were slammed shut, Australians were locked down in their homes, and thousands of businesses were forced to close.
Just months after the emergence of the virus in China, the former Liberal leader made the at-the-time unprecedented call to ban international travellers from entering Australia — a decision that likely staved off the crisis locally but also left many Australians stranded overseas and others separated from friends and family abroad.
International borders remained closed for almost two years, only reopening to vaccinated travellers in early 2022 after the Omicron variant had swept the country.
During the pandemic, Mr Morrison, along with then-treasurer Josh Frydenberg, also oversaw the creation of the almost $90 billion JobKeeper scheme wage subsidy scheme, one of the largest economic support programs ever introduced.
Asked if he had any regrets from that era this week, Mr Morrison said you "don't get everything right, particularly when you face that many challenges".
"But I tend not to dwell too much on that, because frankly there was just the next challenge coming the next day," he said.
"You do the best job you can on the day and then you shake yourself off the next day and you do it all again."
Mr Morrison left parliament at the start of 2024, more than a year after losing the 2022 election to Labor prime minister Anthony Albanese.
The end of his prime ministership was mired in scandal, after it emerged he had secretly sworn himself into five additional ministries during the pandemic.
This week he described those secret positions as a "latent redundancy that was never active".
"These were unusual times and there were many things we did that were unusual," he said.
Since retiring from politics, Mr Morrison has continued to advocate internationally for the AUKUS partnership, which he said remains "as strong today as the day it was announced" despite the arrival of the second Trump administration in the United States.
He declined to comment on the current direction of the Liberal Party, which suffered one of the worst election defeats on record last month.
But on its future, he said the party's principles remain "as important as they ever have been".
"And they are ensuring a strong economy, a strong defence force, guaranteeing those services, responsible financial management — all of those things over the last 70 years and more have meant that Australia is in the strong position it is today," he said.
"And for most of that time it has been Coalition governments that have been in government."
Some 830 Australians — including Hollywood heavyweights, journalists, and community advocates — will be recognised in this year's King's Birthday Honours List.
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