The former prime minister, Scott Morrison, has announced that he will retire from parliament at the end of February.
Morrison made the announcement in a statement posted on Facebook. He said he would “take on new challenges in the global corporate sector and spend more time with my family.”
Morrison’s Facebook post today
The 1041st member of the House of Representatives, Morrison entered parliament as the member for Cook at the 2007 election, his arrival coinciding with the defeat of the Howard government. He was re-elected in 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019 and 2022. The precise date of his resignation is not known but he will have served for 16 years and 3 months.
First appointed to the shadow ministry on September 22, 2008 by Malcolm Turnbull, who had replaced Brendan Nelson in a Liberal Party leadership ballot, Morrison served as the Shadow Minister for Housing and Local Government and a number of other portfolios until the coalition won office in 2013.
In government, Morrison was first Minister for Immigration and Border Protection, charged with “stopping the boats”. He subsequently served as Minister for Social Services, before becoming Treasurer when Malcolm Turnbull overthrew Tony Abbott in September 2015. Morrison, in turn, supplanted Turnbull as prime minister in August 2018. The additional ministries he had himself secretly sworn into during the pandemic are itemised on his Parliamentary Handbook page:
Morrison’s ministerial appointments as recorded in the Parliamentary Handbook
Just on nine months after becoming prime minister, Morrison led the coalition to victory in the 2019 election, defeating Bill Shorten and the ALP. The “miracle” win saw the coalition’s majority double from one to two.
Following the Covid-19 pandemic during 2020-21, Morrison led the coalition to a severe defeat in May 2022. The Liberal Party lost 18 seats, 10 the ALP, 6 to the Teal independents, and 2 to the Greens in metropolitan Brisbane. The loss of the Teal seats – the formerly safe Liberal party electorates of Kooyong, Goldstein, Wentworth, North Sydney, Mackellar and Curtin – in addition to earlier losses in Warringah, Mayo and Indi, posed an identity dilemma for the Liberals that has not yet been resolved.
Morrison’s retirement will mean a by-election in Cook, the fourth by-election of this parliamentary term. Created in 1969, Cook has only been held once by the Labor Party. Ray Thorburn won it for the ALP in 1972 and 1974, during the Whitlam government’s time in office.
At the last election, Morrison withstood a 6.58% two-party-preferred swing to hold Cook with 62.44%. The Liberal Party’s primary vote fell 8.17% to 55.53%. The ALP’s primary vote languished on 24.99%. The result of this year’s by-election is seemingly a foregone conclusion.
Morrison’s resignation statement on his website: