Scott Morrison has declared politics is a “brutal business” as he seeks to downplay the leaking of a text message from the deputy prime minister, Barnaby Joyce, branding him a “hypocrite and a liar”.
Speaking at the i4Give Day memorial service in Sydney, which commemorates the young victims killed in the Oatlands crash in 2020, the prime minister also spoke of his Christian faith, saying he had “easily” forgiven Joyce for the damaging text message leaked on Friday.
“Politics is a brutal business,” Morrison said on Sunday.
“If you can’t accept and understand each other’s frailties, and be forgiving in those circumstances, then frankly, that says a lot more about you than it does about others.
“That is what my faith has always informed me to do … as it has so many others, and I’m thankful for that.
“Politicians, they’re no different to anyone else. And people say things, and people feel things, people get angry, people get bitter. Of course they do. That’s all of us. And so who am I to be judging someone else?”
Morrison said “no one is immune” to having unpleasant things said about them, but the more important question was how to respond. He said he hoped the lesson from the i4Give day of “understanding human frailty” was heeded.
“Human frailty, it’s real. We all share it. We all live with it. And we all need to be more understanding of it.”
He insisted that he and Joyce could continue to work together, saying he would not be distracted by last week’s leaked messages, which came after revelations of another text exchange between the former New South Wakes premier Gladys Berejiklian and an unnamed Liberal minister, in which Morrison was called a “horrible, horrible person”, a “complete psycho”.
He insisted that none of the leaks had come from within his cabinet.
“What people send around in texts I frankly could not care less about,” he said.
“Australians are far more interested in their jobs and their lives than what people are sending in text messages to each other,” he said.
Senior ministers also rallied around Morrison on Sunday ahead of the parliamentary sitting week, dismissing the series of text messages that questioned his trustworthiness.
The environment minister Sussan Ley said that while it had been a difficult week for the government, she insisted the chance of any leadership spill against Morrison or Joyce was “absolutely none”.
“The most important issue is the unity in the Morrison government,” Ley told Sky News on Sunday.
“As a minister that has sat in three cabinets with three prime ministers … this is the most united cabinet table I have sat at.”
When questioned on whether Morrison remained an asset for the Liberal party, the home affairs minister Karen Andrews said the prime minister was a “great campaigner” who had connected well with voters at the 2019 election, when he defied expectations of a Labor victory.
“It is a different set of circumstances now, but the Scott Morrison that was there a couple of years ago back in 2019 is the same Scott Morrison that we have now,” Andrews told the ABC’s Insiders program.
“We need to get him out into the community, out in Victoria, Queensland, New South Wales, all of the states across Australia. We all need to be doing that. It has been an incredibly difficult time for everyone and we all have to make sure that we are properly connecting.”
When asked if she had ever known Morrison to tell a lie, Andrews said that had not been her experience, and he had only ever been “decent and respectful”.
“I’ve had a couple of robust discussions with him, as you would expect, but I’ve always found him to be respectful to me, to listen to what I had to say.
“He doesn’t always agree with it, but we just work our way through it.”
Andrews also said that she was confident that Joyce and Morrison would be able to work together cooperatively “in the national interest”, despite the damaging leak of the message sent by Joyce as a backbencher in 2019.
In the message, which was sent to a third party to be conveyed to former Liberal staffer Brittany Higgins, Joyce said he did not “get along” with Morrison.
“He is a hypocrite and a liar from my observations and that is over a long time,” Joyce said in the screenshot of a message, dated 22 March last year.
“I have never trusted him, and I dislike how earnestly [he] rearranges the truth to a lie.”
Joyce disavowed the message on Saturday, saying it had not been based on his recent relationship with Morrison, with whom he has been in parliament since 2007, and worked with in cabinet for close to a decade.
“My view from the backbench about the prime minister was based on assumption and commentary, not from a one on one working relationship,” Joyce said.
“From a one on one working relationship, I found a man who has honoured every agreement that he’s made with me.”
On Friday, Morrison accepted an apology from Joyce, and knocked back the offer of his resignation.
“I understand Barnaby was in a different headspace last year, both professionally and personally, and so I know he genuinely no longer feels this way. Relationships change over time. Politicians are humans beings too. We all have our frailties and none of us are perfect.”
The shadow treasurer, Jim Chalmers, seized on the divisions, labelling the government “a smoking ruin of division and disunity and dysfunction”.
“The government seems to spend all of its time dishing out free character assessments of each other.”
