Book Review: Plans for Your Good: A Prime Minister’s Testimony of God’s Faithfulness

Former Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s recent book gives readers insight into his Christian evangelical thinking. However, outside of AUKUS and standing up to “China’s bullying,” it has limited value for those who are primarily interested in foreign policy.

Plans for Your Good is an unusual book for a former Australian prime minister to write. With a few exceptions, most Australian prime ministers have followed some version of the Christian faith. However, Scott Morrison is unique with his evangelical faith, not confined to Pentecostalism as he says himself.

One could approach this book by asking how it adds to an understanding of Morrison’s prime ministership, giving particular attention to his theological perspective. It appears that the intended readership is Christian evangelicals in the United States (US). Morrison links himself with fellow evangelicals, such as former Vice President Mike Pence, who contributes a foreword, and former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who has written a recommendation. The book is written in US English, with explanations of Australian terminology (sheep station equals ranch) and situations (cricket explained in baseball terms). The assumption is that US evangelicals will find inspiration in Morrison’s faith journey as Australia’s prime minister, a contemporary Antipodean version of John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, but without the Slough of Despond.

From the perspective of foreign policy, the book offers little on how Morrison approached key issues, except on AUKUS. Morrison’s approach towards China, in relation to AUKUS, echoes those of Pence and Pompeo in their well-known speeches criticising China. While noting Xi Jinping’s initial “charm offensive,” Morrison emphasises China’s coercive strategy to achieve its “destiny of hegemonic power in the Indo-Pacific.” Australia’s long-term interests, according to Morrison, meant that “We had to stand up for ourselves, face our fears, and not capitulate to China’s bullying.” From this perspective, AUKUS was a means for strengthening Australian security in relation to China.

Apart from the difficulties in implementing the contract for conventional submarines from France, Morrison argues that these submarines would not have had the same capacity to deter China as nuclear-powered submarines. Morrison explains that nuclear-powered submarines can stay submerged for longer than conventional submarines without saying that the former would also be able to operate much closer to China, thus upping the ante in the event of conflict. Why couldn’t the French contract have been modified to allow for nuclear-powered submarines? One of the reasons for delay had been the complexities of modifying the design of the French nuclear-powered Barracuda class submarine to meet the Australian requirements for a conventional submarine.

Morrison goes to some length to justify his dealings with President Emmanuel Macron. Morrison claims that Macron knew what was going on, citing the way in which French officialdom went into “overdrive” in liaising with the Australian defence bureaucracy after Morrison signalled to Macron that the contract was not necessarily a “done deal.” Obviously, being labelled a liar by Macron hurt. Morrison’s justification for not saying directly what was being planned was that France would have mounted a massive political exercise to block AUKUS, focusing on French relations with the United States.

It is surprising that Morrison does not mention President Joe Biden’s requirement that there be bipartisan agreement on AUKUS in Australia and that he does not discuss his success in winning Labor support.

The discussion of AUKUS reveals that Morrison had been concerned about the French submarine project since late 2018 and re-visited the issue after the election in May 2019. He discussed the matter with his chief of staff, Dr John Kunkel, and senior defence adviser, Jimmy Kiploks, with the latter assigned to have discussions with “key people” in the Department of Defence in late 2019 and early 2020. They concluded that nuclear-powered submarines were feasible with the cooperation of the US. A “small project team” in Defence worked on the plan over the next year. These efforts led to Morrison’s meeting with Biden and Prime Minister Boris Johnson at the Group of Seven (G7) meeting in Cornwall in June 2021, ahead of the AUKUS announcement in September 2021.

Morrison’s account helps to “flesh out” the process whereby AUKUS came about. It provides an insight into his thinking and indicates some, but not all, of the steps involved. While Morrison emphasises his concerns about China, his approach is in line with the tradition of working closely with Australia’s “great and powerful friends.” He notes that “There are no three nations in the world that share a greater trust than Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States.” While good relations with France were desirable, this level of trust did not exist.

At the end of his discussion of AUKUS, Morrison returns to his theological perspective. It wasn’t that God told him what to do over AUKUS. In Morrison’s perspective, God gave him “strength and conviction” in pursuing what he determined to be right.

Morrison’s theological perspective focuses very much on the individual Christian’s relationship with God. It was not so much about having God on his side but, instead, aspiring to be on God’s side. He eschews discussion of how Christian faith relates to issues going beyond the individual. His faith gives him confidence, enabling a certain resilience even when he makes mistakes. However, beyond that sense of grace, Morrison does not elaborate on how that faith might relate to collective issues. He falls back on rationales such as “national interest.” But how does national interest look from a Christian perspective? There is a whole array of Christian thinkers who have contributed to this topic. Reinhold Niebuhr, for example, upheld the US position during the early Cold War on Christian realist grounds, but later became a critic of the US in the Vietnam war because the US had succumbed to hubris.

Morrison wants to distinguish himself from Christians he sees as identifying too much with the liberal perspective. He sees liberal churches as simply adopting secularist values. This is too simple. It is true that such churches, perhaps exemplified by the Uniting Church where Morrison was involved in his younger years, are often more politically progressive. However, such political positions generally arise from theological reflection, focusing particularly on social justice. This is not to say that other political perspectives cannot arise from theological reflection. Nevertheless, that reflection needs to extend beyond the individual to society more broadly, including the international community.

While this book might have some appeal to Christian evangelicals in the US, and provides some insight into Morrison as a person, except for AUKUS, it has limited value if one’s main interest is foreign policy.

This is a review of Scott Morrison’s Plans for Your Good: A Prime Minister’s Testimony of God’s Faithfulness (W Publishing, 2024). ISBN 9781400340286.

Derek McDougall is a Professorial Fellow at the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Melbourne.

This review is published under a Creative Commons License and may be republished with attribution.