Australian Atheists Forum

We brought word last week that former prime minister Scott Morrison had sought to bathe his overthrow of Malcolm Turnbull as Liberal leader in a divine light. But it now looks like ScoMo might need some help from on high with the underwhelming local sales of his memoir.

The blaze of free publicity accompanying the publication of Plans For Your Good: A Prime Minister’s Testimony of God’s Faithfulness, had CBD thinking the man dubbed “Scotty from Marketing” had not lost his touch.

So you’d think after that deluge of free plugs in print TV, radio and online, copies of the thing would be flying off the shelves, right?

Well, chatter among publishing types that the book has been a flop in Australian mainstream retail and online outlets, sent us searching for hard data.

According to the most authoritative sales index, Nielsen BookScan, in the week to May 18 Plans sold 218 copies in the 1300 Australian booksellers monitored by the global analytics giant, putting the nation’s 30th prime minister at 827th spot on Nielsen’s bestseller list for the week. Oh, and the hardback notched up one sale on the Nielsen index.

cott Morrison has yet another new job — and like some of his other post-Parliament gigs, it’s tangentially linked to the AUKUS submarine pact he helped set up as prime minister.

The Age reports Morrison is listed as a strategic advisor at a newly created venture called the Seafloor Minerals Fund, alongside ex-US secretary of state Mike Pompeo. Both men are also behind venture capital firm DYNE, set up to support the strategic goals of AUKUS, and which also has interests in deep sea mining, according to the story.

Crikey figured it was time to have another look at Morrison’s post-politics career.

As Australian National University historian Frank Bongiorno has pointed out, Morrison is the only former prime minister other than Malcolm Turnbull who was originally elected to Parliament after 2004. That’s significant because that’s when the Howard government, under pressure from then-Labor leader Mark Latham, abolished the generous pension-for-life scheme politicians had previously received if they had served in Parliament for more than eight years.

Unlike Turnbull, Morrison is not a millionaire, nor is the 56-year-old ready to retire, so he really did need to find a viable career after quitting politics.

Australian Financial Review political editor Phillip Coorey reported last year Morrison was “relatively well off [but] has a Sydney mortgage and is paying school fees for his two children”. His salary as prime minister was $549,250. As a backbencher, following the 2022 election loss, he would have earned a salary of $225,750.