It is close to the election and I am not a vengeful or vindictive person I dont background and I dont want to be seen as someone who is out to exact revenge.
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I want to win the next election. And the one thing Barnaby Joyce and Michael McCormack agree on is that that has to be our priority. I know its mine.
Mr Joyce sent the text to a person last March to have it forwarded to former Liberal adviser Brittany Higgins after she went public with her allegation she was raped by a colleague in a ministers office in Parliament House.
Mr Joyce said in the message that he and Mr Morrison did not get along, adding: He is a hypocrite and a liar from my observations and that is over a long time. I have never trusted him and I dislike how he earnestly rearranges the truth to a lie.
The Prime Ministers office sought to minimise the political damage by revealing the text exchange late on Friday along with statements from Mr Morrison and Mr Joyce when The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age had obtained the text.
Mr Joyce held a brief press conference on Saturday to apologise for the text and cancelled his scheduled appearance on the ABCs Insiders program on Sunday morning to avoid further questions, leaving Home Affairs Minister Karen Andrews to take his place.
It wasnt Barnabys finest hour by a long stretch but he apologised, Ms Andrews said.
Mr Morrison said all Australians knew that people got angry and bitter at times and that the best approach was to forgive them.
That is what my faith has always informed me to do the same as it has so many others, and Im thankful for that, he said.
Appearing in western Sydney to mark i4give Day with Daniel and Leila Abdallah, who lost three children and a niece when a drunk driver struck them two years ago, Mr Morrison said everyone needed to understand human frailty.
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Im sure if anyone went out there and checked what everybody has ever said about them, including all of us here, you will find people who will say not the most pleasant things about you. No one is immune to that, he said.
The question is, how do you respond to it as an individual? And today, on i4give Day, I think we get a very good lesson about that. I think this day is all about understanding human frailty. Human frailty, its real. We all share it. We all live with it and we all need to be more understanding of it.
Labor has made Mr Morrisons character a dominant theme in its attacks on the government after the Prime Minister was called a liar by French President Emmanuel Macron and former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull, with the attacks likely to intensify in Parliament this week.
This government is a smoking ruin of division, disunity and dysfunction and ordinary Australians are paying the price for that, Mr Chalmers said on Sunday.
Weve got frightened and vulnerable people in aged care, weve got small business owners worrying about customers coming through the door, weve got working families worried about the skyrocketing costs of living and real wages going backwards, and the government seems to spend all of its time dishing out free character assessments of each other.
There is no salvaging this government. A change in the Liberal leader or the National leader wont do it. The only way to chart the path for a better future for this country is to change the government.
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Not the time for revenge: McCormack urges Nationals to focus on election - Sydney Morning Herald
