We Look At The Possible Reasons Why Scott Morrison Made Himself A Shiny Trophy For Stopping The Boats

We have some theories, by which we mean baseless speculation accompanied by cheap visual jokes.

Thanks to a piece in the New York Times in which current Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison waxed rhapsodic about his new BFF Donald Trump – a man who fondly refers to ScoMo as “who?” – Australia discovered something about which they were not previously aware.

The PM’s office contains a little metal trophy in the stylised shape of a fishing vessel with the slogan “I Stopped These” thereon.

Just let that little fact sink in for a second, thanks to this pic by Australian Associated Press photojournalist Lukas Coch.

Here's the trophy asylum seeker boat the prime minister has as a reminder he stopped them.https://t.co/kXUJHSDtg8 pic.twitter.com/ai9NqHDQ92

— BuzzFeedOz Politics (@BuzzFeedOzPol) September 19, 2018

And we could spend some time pointing out that Morrison didn’t “stop” the boats so much as “redefined what constituted a ‘boat arrival’, and also stopped reporting when boats arrived, and wrapped the whole thing in secrecy”.

(As the Guardian accurately pointed out: “In reality the boats have not stopped – with several making their way to Australian territory including the Cocos Keeling Islands, Saibai Island, and late last month, far-north Queensland.“)

Or we could notice that the trophy is objectively hideous – honestly, why is the text off-centre like that? And was that the default font? Did he knock this up in Microsoft Paint before embedding it in Word and emailing it to a TAFE metalworking class before cutting their funding?

But frankly, the existence of this trophy raises so many other questions. Like:

1. Does he have Memento-style memory loss?

Few adults would bother commissioning a statuette of a ClipArt boat, but maybe Morrison was looking for a memory jogger less low-rent than physical tattoos. The tight framing of the photo gives few clues, but maybe he has a bunch of other objects explaining their significance to Scozza.