A politician’s character is important if they are in the running to become prime minister
BILL Shorten wants the public to buy into his Budget reply vision in the same week he has been exposed for misleading that same public in the dual citizenship debacle.
Opinion
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A politician’s character matters. It mattered that Barnaby Joyce claimed to be the conservative leader of the National Party, upholding Catholic family values, when in fact he got his media adviser pregnant, away from his wife and four daughters.
A politician’s character is particularly important if they are in the running to become the prime minister of our country.
Bill Shorten has this week been exposed for the ease with which he blatantly mislead the public by insisting over and over again that Labor’s strict vetting processes meant his MPs were above scrutiny.
If deceiving the public over a period of eight months wasn’t damaging enough, Shorten then refused to apologise for misleading Australians when asked at a press conference, and showed no contrition for his deception when it was laid bare on Wednesday by the High Court’s damning judgment of Katy Gallagher.
Instead, he had the sheer audacity to blame the legal advice from ALP’s lawyers, the High Court and the Australian Electoral Commission. But the ruse played on the Australian public is greater than it first seems. The ALP has known since the Canavan judgment was handed down by the High Court in October its defence that MPs had taken all reasonable steps to renounce their foreign citizenship would no longer hold.
The October judgment clarified that taking all reasonable steps was applicable to extreme circumstances, such as in the case of countries that refuse to relinquish citizens. It did not apply to MPs who had simply sent in a renunciation form too late.
Yet, with echoes of Mediscare, Shorten and his team continued to utter false statements that their MPs had taken all reasonable steps to renounce foreign allegiances.
In these six months, it cost taxpayers more than $1.5 million to pay the salaries, hotel accommodation, flights and other travel expenses of the Labor MPs and crossbencher Rebekha Sharkie. This is an abuse of taxpayer funds. Those MPs were not entitled to sit in the Parliament.
This was not simply a matter of Shorten gaining the upper political hand and squeezing Turnbull’s neck by forcing him to withstand the heat of the New England and Bennelong by-elections at a time his leadership was under pressure.
Shorten had an obligation to comply with the constitution, as Paul Kelly pointed out yesterday.
Former Greens senator Scott Ludlam respected it, as did his colleague Larissa Waters and Fiona Nash, who stepped down when not even an eyebrow had been raised in her direction.
Shorten’s disregard for abiding by the Constitution is unacceptable.
It would be unacceptable for any politician, but is especially so from the man who is asking the country to elect him prime minister.
A politician’s character matters.
As a political editor in the press gallery, I have a responsibility to shine a light on how the Opposition Leader operates, including his attempts to intimidate and bully those reporting on him and Labor.
I have already disclosed the aggressive, private text messages I received from Shorten’s office last year when we were investigating the possible dual citizenship of Katy Gallagher and other Labor MPs.
One text about a story on both Liberal and Labor MPs under a citizenship cloud said “it’s embarrassing and we’ll take the piss out of it tomorrow”.
A question to their office about another MP’s citizenship was met with the text: “This is so f…ing stupid.”
These tactics, which I understand have also been used on other journalists, were an attempt to shut down reporting about Labor’s obligation to comply with section 44 of the Constitution at a politically inconvenient time for Shorten.
It was not an isolated occasion.
On the weekend, News Corp investigative journalist Charles Miranda, who spends months of the year reporting from war zones and spent the past few weeks in Afghanistan, reported a story that Shorten and Liberal Senate President Scott Ryan missed a dinner with Diggers in the Middle East on Anzac Day and instead went shopping at one of Dubai’s famous shopping malls.
These are the undisputed facts about the story:
Defence Vice Admiral David Johnston and a select group of female officers were expecting Shorten as a VIP guest at a dinner in the ADF Middle East headquarters mess room. Two tables had been set up, with a place for him and Senator Ryan.
Shorten and Ryan did not attend the dinner. They left early — many hours before their flight was due to depart for Australia — and visited a Dubai shopping mall.
These are facts that can’t be twisted or changed or altered or — as much as Shorten may wish it — erased from history.
There can be debate about what Defence told Shorten, whether he knew the dinner was still on, why the Diggers weren’t told the dinner was cancelled — and we’ll be putting in Freedom of Information requests to get to the bottom of the story.
But the facts, as presented above, are accurate.
Yet, Shorten tried to kill off the story with bullying tactics similar to those used to try to shut down our questions over Katy Gallagher and other MPs.
On the eve of it being published, Shorten lost his temper and issued a threat: He would never give this newspaper stories again if we ran Charles Miranda’s article.
Never mind that we published 11 front pages on Barnaby Joyce, or ran a recent story splashed across page one on Turnbull’s million-dollar investment in a short-selling fund that bets against Australian retailers.
It is a wonderful thing for democracy that The Daily Telegraph does not succumb to such pressure.
The next day, Labor advisers told journalists that the story was wrong.
Journalists swallowed the lie and the story was not pursued to its full conclusion.
A robust opposition is essential for democracy, to keep the government honest. But the opposition needs to be accountable, too.
We have grown accustomed to trusting the word of our politicians. It is not a stretch to say that currently, Shorten’s word cannot be trusted.