Liberal party revives old tradition of screaming about ‘dirt units’ over questions on Peter Dutton’s GFC share trading | Samantha Maiden
They make it sound like someone’s been crawling through their wheelie bin or peeking in their window at night with binoculars, writes Samantha Maiden.
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Dirt units get a bad rap in Australian political life.
The minute someone digs up something interesting about a politician, the wounded party cries “dirt unit!”.
And so it was that the Liberal Party started screaming the words this week when questions were raised about Peter Dutton’s share-trading during the GFC.
They make it sound like someone’s been crawling through their wheelie bin or peeking in their window at night with binoculars or stealing their bras and undies off the Hills hoist.
If only it was that interesting. Nine times out of 10 it’s about the boring job of going through years of declarations to parliament or lands title searches.
It’s not really that boring though. Personally, I’ve never met a lands title search I didn’t like.
Go look at my stories on Anthony Albanese’s property empire. You don’t see the Liberal Party complaining about that.
It’s all publicly available stuff, so to the critics I say, “Suck it up princess. Have a cry.”
And stop claiming every story you don’t like is from a “dirt unit”.
Just deal with the questions in a professional manner.
As an aside, we approached Mr Dutton on Thursday about his share-trading during the global financial crisis. He ended up asking for five days to offer a detailed response and check records.
That’s fine and dandy except that at the end of all that we got two sentences, one of which was about “dirt units”, on Monday.
His response on Wednesday was stronger and more detailed and he should have adopted that position from the start.
But the sad truth is dirt units ain’t what they used to be.
Anthony Albanese is well-known for having resisted having a dirt unit, AKA opposition research in government, which I believe was a mistake.
Indeed, I have a soft spot for so-called dirt units of any political persuasion.
It’s called research. Plenty of political staffers I know have worked in dirt units.
And there’s a lot to learn from their investigations.
Funnily enough, they like to call them Democracy Enhancement Units.
There might be something to that. A few years ago, the online news outlet Crikey asserted that dirt units were bad because they dig up stupid things political candidates said on the internet.
“There’s never been a more exciting time to be part of a political dirt unit,” the author said, blaming the internet footprint of people born after the 1980s.
It followed two candidates getting into trouble for homophobic and racist posts.
“As appalling and tasteless as his posts were, his excuse – that they were made seven years ago and that his views have since developed – is, on face value, believable.”
Maybe. But then where is the harm in knowing about it? The article went on to claim nobody would run for political office anymore because of Facebook and Snapchat.
Turn it up. Plenty of people are still running for office.
The golden era for dirt units was under Bill Shorten when his researchers secretly orchestrated the downfall of Speaker Bronwyn Bishop in the Choppergate scandal and the demise of former health minister Sussan Ley by leaking a dossier of travel records to newspaper outlets to engineer a political crisis.
Now, on the one hand, you can certainly say that was politically motivated.
But readers were rightly outraged.
Using a taxpayer-funded helicopter to fly from Melbourne to Geelong was stupid and deserved to be exposed.
In my book Party Animals, there’s a whole chapter on dirt units.
Leaked emails outlined the political research unit’s success in triggering two of the biggest scandals to rock the Abbott and Turnbull government – involving Bronwyn Bishop and Sussan Ley – which weakened Tony Abbott’s leadership and also sparked a major review of travel rules.
The book revealed that for six years, Mr Shorten’s office was running one of the most methodical, relentless and successful investigative journalism units in Australia.
But rather than journalists, it was political staffers who prepared the material, which also targeted Richard Di Natale’s payment of au pairs and the man who led the royal commission into unions, Dyson Heydon.
Journalists should study the work of dirt units not because it’s dirty but because it’s learning how to research and use publicly available material.
Research units gathering damaging material on political enemies are hardly the domain of Labor alone.
During the 2016 federal campaign, the Liberal Party’s negative research unit effectively weaponised Mr Shorten’s attendance at the wedding of Chinese donor Huang Xiangmo by sending photographs and video to journalists.
John Macgowan, a former Liberal staffer seconded to the unit, revealed how they obtained the video of Mr Shorten at the wedding. Where did they obtain the “damning” vision?
Mr Macgowan confirms it was from all the other Liberals who attended the same wedding.
“There was a whole table of Liberals there,” he laughs.
“Stuff like that, we were trying to do that every day. The real fights happen down on the ground, but you don’t want people turning on the 6pm news seeing your guy getting smashed.”
Mr Macgowan also confirmed his involvement with the leak of the NSW Labor leader Michael Daley video where he complained about Asians taking young Australians’ jobs.
The leaked video destroyed Labor’s campaign in the March 2019 state election.
“One of the kids in one of the ministers’ offices – I don’t know how he found it, but he made a meme,” Macgowan said.
“I rang him up and said, ‘How did you find that?’ We found it when it had 40 views [on YouTube].”
The video was taken down before it was leaked with devastating effect during the NSW state election.
The dirt unit strikes again.
But don’t make the mistake of assuming all negative stories are from dirt units or that dirt units are irredeemable and all bad.
If they were, political parties wouldn’t always have them.
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