The biggest political scandals of the past 30 years
Pet dogs, helicopters, lobsters and forbidden affairs have all created some of the biggest political scandals in Australia in the past 30 years.
Victoria
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DUAL CITIZENSHIP, 2017-18
It was the crisis a century in the making. Under the constitution, MPs can’t be dual citizens or entitled to citizenship rights elsewhere. Somehow, this was missed by all major parties, and 15 MPs and senators resigned or were forced out by the High Court, including deputy PM and secret Kiwi Barnaby Joyce.
BARNABY’S BABY, 2018
Rumours of Barnaby Joyce’s affair with staffer Vikki Campion were denied until pictures of a pregnant Campion were published. The deputy PM was the father, although he suggested paternity was a “grey area”, and he resigned after Malcolm Turnbull implemented a bonk ban between ministers and staff. It brought back memories of Kennett government minister Ian Smith, whose chief of staff fell pregnant during their secret affair, as well as federal Liberal MP Bob Woods, who received an 18-month suspended jail sentence for claiming a travel allowance when he was sleeping with a staffer.
CHOPPERGATE, 2015
Public frustration with expenses rorts soared to new heights when Speaker Bronwyn Bishop splurged $7200 on a helicopter trip between Melbourne and Geelong for a fundraiser. Days of damaging revelations followed but she was defended by Tony Abbott, who once described himself as the political love child of Bishop and John Howard. It hampered his leadership until Bishop had to resign.
RUDD/GILLARD/RUDD, 2010-13
On June 24, 2010, Australians went to bed with prime minister Kevin Rudd and woke the next day with prime minister Julia Gillard. The unprecedented switch was orchestrated by Labor MPs three years after Rudd returned them to power. Gillard challenged the still-popular PM for the leadership and Rudd resigned rather than face a contest. She moved swiftly to an election but was plagued by leaks and had to cobble together a minority government. Following a further three years of instability and sniping, Gillard was rolled and resigned to make way for Rudd’s return. He led Labor to the 2013 election and was trounced by Tony Abbott.
ABBOTT/TURNBULL/MORRISON, 2015-18
Tony Abbott was a brutally effective opposition leader during Labor’s chaos. But within two years of winning the top job, the Liberals were embroiled in an equally messy leadership fight, and Abbott was knocked off by Malcolm Turnbull. The ex-merchant banker cited Abbott’s dire poll numbers when he replaced him, but after scraping home in the 2016 election, Turnbull’s poll numbers also soured. His conservative protector Peter Dutton launched a shock bid for the leadership in 2018, with climate change a key issue, just as it was when Abbott defeated Turnbull to become opposition leader back in 2009. But Dutton’s bid flamed out and Scott Morrison came through the middle to win. Turnbull supported his Treasurer, although he later suspected Morrison played a double game.
LOBSTER WITH A MOBSTER, 2017
The headline said it all. Victorian Liberal leader Matthew Guy’s tough-on-crime campaign was permanently tainted when his secret Lobster Cave dinner with alleged mafia boss Tony Madafferi was exposed.
CHILDREN OVERBOARD, 2001
Border protection became a pivotal 2001 election issue after the SIEV 4 sailed into Australian waters and was intercepted. Some men on-board jumped or were thrown into the water during a heated dispute, and were later retrieved. Vision of a man holding a child over the water was also recorded. After the incident, Howard government ministers told the media there had been reports of threats made for children to be thrown overboard. Doubt was later cast on the reports. The issue flared after the Tampa crisis, which saw a Norwegian ship rescue hundreds of asylum seekers from a sinking Indonesian fishing boat before a standoff with Australian authorities who refused to let them land at Christmas Island.
CORNELIA RAU, 2004-05
Cornelia Rau was a German-born Australian who had been struggling with mental illness when she disappeared in 2004. She was found 10 months later, having been detained in a Brisbane prison and then South Australia’s Baxter detention centre. She received $2.6m in compensation and an apology from John Howard.
SAM DASTYARI, 2016-17
A rising Labor star, Sam Dastyari’s parliamentary career ended in a blaze of controversy. In 2016, he was forced off the frontbench after a political donor linked to the Chinese Communist Party paid a legal bill for him. Dastyari attempted to rehabilitate his reputation but was gone for good when it emerged he gave counter-surveillance advice to the donor and contradicted Labor’s South China Sea stance.
KENNETT DUMPED, 1999
When Labor’s Steve Bracks began the task of taking down Liberal goliath Jeff Kennett, not many gave him a chance. After seven years of furious reform by Kennett, it was the steady campaign in the bush that brought Bracks to power, but not on election night. The death of a Frankston East candidate and the close results meant voters waited a month for a winner - and even then it was in the hands of three independents.
BRACKS QUITS, 2007
Labor’s pin-up boy was riding high in the polls. But at a snap press conference one morning, Steve Bracks quit parliament. After 22 years as an MP, he wanted to spend more time with family, following son Nick’s drink driving incident. Bracks handed the baton to his loyal treasurer John Brumby, who was defeated at the 2010 election by Ted Baillieu.
OIL-FOR-WHEAT, 2005-06
After Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990, Iraq was hit with tough sanctions, although it could sell oil to purchase humanitarian supplies. The Australian Wheat Board stepped in to sell wheat to Iraq, but in a shocking twist, AWB was exposed for paying kickbacks to Saddam Hussein’s regime to secure the lucrative business.
UTEGATE, 2009
Malcolm Turnbull was convinced he had Kevin Rudd’s number. The Liberal leader accused the PM of corruption and lying to parliament over claims he tried to help a car dealer - who had given him a free ute - access the taxpayer-funded OzCar scheme. But Turnbull was humiliated when it emerged the email he used as evidence was forged by Treasury official Godwin Grech.
PETER SLIPPER, 2011-12
It was the defection that shaped the nation. Peter Slipper quit the Liberal Party to become Speaker in 2011, gifting Julia Gillard an extra vote on the floor of the House of Representatives - a crucial buffer when her minority government was struggling. The turncoat move blew up in 2012, however, when Slipper quit parliament over sexual harassment allegations. He denied the claims but apologised for lurid text messages.
CRAIG THOMSON, 2012-14
Julia Gillard couldn’t afford to lose any votes when she was in minority government. But backbench Labor MP Craig Thomson became toxic when it was revealed the former Health Services Union boss had spent union money on sex workers and fine dining. He was convicted but spared a jail term on appeal.
KNIGHTING PRINCE PHILIP, 2015
It was the Australia Day gong that marked the beginning of the end of Tony Abbott’s prime ministership. His captain’s call to award Australia’s highest honour to the Queen’s husband stunned colleagues and caused international embarrassment.
SECRET TAPES, 2013
A crisis in Victoria Police command infected the state government in 2013 when the Herald Sun published secret tapes that brought down Liberal premier Ted Baillieu. The bombshell recordings included conversations between Baillieu’s chief of staff Tony Nutt and Tristan Weston, a former adviser to Police Minister Peter Ryan, who had sought to undermine top cop Simon Overland. Baillieu referred Nutt to the corruption watchdog, renegade MP Geoff Shaw quit the government, and then Baillieu fell on his sword in a week of high drama.
ROBODEBT, 2016-2020
Robodebt was the Coalition’s welfare crackdown to raise billions through automated data-matching. It just wasn’t legal. Facing a class action, the Morrison government abandoned the scheme and repaid 373,000 Australians a massive $721m.
TRAVEL RORTS, 1997
John Howard came to office promising higher standards of ministerial conduct. Those standards meant a rocky start for his ministry - Howard lost three ministers in a week over taxpayer-funded travel claims.
SPORTS RORTS, 1994, 2020
In 1994, Labor Sport Minister Ros Kelly lost her job after the Auditor-General pinged the government’s administration of grants for sporting facilities. History repeated when the audit office targeted Nationals Sport Minister Bridget McKenzie’s allocation of grants at the 2019 election. She resigned because she breached the ministerial code by giving a grant to a Victorian shooting club without declaring she was a member.
EVANS AND KERNOT, 1997
Cheryl Kernot was the leader of the Australian Democrats - a former political force in the Senate - when she surprised the country by defecting to Labor in 1997. The surprise turned to shock when it emerged Kernot had been having an affair with Gareth Evans, Labor’s deputy leader.
DAMIEN MANTACH, 2015
Liberals were licking their wounds from the 2014 state election when state director Damien Mantach was busted stealing $1.5m from party coffers. He used false invoices to take the cash amid a personal crisis, and was jailed for five years.
CARMEN LAWRENCE, 1995-97
Carmen Lawrence was the first woman to lead an Australian state (Western Australia), and was once touted to become our first female PM. But her shift to Canberra came unstuck when a royal commission found she lied about her knowledge of a politically charged Family Court scandal. She was charged with perjury and acquitted.
ROYAL COMMISSIONS, 2013-15
When Tony Abbott won the 2013 election, he turned the blowtorch on Labor, calling royal commissions into the “pink batts” home insulation program linked to the deaths of several workers, as well as the governance of trade unions. Kevin Rudd gave evidence at the pink batts inquiry, the first Australian PM to appear before a royal commission, while the trade union probe grilled new Labor leader Bill Shorten.
PETER REITH, 2000
Senior Liberal minister Peter Reith hit the headlines when a $50,000 bill was run up on his ministerial phone card (remember them?), including $1000 in calls made by his son. Reith eventually paid back the money, despite mystery over who was responsible for the fraud. It followed controversy over Reith’s role in a plan to secretly train soldiers in Dubai as a union-busting workforce at the height of the 1998 waterfront dispute.
BRANCH-STACKING, 2020
On a Sunday night, 60 Minutes aired claims of “industrial scale” branch-stacking against Labor powerbroker Adem Somyurek, and secret recordings of his sexist and homophobic remarks. It took less than 24 hours for Daniel Andrews to blast his factional rival out of his cabinet, and for Somyurek to quit the party. After another 24 hours, two of Somyurek’s supporters were gone from cabinet too.
EAST TIMOR SPYING, 2004
It took almost a decade for this scandal to go public, but in 2004, the Australian Secret Intelligence Service bugged East Timorese government offices to help Australia in negotiations over maritime boundaries that determined ownership of lucrative oil and gas fields. Legal action against Witness K - a former ASIS spy who exposed the operation - and his lawyer for breaching national security laws continues today.
FIRE SERVICES SAGA, 2016-2020
“This dispute had to come to an end and I ended it.” That’s what Daniel Andrews said after he forced Jane Garrett out of his cabinet and sacked the CFA board to ram through a union-friendly pay deal. But the dispute dragged on for years, ending the careers of dozens of emergency services leaders, sparking a total restructure of Victoria’s fire services and prompting a (continuing) corruption probe.
PATCH AND TED, 2016
State parliament had gone to the dogs when Corrections Minister Steve Herbert lost his frontbench job for using his taxpayer-driver to chauffeur his pet pooches Patch and Ted.
RED SHIRTS, 2015-2018
Labor won the 2014 state election with a field campaign driven by operatives in “red shirts” who were part-paid by the taxpayer, having also worked for MPs. The Herald Sun exposed the rort in 2015 and Labor was eventually forced to pay back $388,000 after the Ombudsman found the scheme was an “artifice” that was “wrong”.
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