Political dirt units are meant to stay in the shadows. This week, they came out

Labor MP Andrew Charlton said the quiet part out loud on Wednesday night, when he revealed the prime minister’s office was behind a story published this week about Peter Dutton’s share trades during the Global Financial Crisis.

Charlton had gone on the ABC’s 7.30 to criticise the opposition leader’s share purchases on the eve of the government’s bank bailout in 2009, following a story that had dogged Dutton since being published by news.com.au on Tuesday.

Peter Dutton has accused Labor’s dirt unit of fuelling questions about his financial activities.Credit: Rhett Wyman

Then questions turned to when Charlton first learnt of the facts that had made his “jaw fall to the floor”. The first-term MP admitted it had been more than a week. And by whom was he told of this shocking new intelligence? “By the prime minister’s office, who was looking at it,” Charlton said.

The Parramatta MP confirmed what Dutton had been saying: the story about his share purchases had come from the prime minister’s “dirt unit” – the group of political staffers tasked with digging up unfavourable material about their rivals and delivering it to the public, often through the mainstream media.

“As Andrew Charlton pointed out last night ... the prime minister’s office were shopping this around last week, and they’ve shopped it to a number of journos, one’s picked it up, but this is how the government operates, and they’re throwing mud,” Dutton said on Seven’s Sunrise on Thursday.

The Albanese government is not the first to throw mud at an opposition during a federal election campaign and hope it sticks, although usually they seek to keep fingerprints off the final product. Political dirt units, which are never called that by the parties that employ them, have been deployed by successive governments since at least the Fraser government in the 1980s.

Once they’ve found something, they typically hand that information to a journalist. Reporters at The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age are sometimes approached in this way. Like other media organisations, journalists then interrogate motives behind supplying the information, verify the content and, if it is true and newsworthy, seek the subject’s side of the story. (This masthead’s reporting on Dutton’s property interests did not stem from any government sources.)

John MacGowan, a former Liberal party dirt unit staffer who is now a private consultant, says dirt units are a cost-effective way for political parties to earn media coverage that multiplies. Ideally, information is reported by a trusted source and picked up by commercial media, where undecided voters will hear it. “Five guys sitting in a dark room costs less than $200,000 for a campaign, whereas an advertising campaign costs $30 million. The whole principle is cheap work for free content,” he says.

Albanese initially bucked the tradition, opting not to have a dirt unit after being elected in 2022 and vowing to “do politics better”. But Labor sources said that changed halfway through his term, when Labor’s honeymoon came to an end and it started dropping in the polls.

Dirt units dug up the information behind stories targeting Liberals Bronwyn Bishop and Sussan Ley, and state Labor leader Michael Daley.Credit: News Corp / Jamie Brown

The Labor government now has a “research unit” that few people will talk about, but several staffers confirm exist. They look up publicly available information about opponents, such as company, real estate and parliamentary records.

These units have operated under different names over the years. In the Rudd-Gillard era, it was the “caucus committee support and training unit”. Howard’s team was the “government members’ secretariat”. Hawke and Keating were less coy; their “national media liaison service” was referred to as the “aNiMaLS”.

In the later days of the Fraser government, a staffer in every capital city would listen to opposition MPs on radio each day to detect any contradictions in their messaging. This still happens – political staffers will walk around the federal press gallery to hand out printed quotes that highlight, for example, a disagreement over a policy between two senior frontbenchers. But these days, the dirt that has the most impact often comes from trawling MPs’ declarations, political donations, social media histories, and videos or photos taken on smartphones.

Dirt units are not limited to the party in power, although the government of the day has more resources. “It’s a bit of a luxury to have people full-time on that stuff in opposition,” says one former adviser, who worked in opposition research for Labor. “It’s something staff will do across shadow ministers offices. Any full-time people would be in the leader’s office, where there is a bit more flexibility. They usually have vague titles around research, and they’ll probably be doing other things as well.”

Despite being in opposition, former Labor leader Bill Shorten had a renowned research unit. His team’s scalps include former speaker Bronwyn Bishop, who ended up resigning over the Choppergate scandal, and former health minister Sussan Ley, who left the frontbench after purchasing a Gold Coast apartment from a Liberal party donor during a taxpayer-funded work trip. After a time in the wilderness, Ley is back on the front bench.

These operations are turbocharged during an election campaign, when campaign headquarters bring in extra staff. The priority is digging around newly pre-selected candidates. “They’d be doing a deep dive into every single candidate the other side has preselected for any skeletons in the closet,” says the former Labor staffer.

Timing is key. Negative stories about new candidates are usually reserved for the final stages of the campaign, when it’s too late to change course. “The best-case scenario is you force them to bow out, or the party disendorses them, and that will potentially cost a seat,” says the former Labor adviser. A story that drags on for three or four days is “an eternity in an election campaign”. “You’ve lost momentum, it distracts your campaign from what you want to be focusing on.”

MacGowan, whose team helped bring down then-NSW Labor leader Michael Daley in 2019 by surfacing a video where he said “Asians with PhDs” were taking Australians’ jobs, thinks it’s always better to plant stories during the campaign, rather than beforehand, as happened with the story about Dutton’s shares.

“They go out in the morning to a press conference with the message of the day … and if your first question is about a shitty little yarn the dirt unit landed, that’s an enormous problem they’ve got to spend the whole day cleaning up. Time and manpower is all that matters in an election, and you’ve just taken 12 hours and one staffer out of their day,” he says.

But there are also risks for the mud-throwers. They have to be careful not to walk into a trap where they criticise behaviour, only to have an example from their own side thrown back at them. “It’s possible they can snooker themselves by setting a standard,” the former Labor staffer says.

Such was the case last year, when Albanese came under fire for accepting flight upgrades from Qantas. While that story didn’t come from a dirt unit, Coalition Senator Bridget McKenzie leapt on it to lead the Coalition’s attack, only to realise that she, too, had been lax in declaring flight upgrades. “As soon as a story breaks, the other side is trawling through records to expose they have done it as well,” says the former Labor staffer.

It’s one reason why dirt units want to stay in the shadows – and why this week’s admission by Charlton was rare. But MacGowan doesn’t think the label hurts too much, given the veil is gradually being lifted on these processes anyway. “No one cares where the story comes from, as long as it stands up as true,” he says.

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