Godwin Grech reveals toll of UteGate

The former Treasury official has written an account of his lifelong battle with mental illness.

Former Treasury official Godwin Grech at Parliament House in 2009. Picture: Kym Smith

He was the mercurial public servant whose tale of corruption and graft for a time threatened to bring down the prime ministership of Kevin Rudd but instead crippled then opposition leader Malcolm Turnbull.

Now, 10 years after he fumbled into the national spotlight brandishing the most famously faked email in Australian political history, former Treasury official Godwin Grech has written a warts-and-all account of his lifelong battle with mental illness and the “powerful and highly privileged’’ people he claims ­exploited his frailties for their own end.

In a sad postscript to one of the most bizarre episodes in politics, the “UteGate’’ affair, Grech has for the first time ­detailed the devastating physical and emotional consequences the episode had on him.

“No public servant or any ­employee should be placed under such duress,’’ he writes in an 82-page submission to the Productivity Commission, which is conducting an inquiry into mental illness.

He describes himself as “someone who has experienced high level and relentless public and private ridicule, mockery, character assassination, invalidation and devaluation as a human being”.

Grech was the Treasury officer responsible for the OzCar program, a government-underwritten trust set up to stave off ­recession in the car industry.

He obtained national notoriety in 2009 after he gave sensational Senate testimony claiming he had received a ­request from Rudd’s office, allegedly seeking access to the OzCar fund on behalf of a political donor and mate.

An email supposedly substantiating the claim formed the basis of an all-out political ­assault by Turnbull, which for a time threatened to bring down the Rudd government.

But the email was quickly ­exposed as a forgery, and Grech the forger. The result was a collapse in Turnbull’s authority and his ultimate removal as leader.

Grech was never charged over the episode but his career as a senior bureaucrat was finished. He all but vanished.

He now reveals that on the night police raided his Canberra home and heard his confession he was effectively committed to psychiatric care, so worried were officers about his mental state. He spent six months at Canberra’s Calvary Hospital where his weight plummeted to 43.6kg and he was placed on a cocktail of drugs that worsened his physical ailments, including chronic bowel and kidney disease.

Grech has since moved back to Melbourne.

He has struggled to find ­employment and it is not clear if he is working.

Now in his 50s, Grech ­describes the fallout of UteGate, as well as his frail mental and physical state that led up to it.

He describes throwing up in the Treasury toilets late one night — a recurrence of the bulimia that had troubled him for much of his life. He talks about his frequent hospitalisations and the “exploding’’ workload brought on by the global financial crisis that threatened to engulf the car industry in recession.

He describes how car dealers whose businesses faced extinction would call him up threatening self-harm or suicide.

And, inevitably, Grech talks of the “powerful and highly privileged’’ Canberra players his work brought him into contact with, an apparent reference to his relationship with Turnbull.

“It is in this overall environment and sense of futility, anger, bitterness and despondency, that I came into the orbit of various powerful and highly privileged ­individuals who had zero concern for my wellbeing and who were content to exploit my vulnerabilities for their own benefit.’’

Grech stops short of blaming Turnbull — or anyone else — for his fate. He says there is little point inhaling “the toxic fumes of lingering anger’’. But it is clear he ­remains bitter at his treatment, not just from those unnamed powerful figures, but from the public service to which he ­devoted much of his life. “The sad reality is that if I couldn’t rely on my own father when I needed him most — it was utterly delusional of me to ­expect better of others who have never been ­invested in my wellbeing,” he says.

That is a reference to Grech’s childhood, which he said was often loveless and marred by frequent episodes of domestic ­violence. He was the child of two Maltese immigrants who settled in Melbourne in the 1950s. His ­father was illiterate, emotionally aloof and frequently violent ­toward his mother.

“On one occasion, in a complete rage, my father literally ripped the cupboards off the wall and smashed every piece of crockery he could find, and while holding a dining chair from its back, smashed everything in his path,’’ Grech writes.

He says he wrote the “very personal’’ submission in order to give the commissioners a “lived’’ account of mental illness.

In a reference to the notoriety he experienced as a result of UteGate, Grech writes: “I am also someone who has experienced high level and relentless public and private ridicule, mockery, character assassination, invalidation and devaluation as a human being over a long period, including by high profile public figures and am very aware of the stigma and inherent discrimination that one confronts when seeking to re-engage — thereby seriously compounding the mental health challenges as well as compromising the prospects for effective ­rehabilitation.’’

In his submission Grech says he has had a myriad of mental illnesses, including depression, anxiety, obsessive compulsive dis­order, bulimia and anorexia. Some he had “long been aware of and attempted to manage secretly on my own over many years, while others came as a surprise”.

“I have applied myself completely to the painful and testing task of rehabilitation over almost a decade by working with relevant mental health experts in multiple settings,’’ he says.