How wild West men revived a pariah

JULIAN Grill, the thoroughly bugged and irretrievably disgraced influence-peddling business partner of Brian Burke, allows a quiet chuckle over Atlantic salmon, sauvignon blanc and small talk at a favoured Perth eatery.

JULIAN Grill, the thoroughly bugged and irretrievably disgraced influence-peddling business partner of Brian Burke, allows a quiet chuckle over Atlantic salmon, sauvignon blanc and small talk at a favoured Perth eatery.

Talking in public has become an extremely dangerous and potentially incriminating pastime for Grill since the strategic placement by Western Australia's Corruption and Crime Commission of powerful listening devices and concealed cameras.

But although he and Burke, whose legendary charisma is now radioactive, could end up facing prison after the commission makes recommendations later this year to the Director of Public Prosecutions, Grill can still smile.

In lighter moments, acquaintances banter with him and Burke - the former journalist who became a premier at 36 and a convicted criminal in the aftermath of the WA Inc corruption inquiries - over where else the tiny electronic buttons are hiding.

Might one be surgically implanted in a nostril or other orifice? Imaginations are running riot in an atmosphere of fear and paranoia. Who is that stranger in the trench coat? As for intimate relations in his bugged home with his deeply disconcerted wife, Grill has, it is said, become more circumspect. Not as amorous.

But the outside table at a fashionable cafe on Mount Street, with its panoramic river and city views, is one location that has not to Grill's knowledge (he can never be too sure these days) been targeted for covert eavesdropping by the commission's technical gurus.

Before he parries questions and examines three pages of the inquiry's transcript of his evidence under oath, he picks up his Blackberry. It is turned on.

Grill, a former Labor minister, switches it off - but not to prevent it from ringing and interrupting conversation. He understands that his Blackberry, even turned off, might have been tampered with to make it transmit private conversations into the headphones of a faceless CCC operative in a secure office in the city. Deftly, he pulls the Blackberry apart, removes its small battery and places it beside the cutlery. No battery equals no eavesdropping.

Grill is meeting The Weekend Australian to insist that neither he nor Burke were rewarded with anything like $1 million or more in success fees from their client, resources minnow Precious Metals Australia, after it had received a $17.5 million payout from Swiss-based global giant Xstrata. Grill wants to say as little as possible; and most of it off the record. But he insisted on picking up the bill.

For someone accused, with Burke, of masterminding the disfigurement of democracy in the west by brazenly manipulating Labor mates from the top of the Alan Carpenter Labor Government to the bowels of the public service, Grill's consternation over a single element of evidence - the size of the success fee for allegedly corrupting a parliamentary report that led to Xstrata being forced to pay out to PMA - seems odd. But he is adamant: "There is no serious suggestion that we received anything more from PMA by way of success fee than the $130,000 mentioned by assisting counsel, Stephen Hall."

It is mid-afternoon and outside Grill's Mount Street home a few doors away - the one acquired from Lord Alistair McAlpine - a television crew and reporter have arrived to set up cameras for a brief report.

On the other side of the country in federal parliament, the stench from Burke and Grill is wafting around Opposition Leader Kevin Rudd. For his misjudgment in coming to Perth in 2005 and repeatedly meeting Burke, then well into his post-prison rehabilitation as a political kingmaker, factional wheeler-dealer and electoral fundraiser, Rudd is being pilloried. Never mind the ugly stench. Any serving politician who may be shown, thanks to those listening devices and concealed cameras, to have improperly associated with the two lobbyists is dead meat.

The revelations and telephone intercepts tumbling out from public hearings conducted under the thoughtful gaze of commissioner Kevin Hammond and the west's version of Eliot Ness, take-no-prisoners lawyer Stephen Hall SC, are appalling even jaded observers of political scandal.

But the extraordinary leverage of Burke and Grill in wringing dodgy favours, confidential cabinet decisions and valuable taxpayer-funded concessions from compliant ministers in the Carpenter Government have also raised uncomfortable questions for the West Australian media and, in particular, its daily newspaper, The West Australian. Would Burke have risen, Phoenix-like, to lord it over the state's political and business community if he had not been given the green light by The West Australian? And were some of the daily's reporters prepared to turn a blind eye to Burke because of old relationships and his skilful propensity to dole out tidbits ofnews?

Similar questions were posed a decade ago when Western Australia's corruption was laid bare by the far-reaching royal commission's inquiries. The newspaper was lampooned for years, its critics accusing it of failing to identify wrongdoing by the Burke government and its corporate sponsors. In Allan Peachment's scholarly book The Years of Scandal, Grill writes how The West Australian had played a "particularly schizophrenic role" before and during the WA Inc revelations.

Grill writes: "There was an impression in some local circles that (the newspaper) had been unnecessarily compliant to Brian Burke while he was premier; had it been more critical of the Burke and Dowding governments, the events giving cause to the royal commission would not have materialised. Paul Murray (the then editor) rankled at these suggestions; one way to disprove them was to deal harshly with central witnesses called to give evidence."

It is no secret that since putting prison behind him in the late 90s, Burke cultivated influential contacts at The West Australian as he went about rebuilding his professional career. After all, if he could not get the media on side, how would he be able to persuade corporations to fund public lobbying by him on their behalf? But there was a stumbling block - the then premier, Geoff Gallop.

Gallop, who regarded Burke as a cancer and ordered that he be cut out of anything to do with his cleanskin new government, would discover that The West Australian had become unusually forgiving of Burke. The paper appeared to be barracking for the old warhorse. On April 5, 2003, the newspaper's editorial mocked and chided Gallop for his hardline stance banning ministers from having contact with Burke. It criticised Gallop's anti-Burke and anti-Grill policies as "the contemporary equivalent of medieval bell-ringing accompanied by the morbid chant of 'unclean, unclean"'.

The West Australian declared: "Thus Dr Gallop says he has made it clear that he wants ministers to avoid 'those two people'. His stance is both naive and questionable on the grounds of fairness." The newspaper lamented that Gallop was no champion of democratic liberties for unfairly affecting "the capacity of two men to lawfully earn their livelihoods".

Gallop, who regarded The West Australian as a nasty and erratic tabloid determined to campaign against him whatever he did, tooklittle notice. The ban remained, but Burke's tentacles were spreading nonetheless as he talked up his reach and persuaded business leaders to pay handsomely for his advice and influence.

Within a few months of the April 2003 editorial, a youthful new editor, Paul Armstrong, then 33, was in charge at The West Australian and hitting Gallop hard. Meanwhile, Burke was being steadily accepted back into polite society as he cleverly pulled strings and massaged fragile political and media egos. There were always good leaks to those journalists he trusted; and kudos for the ministers he had turned into informants.

Several journalists, those who maintained a healthy suspicion about Burke and relentlessly pursued his burgeoning business interests, were barred. John Flint, a Walkley Award-winning investigative journalist for The Sunday Times (a News Limited paper in the same stable as The Weekend Australian), repeatedly highlighted Burke's growing influence, but Flint was in a minority. According to Flint, the rehabilitation of Burke was being "delicately managed with the help of sympathetic journalists who emphasised his achievements as premier" and who "questioned his casting as arch villain in the WA Inc mess".

Joe Spagnolo, a colleague of Flint at The Sunday Times, incurred Burke's wrath for publicly recounting how the lobbyist had tried to capture his professional allegiance. Burke had told Spagnolo that if he played his cards right he would be drip-fed stories in the same way Burke was drip-feeding to other journalists whom he named. Spagnolo was handed a story already written by Burke precisely the way he wanted it published.

"The meeting ended up being one of the most extraordinary experiences in my 21 years of journalism, with Mr Burke using all his charm and cunning to try to influence how the story would appear in The Sunday Times," Spagnolo revealed in a subsequent newspaper article.

But in February last year, with Gallop out of politics, new premier Carpenter, himself a former journalist who had made his name covering the WA Inc stories of Burke's dishonesty, suddenly drew rare praise from Armstrong and The West Australian.

Against strong advice, Carpenter had lifted Gallop's ban on ministers having contact with Burke. The newspaper lauded his decision as "realistic". Amid public debate at the time of the ban being lifted, The West Australian's regular columnist and former editor Murray said: "The way people are going on at the moment, you'd think that Brian Burke is a sort of avian flu virus. You know, I think people need to take a bit of a cold shower about Burke's influence and his power."

Neither Murray nor Armstrong returned The Weekend Australian's calls and requests for interview. Since the CCC's explosive evidence about Burke's influence, triggering the sacking of three ministers including two this week, Carpenter has bemoaned how some Perth journalists had special relationships with Burke and were dangling from him.

His former education minister, Ljiljanna Ravlich, has revealed Burke told her he personally knew Armstrong "very well and that he met with him regularly to have coffee". Burke, according to Ravlich's account to parliament, was the fixer for a meeting with Armstrong after he had run several tough stories about education. Armstrong "proceeded to tell me that footballers and businessmen all come to him because, in his mind, he really runs the state," she told parliament.

Burke told Ravlich that although Armstrong "thought he was a mover and shaker in Western Australia", he was "quite immature and juvenile and although he was in his late 30s he still lived at home with his mother".

Peter van Onselen, a senior lecturer in politics at Edith Cowan University and a political commentator on ABC radio, believes some of the West Australian media's heavyweights should be feeling sheepish now.

"The West Australian deserves a clip over the ear. They have as much egg on their face as Alan Carpenter for lifting the ban," van Onselen said yesterday.

"It boggled my mind when I moved here to find that Brian Burke, post-WA Inc after having spent time in jail, was still a senior factional operator in the Labor Party. The media should have been similarly disgusted. I couldn't understand how a fellow with such a dodgy past could be enticed the way he was. And then it became clear to me that sections of the Labor Party thought he was done over by WA Inc and harshly done by.

"I think that the biggest lesson for all media organisations is not to lose sight of the absolute need to provide the support for long-term investigative reporting."