House's dirty deeds

BOTH sides of politics engage in exposing opponents' foibles, when perhaps their time and money would be better spent working on policy.

Mirabella v Albanese

YESTERDAY'S revelation that the Prime Minister's Office sought to put in place a "dirt digging" unit should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with party politics.

Desperate governments have long engaged in this less than savoury practice, establishing formal and informal processes to maximise results.

The fact the Gillard government has been cranking up moves to uncover compromising information about opposition MPs says much about federal Labor's woes.

That news of the dirt unit was itself leaked, with quotes from unimpressed Labor insiders to boot, speaks to widening divisions within the government.

But while dirt digging has long been a part of politics in this country, there is hypocrisy in yesterday's revelation.

Julia Gillard and some of her most senior ministers have been at the forefront of condemning what they have termed "grubby" Coalition tactics, including the relentless campaign against former Labor MP Craig Thomson.

Kevin Rudd came to office pledging to reduce the number of political staff members, partly because Labor in opposition, correctly, claimed that some were being used as partisan tools rather than policy analysts by the Howard government.

Then there is Gillard herself. The Prime Minister has shown outrage when the media has reported on allegations concerning her long distant past.

Taking the moral high ground and condemning efforts to trawl through the past activities of MPs - including their personal lives - is easier to do when one doesn't sanction similar conduct within one's own ranks.

It seems that this now may be a charge that can be levelled against Gillard, unless her office acted without her imprimatur.

It wouldn't be the first time this has happened. In January former prime ministerial press secretary Tony Hodges was forced to resign after allegedly misrepresenting remarks by Tony Abbott about closing the Aboriginal tent embassy, and instigating the ugly protest that followed on Australia Day. The Prime Minister and her staff claimed Gillard had not been informed of the dirty trick, which nearly resulted in a riot.

Reports yesterday revealed that PMO director of strategy Nick Reece distributed a "to do" list to ministerial advisers, who were called together to look at ways of uncovering everything from litigation in the backgrounds of Coalition MPs to untoward activities they might have been involved in during their younger days. A spreadsheet with tips on how to uncover the information was also sent out, including pointers on how to conduct company searches and trawl through social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter.

The news of the dirt unit comes on the back of reports in The Australian last month that senior Labor sources had revealed the government was "taking the gloves off" to counter the relentless negativity of the opposition.

Leader of the house Anthony Albanese used a speech in parliament to table newspaper articles from 1978 about a young Abbott being charged with indecent assault, noting that the charges were later dismissed. Albanese's argument was that that incident should have given Abbott a better understanding of proper process and why the parliament should not be used to convict Thomson.

Liberal frontbencher Sophie Mirabella - who was also mentioned in reference to a feud she had had with the family of her late partner - angrily confronted Albanese on the floor of the parliament after he had finished speaking.

The fact governments use the extra resources of incumbency - access to the bureaucracy and a larger number of political advisers - to engage in dirt digging and dirt distribution is nothing new.

The Keating government in its early days ramped up the activities of a body called the National Media Liaison Service, dubbed aNiMaLS. Its task was to spin to journalists, the end point of dirt digging. Some of the dirt gathered by aNiMaLS and passed on to journalists was the allegation that John Hewson, Paul Keating's first opponent, left his wife and family on Christmas Eve. Hewson's first wife, Margaret, went on to make a politically damaging (and controversial) appearance with their children on the Nine Network's 60 Minutes program.

After John Howard's elevation to the Liberal leadership, aNiMaLS played a role in distributing details of his previous policy utterings, from slowing Asian immigration to abolishing Medicare, in the hope of improving the government's fortunes. Howard pledged that his government would abolish the unit, which he duly did.

However, the Coalition quickly replaced it with the Government Members Secretariat. As if torn from the pages of an intriguing political thriller, the GMS offices were located behind frosted glass around the corner from the Parliament House cafe, with only the smallest of font identifying the name of the unit on the entry door.

Like aNiMaLS, the role of the GMS was more dirt distribution than dirt digging, but a number of paid-up staff in the GMS were charged solely with trying to turn up dirt at key pressure points for the Howard government, which spent much of its time in power trailing in the opinion polls before improving its fortunes ahead of election time.

A senior adviser to the GMS who was responsible for digging up and distributing information about stamp duty concessions on the Gold Coast apartment of star Labor recruit and former Democrats leader Cheryl Kernot was located in none other than Abbott's ministerial office. Abbott, workplace relations minister at the time, was viewed as just the sort of Howard loyalist who could be trusted to keep such practices under wraps.

Previously, Abbott had led the way himself by picking through, on behalf of the Howard government, the electoral practices of One Nation founder Pauline Hanson. The Coalition was desperate to bring her down to stop the leaking of votes to One Nation, and the information gathered contributed to charges being laid against Hanson.

Before the turn-around in opinion polls brought about by the Tampa asylum-seeker standoff in late 2001, the Howard government was under extreme pressure. Dirt digging became a focal point of what government strategists argued it needed to do to salvage its position in the polls.

When Mark Latham was making inroads into Howard's political dominance after elevation to Labor's leadership in December 2003, he was quick to accuse the Coalition of digging up dirt about his personal life and activities in local politics before he moved to federal parliament in 1994.

On July 6, 2004, Latham told ABC radio "government staff would be better deployed working on some good policies for the country". Newspapers that day had carried a story that Latham accused an adviser from cabinet minister Kevin Andrews's office of going to Liverpool to dig around in his past, including about his time as mayor.

Latham's suggestion that staff would be better off focusing on policy rather than political antics was a fair point then, as it is now. The Gillard government has had its fair share of difficulties selling its policy agenda. Indeed, that agenda has been the subject of criticism for a lack of adequate framing. More staff attention to policy detail might be no bad thing in the may political environment. Given the generally low return on time spent dirt digging, it's hard to escape the conclusion that governments would be better off directing resources to other, more productive activities, especially in the present political environment, where voter cynicism is so high.

In 2004 Labor senator John Faulkner helped lead the charge against the activities of Howard's GMS, calling on it to be brought under greater parliamentary scrutiny.

On July 11, 2004, he told Nine's Sunday program: "An outfit like (Keating's) aNiMaLS or the current Government Members Secretariat ought to be subject to the most thorough of parliamentary scrutiny."

The fact ministerial offices, as was revealed to be the case yesterday, often allocate a portion of their staff to the job of looking into the failings of their opponents opens the door to criticism that the staff members are not exercising the tasks they were assigned, a potential breach of conduct guidelines.

What appears different about the Gillard government's efforts at dirt digging is that it involves personnel from the PMO.

University of Adelaide political scientist Wayne Errington, who has written extensively about the dirt-digging practices of the Howard and Keating eras, notes that the Gillard government continues to operate its own version of aNiMaLS and the GMS, called the Caucus Communications Team.

"That's where the digging should be done," suggests Errington. "The Prime Minister's Office shouldn't be anywhere near it.

One Labor MP laments: "All sides do this sort of stuff. Of course they do. But what the hell is Julia's office doing putting itself anywhere near this? A phone call is about as close as the PMO should get to this sort of stuff, period."

Knowing where the line is between the rough and tumble of daily politics and digging and throwing dirt isn't always easy. Compiling information on opponents - what they have said in the past and how this may contradict what they are saying in the present - is one thing. It's hard to see what's wrong with that. Journalists are often happy to accept such information when it is presented to them.

But is it going too far for teams of political staff to delve into the pre-parliamentary activities of parliamentarians? And what about their personal lives?

"I suppose when you think about it, the best dirt unit doesn't get discovered, does it?" Errington wryly notes.

There have been numerous highly controversial and downright dirty rumours and suppositions about MPs through the years, including several recently, that may well have emanated from dirt units on either side. There is no way of confirming the source.

Bill Shorten came out recently to put an end to rumours that had been circling about his personal life. When Latham was Labor leader he called a press conference to dispel rumours about a salacious buck's night video. No such video ever surfaced.

One Parliament House rumour that did prove to be true - the affair between Kernot and Labor foreign minister Gareth Evans - was reported by Nine's Laurie Oakes on July 3, 2002, after both parliamentarians had retired. It was a controversial decision to report the affair, prompted by publication of Kernot's autobiography, which omitted to mention the relationship.

Involvement by so-called dirt units in the above allegations has never been established but, on the balance of probabilities, one might be tempted to assume they played some part.