Much ado about nothing

THANKS to the 'usual suspects', the Heiner affair is Queenland's grassy knoll.

PLACED on about 150 seats for the benefit of an audience in NSW's Parliament House in Sydney yesterday were a few pages about a Queensland saga known to conspiracy theorists and political operatives alike as the Heiner affair.

"What is it?" asks the heading on one of the pages. It answers: "It concerns the shredding of documents by the Queensland Goss cabinet in 1990 required as evidence in imminent court hearings."

Overleaf is a breathless description of why the Heiner affair should raise a flicker of interest 17 years later.

It states: "The list of miscreants in this affair is almost endless: the cabinet ministers of the Goss government itself, ministers (or at least the premiers and their attorneys-general) of all subsequent governments to this time, the Criminal Justice Commission, its latter-day successor the Crime and Misconduct Commission, the relevant public service personnel within the Justice Department, and the list goes on. Even the Crown, in the form of the state governor, appears to have failed in its duty up to this time."

By 10am yesterday after the conference room filled and the attendees had read pages traducing an "almost endless" list of "miscreant" Queenslanders, Greg Smith, the NSW shadow attorney-general, stood up to introduce two special guest speakers: Piers Akerman, a columnist for The Daily Telegraph (and a man Smith would subsequently thank as someone who "has stuck his neck out in the media as the only journalist who has genuinely taken up this offer to put it as he sees it from the material he has researched and looked at"), and Kevin Lindeberg, a sacked union official and the "driving force" behind the Heiner affair for the past 17 years.

Smith described Lindeberg as a "man of high principle" and "extraordinary courage", a Dreyfus-like character who had "fought a relentless campaign" for truth and justice.

For the next two hours, the audience clapped, cheered and nodded approvingly as Smith, Akerman and Lindeberg expounded on what they regard as Queensland's unforgivable political and legal disgrace: the Heiner affair. Akerman went further, lampooning The Australian's editor-in-chief Chris Mitchell over a long-time friendship between Mitchell's wife, Christine Jackman, and Opposition Leader Kevin Rudd, and accusing the newspaper of "contemptible journalism".

According to Akerman, the undoubted intent of the editors of The Australian (a newspaper not regarded by friends or foes as left-wing or especially friendly to Rudd) has been to denigrate those seeking to bring light and justice to the Heiner affair, something Akerman regards as "one of the most pitiful examples of an ongoing injustice".

Akerman, who has been criticising The Australian in his columns in The Sunday Telegraph and in his online comments (he wrote recently that The Australian had sunk to a new low in journalism because of an article that differed from his perspective on the Heiner affair), railed that recent coverage had tried to link him to a "shadowy group of right-wing extremists".

He concluded by pledging: "This is not a flash in the pan thing. The principles at stake are too large."

The Australian, for its part, has likened the Heiner affair to Queensland's "grassy knoll", a hump of bizarre conspiracy theories propounded by the obsessive Lindeberg and a group of hangers-on, some well-meaning, some deluded, some mischievous.

Mitchell has had an unenviable experience of the Heiner affair, having edited The Courier-Mail in Brisbane for eight years until 2002 and committing significant resources during that period to run down every lead. In the final analysis, just about everything that could possibly have been wrung from the story was investigated and reported. It was, and remains, a dud. The Heiner affair never lived up to the lofty expectations of its boosters.

In this respect, The Australian has found something on which it can agree with The Sydney Morning Herald's Alan Ramsey, who devoted a recent column to a forensic analysis of the Heiner affair. Ramsey concluded that it was "desperate, pathetic, muck-smearing tosh". Most of the rest of the media now simply ignores the matter.

Of Lindeberg, who has spent most of the past 17 years of his life unemployed and dedicated to a cause that has led to him being feted by true believers, Ramsey wrote that one man's obsessive journey "is now a political crusade, aided and abetted by the usual suspects from among the more odious far Right of national politics".

But how has it come to this?

Why is a 1990 decision by the cabinet of a long-defunct Queensland Labor government to shred certain documentation being debated, ad nauseam, again, and firing the vivid imaginations of conspiracy theorists across the country (many of whom want nothing less than yet another public inquiry and the appointment of a special prosecutor to jail dozens of former and serving politicians and bureaucrats in Queensland).

Why is it propelling the indefatigable Lindeberg from his Brisbane home to Sydney and inspiring fire and brimstone from columnist Akerman in rare attacks on a sister newspaper in the News Limited stable, its editor-in-chief and senior journalists?

Why is it drawing the support of NSW Liberal Party politicians and Nationals mavericks such as senator Barnaby Joyce?

The answer, on the eve of a federal election, is Rudd.

As Akerman received generous applause yesterday for pursuing, for the past seven weeks, a story that investigative journalists in Queensland in the preceding decade have dissected (and discarded as overblown nonsense), he spoke again of the so-called Rudd connection, a theme he has hammered constantly in his columns.

"It is disingenuous to suggest he played no part in this matter," Akerman says of Rudd.

Smith also dwelled on the Rudd angle, reminding the audience yesterday that the former diplomat was, in 1990, a newly appointed chief of staff to then Labor premier Wayne Goss.

Here is the rub. In 2007, with an election campaign about to start, Rudd, who has never been a member of cabinet in Queensland or Canberra, is being held responsible for a cabinet decision to shred some documents after the same cabinet had been advised by Crown law that this was an appropriate course of action.

The act of shredding, say the Heiner affair boosters, was so criminally illegal that, notwithstanding the Crown law advice, the politicians - and others involved in the decision - ought to be prosecuted.

According to lawyer Tony Morris QC, the renewed interest in something he formally investigated for a former government in Queensland a decade ago would be laughable if it were not being taken seriously by people he says should know better. Morris, no barracker of Labor causes, is a long-time Liberal Party supporter whose legal advice on political issues to top ministers in the Howard Government has been well documented, but on the Heiner affair he is unequivocal about the ongoing efforts to besmirch Rudd.

"The only thing (that) has occurred in the decade since my report on the matter was tabled in the Queensland parliament, which could explain renewed interest, is pure political expediency: a mischievous attempt by individuals, many of an extreme right-wing persuasion, to jump on a bandwagon (that) left town years ago," he tells The Australian.

"They are motivated solely by the discovery that Kevin Rudd may have had some connection, some very tenuous connection, with events that occurred more than half a generation ago. They imagine that reopening the issue is likely to tarnish his reputation."

Even former Queensland National Party leader Rob Borbidge describes the Rudd link as drawing too long a bow. Borbidge has told The Australian that, as premier in 1997, he had the power to order a public inquiry into the decision of the former Labor government to shred the documentation.

He says he also had a political motive at the time to hurt the Labor Opposition, but he declined because there was no conspiracy and he took the view that it was time to move on.

He is surprised that it is still being dragged up, a decade on from his decision to let the matter rest. But the logical and measured remarks of Morris and Borbidge have infuriated the Heiner brigade, so much so that some of the fantasists suspect the two men are also part of a conspiracy.

Undoubtedly, part of the reason for the enduring interest in the Heiner affair revolves around the whiff of concealment and secrecy. Shredding documents, say the conspiracy theorists, evinces stealth and cover-up. Labor must have had something to hide, they say, for selfish or criminal political reasons.

Thanks to the sworn testimony three years ago of a man who must dread the Heiner affair more than anyone, former magistrate Noel Heiner - whose good name has been associated for the past 17 years with this confected scandal and its lurid accounts of alleged rapes, the abuse of children and justice denied - there should be little doubt about what happened before the shredders began to whir.

However, the evidence of Heiner, who was forced by the Liberal Party's Bronwyn Bishop to a federal parliamentary hearing in May 2004, is extremely inconvenient to Lindeberg (who yesterday spoke of the Heiner affair as "potential corruption of the highest order" and "one of the great shredding scandals for the archives world"). Lindeberg has tried to suggest that Heiner couldn't remember much at all.

In fact, Heiner recalled plenty about the circumstances surrounding the decision by the Goss government to shred material, paperwork and audio tapes, that were in his possession in early 1990.

The material had been gathered in the preceding weeks because of Heiner's appointment in late 1989, by the outgoing National Party-led government of Russell Cooper, to investigate concerns over the management of a youth detention centre on Brisbane's western outskirts.

But the problem from the outset was the incompetence of the National Party: it had not properly constituted the inquiry, and Heiner and his witnesses were exposed to serious potential legal challenges for gathering evidence that lacked the usual protections afforded to material given in judicial investigations. The new Goss government had inherited a big legal headache from the dying National Party, which had been devastated by the Fitzgerald inquiry's exposure of corruption in its ranks and in the police force it had used as a blunt political instrument.

Lindeberg's extremely limited involvement was as a union officer representing the interests of the manager of the centre, Peter Coyne. When asked if he was shocked that his inquiry was aborted and the order given to destroy the material, Heiner said: "No. I believe that at that time it was the only thing that could have been done to protect me and anybody who volunteered to come before me." He produced a letter he wrote on January 19, 1990, in which he expressed his "serious doubts as to the validity of the inquiry which I am conducting".

His letter goes on: "In view of the confusion which exists and my doubt as to the validity of the actions so far, I am not prepared to continue any further with my inquiry. I am therefore ceasing from now to continue any further with the matter until I have obtained written information and confirmation that my actions to date including my appointment and authority to act are validated."

Heiner testified that Crown law, the legal advisers to the government and its public servants, had determined that "if there was no legal proceedings pending and no likelihood of legal proceedings, then the documentation could be shredded, providing the government archivist OK'd it".

Heiner: "That is one of the reasons I agree with the shredding: it protected everybody. As far as I am concerned, it does. Four or five years later, there was a newspaper report about a rape that had been told to me. The first I knew about it was when I read it in the newspaper four or five years later."

Heiner insisted that he would have done something at the time if he had been told by any of the witnesses of such a crime.

This leads to another false claim that has been widely propagated: the bogus assertion that Heiner's inquiry was meant to investigate child abuse and that the shredding had perverted the course of justice by destroying evidence of a serious sexual assault involving a teenage girl who had been an inmate of the youth detention centre. Crucially, Heiner would "vehemently deny anybody having spoken to me about a pack-rape".

"My inquiry was into the administration of the home, nothing else," Heiner says. "All I can remember about the staff is that everybody seemed to be against management and the way that the place was run. A lot of people had husbands, wives or family who were out of work and looking for jobs, and the manager would not appoint any of them.

"They thought they were being hard done by because there was nepotism in the management. Everyone else was getting jobs and the people who wanted and needed jobs did not get them. It was all about the running of the homes."