Pull the other one, minister, no one is buying your denial

Labor objected strongly to the Registered Organisations Commission being established.

I disagreed with my old mates, believing that unions, like every other organisation, should have a watchdog looking at them, that nobody should be above the law. Following the events of the past few days, I should have looked more closely at the forebodings about this body, the subject of warnings from the opposition.

It is bad enough Employment Minister Michaelia Cash can deny five times that no one from her office had forewarned the media about the impending raids by the Australian Federal Police on the offices of the Australian Workers Union in Sydney and Melbourne.

It must have been awkward to say the least for Cash to sneak back during the dinner break and admit that one of her staff had indeed done the dirty deed. That staff member has since fallen on his sword.

If Cash thought the matter would end there, she was sadly mistaken. She snuck back into the estimates committee hearing room when she knew the major television and radio news bulletins had gone to bed.

In the annals of being sadly mistaken, this one is right up there at the top with, as they say in pop chart parlance, a bullet. On Sky News I was just about to start Richo when I heard about it. I began with a live cross to Laura Jayes, who filled us in on the detail, and the first thing that struck me was just how brazen Cash had been in trying to limit the damage.

On several fronts, her explanation left an already amazed and confused press gallery truly stunned. While the usual suspects in the commentariat rushed to defend her, a dose of reality in analysing all this is required.

Cash is asking us to believe that her staff member would hear his boss deny that her office had any involvement in alerting media and then tell no one else in the office, let alone the minister herself.

Then suddenly at the dinner break, having resisted the urge to tell anyone about his actions, he drops to his knees and confesses.

First, you have to understand how ministerial offices usually work. In a situation such as this, it is highly unlikely anyone on a ministerial staff would inform the media in advance about the raids without their idea being sanctioned by the minister or at the very least the chief of staff.

It is almost unthinkable that a junior staff member would make a call such as that of their own volition, then sit idly by, mute, while their boss issued five separate denials that such a call was made.

Second, if the call had not come from Cash’s office then it had to have come from the AFP. Having been forced to act, this was hardly a raid coming at the end of a lengthy investigation. The AFP is not so enthralled by its own brilliance that it wants the media to film the raids.

The reason Labor pushed Cash so hard on who made the call was that it was blatantly obvious the call must have come from the minister or her office. Nobody else had the knowledge or the opportunity. Given that fact, it was pathetic for Cash to plead that “quite frankly I am ­offended on behalf of my staff”.

No one doubts that Cash is a highly intelligent woman. She would have known instantly where to look when she first heard about the media tip-off. She knew where to look and who to probe but instead opted for denial and obfuscation.

Arrogance turned to ignorance in a flash at the beginning of Wednesday’s dinner break, then it all turned into acute embarrassment. In politics, no matter how clever you think you are, you are always just one bad answer from oblivion.

Anyone who worked in my ministerial office knew that calling the media, off your own bat, on a sensitive matter such as this one meant they would face instant dismissal. Even if the leak worked in my favour politically, I would still have sacked the miscreant because the principle involved is so significant.

Of course, Cash had already made herself centre stage on all this by referring the AWU donations to the ROC. Why this was such a priority remains a mystery to me. In the first place, these donations are 11 years old.

The trade union royal commission didn’t bother with the stuff because it is as old as it is trivial. Does anyone really believe Bill Shorten will face a criminal trial over this and be thrown in irons into a cell? I doubt it.

What’s more, if something is awry on this matter, the union may face a fine at worst. Why, then, is this such a big deal? It seems the answer lies in the minister’s near obsession with “getting” the Opposition Leader. Surely she could aspire to more in government, and over time for her legacy, than this mean-spirited referral.

The ROC has serious questions to answer as well. While the AWU seeks injunctions in the Federal Court, some obvious questions can be asked of the commission. Given that AWU federal secretary Daniel Walton has said the AWU had co-operated in investigations from government agencies for 13 years, the claim “a caller had rung a staff member” about the AWU destroying or hiding evidence looks dodgy. The identity of that caller is now a critical factor in what began as a tawdry political fix and then morphed into a scandal within 24 hours. That evidence must now be made public. The decision to call in the police to snatch documents the union had never refused to produce will come under great scrutiny.

The irony of all this is that the raids occurred on the day AFP commissioner Andrew Colvin was telling another Senate estimates committee there were insufficient numbers of AFP officers in NSW to hunt down drug importations, yet officers were pulled from regular duties for raids on the AWU that seem unjustified.

Malcolm Turnbull, Cash and others had better come to realise that 21 losing Newspolls in a row is no ­accident. If Shorten’s bid for the Lodge is to be thwarted it will be by policy, not police.