The least we can hope for from the government’s political embarrassment over its botched attempt to string up Bill Shorten is that it deflates for a time the traditional outbursts of the employment minister Michaelia Cash.
Reasonable human beings would have melted into obscurity had their insistent denials been so comprehensively exposed as false, but not this senator – she is not for turning.
She insisted it was a terrible, insulting thing to suggest that she knew anything about tip-offs to the media to be camera ready for the big event as the rozzers swooped on the Australian Workers’ Union looking for pieces of paper that were already accessible.
What we have to accept, although there are many instincts telling us otherwise, is that this minister does not know the strategic decisions being made in her office about one of the most calculated political stunts of the season.
A humble flack merchant has fallen but will no doubt be assisted to a safe landing somewhere else. In the good old days, when we had a Westminster system, Cash herself would have been carried off.
(July 1, 2005) $100,000 donation to GetUp
Australian Workers Union makes $100,000 donation to activist group GetUp as it launches in 2005. Bill Shorten was the secretary of the AWU and a founding board member of GetUp.
(November 22, 2016) ROC established
Turnbull government sets up Registered Organisations Commission – a new union watchdog to monitor and investigate unions and employer associations.
(August 16, 2017) Cash refers AWU to ROC
After details of AWU's 2005 donation are reported in the Weekend Australian, Cash refers matter to the ROC for investigation.
(October 20, 2017) ROC starts investigating AWU
ROC begins formally investigating AWU's national and Victorian branches.
(October 23, 2017) AEC announces separate GetUp investigation
Separate to AWU, ROC and $100,000 donation, Australian Electoral Commission announces it will investigate GetUp for its conduct in the 2016 election. AEC says GetUp could potentially be an 'associated entity' of Labor and the Greens because its activism substantially benefited both parties in the federal election.
(October 24, 2017) AFP raids AWU
ROC asks Australian federal police to raid offices of AWU, after anonymous caller tells them union officials may be destroying documents. Some media outlets are tipped off, appearing at AWU's offices before police arrive for late afternoon raid.
(October 25, 2017) Cash denies aide tip-off ... then admits it
- 11am – On five occasions, Cash denies that anyone in her office knew about the raid, or tipped off journalists, as she is grilled at a Senate estimates committee.
- 6pm – An explosive Buzzfeed article is published. Two journalists say they were tipped off by someone in Cash's office, an hour before the raid. The Senate committee heads to a dinner break.
- 7.30pm – Cash returns and reveals her senior media adviser, David De Garis, did in fact tip off the media.
- She explains she was unaware of De Garis's actions until he told her over dinner. As for how De Garis knew about the raid in advance, Cash says De Garis was told by 'a media source".
- De Garis resigns.
(October 26, 2017) Calls for Cash to resign
The questioning continues. Cash fronts the Senate committee again as Labor and the Greens call for her resignation, saying she mislead the parliament five times the previous day. Government colleagues stand by her. 'Michaelia Cash simply did not know,' says social services minister Christian Porter.
Instead, what we have is an intriguing side show about journalists, their sources and the extent to which sources should be protected.
It became known that the source of the leak was David De Garis, staffer of the employment minister.
There has been some contention within that bastion of probity, the Canberra press gallery, that Cash’s office should not have been identified as the source of the leak because to do so breaks the convention about the protection of leakers.
This takes us into murky waters about the extent to which the identity of a source has to be protected by reporters when the source’s boss is busily telling the parliament things that the source knows to be untrue.
There don’t appear to be any hard and fast rules that govern the opaque nods and winks that dictate what information journalists think they can report to the public from their leaks in Canberra.
To complicate matters further, there’s a story in one of the papers today that says De Garis got the information he leaked to his selected journalists from another journalist.
This is head spinning stuff. Someone in the media leaks to a ministerial press secretary about impending Australian federal police raids on Bill Shorten’s old union, who in turn tells others in the media to be camera ready.
This snaky path to outing a misleading minister poses fresh challenges for journalistic ethics, namely can journalists themselves be protected sources, when their primary duty is to publish?
It’s comforting to know that the AFP has launched an investigation into the leak and the hydra-headed possibilities of its origin and implications. Maybe the Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance should revisit and polish its dusty source protection arrangements.
Another equally intriguing element of this turmoil, at least from this distance, is that TV cameras and tabloid newspapers are more often than not in attendance at AFP raids, particularly on splashy drug busts and on terror suspects.
Presumably they are being tipped off by the media people at the AFP and so we see piles of drugs paraded for view or people of Middle Eastern appearance being herded from their homes into waiting police vans. It now seems that news coverage of police raids on political targets is unacceptable, but only when it has the potential to embarrass the government.
It’s nice to know the ground rules.
Which gets us to the point about donations to GetUp. If anything is calculated to cause the Coalition conniptions it is the swelling of GetUp’s coffers. Tasmanian senator Eric Abetz has been complaining for years that the activist group is far too big for its boots and, even worse, it has been trying to help Labor and the Greens.
It’s understandable that the senator would be upset after some of his favourite Tasmanian members were wiped out in last year’s federal election – and it’s all the fault of GetUp.
We’ve already had Icac in NSW uncovering Liberal party funding methods from illegal donors washed through organisations, like the Free Enterprise Foundation or Eight By Five.
So we shouldn’t be altogether surprised that the government’s union watchdog, the Registered Organisations Commission (ROC), has sooled itself onto Labor and Greens sources of funding.
The ROC commissioner, Mark Bielecki, told the Senate committee that the raid was necessitated by the AWU’s failure to cooperate in providing documents relating to its donations.
Later he changed gears and said: “Can I go back to an answer I gave you previously when I said that not all notices to produce have been fulfilled by the AWU? That’s not correct. I got them confused with a different registered organisation. So, I withdraw that answer.”
That left the whole purpose of the raid looking a bit thin. What remains is the proposition that the AWU was destroying documents that already had been provided to Dyson Heydon’s trade union royal commission.
At the moment the AWU and the ROC have their heads together trying to agree on categories of documents that are discoverable. The application to determine the validity of the search warrants is kicked down the road to 11 December. In the meantime, the documents that the AFP did seize are not to be forwarded to the people at ROC.
There’s a freeze on the movement of these troublesome papers.
- Richard Ackland is a Guardian Australia columnist
