Get all your news in one place.
100’s of premium titles.
One app.
Start reading
Crikey
Crikey
National
Charlie Lewis

Who tried to clear the Glenn Druery ‘smear’?

We’ve always had something of a soft spot for Glenn Druery, known as the “preference whisperer” on account of his impressive — and lucrative — ability to manipulate the upper house preference system, allowing micro-parties with very low primary votes to get elected.

As Guy Rundle once put it, Druery is someone “who, with no time to spare, will still give you 10 minutes, three libellous stories about candidates, and never goes off the record. Never. If Glenn broke down and said yeah, he pushed that one model off that one Sydney cliff once, he’d still stay on the record.” 

And we see we’re not the only ones: Aussie Parl&Gov WikiEdits, a Twitter account that logs when people using government or parliamentary IP addresses anonymously edit Wikipedia pages — as likely to collect someone correcting the record on an ’80s power ballad as a politician’s legislative record — picked up some interesting changes to Druery’s page coming from the Victorian Parliament.

Someone ducked in and deleted the entire section that came under the heading “Suspected misuse of Parliamentary travel entitlements for private benefit” explaining they had “deleted smear campaign”.

Alas, it didn’t take, and last we checked, the section has been reinstated.

Sign up to read this article
Read news from 100’s of titles, curated specifically for you.
Already a member? Sign in here
Related Stories
Top stories on inkl right now
One subscription that gives you access to news from hundreds of sites
Already a member? Sign in here
Our Picks
Fourteen days free
Download the app
One app. One membership.
100+ trusted global sources.