The oldest (dirty) trick in the book

June 16th, 2012

FAKE NEWS for the Zionist agenda

ABOUT the only endearing and surprising moment that comes easily to mind about former – and very possibly future – prime minister Kevin Rudd was that he was revealed to have attended, once, a pole-dancing club in New York while steamed on the demon drink.

Precisely how the story made it to the front pages some years after it occurred remains a bit of a mystery.

It might have been plain sleuthing by a reporter – the story first appeared in a Murdoch paper, and Rudd’s companion on the dizzy night in question was the legendary Murdoch editor Col Allan, an Australian who has been running the New York Post for years.

Or it might have been filed away by Rudd’s political opponents to be whispered in the right ear at the most convenient moment.

If it was meant by some covert Liberal ”dirt unit” to destroy then opposition leader Rudd’s dazzling reputation as a clean-living Christian lad, as some in his party alleged, it didn’t work. Three months later he was prime minister. Australians tend to approve of leaders who are a bit more than one-dimensional drones, and possibly became disappointed when Rudd failed to offer any more surprises.

Some shovelling of dirt works and some doesn’t.

Plenty of the most intriguing and damaging muck, indeed, doesn’t come from an opposing party, but from enemies within. Rudd, ever since he was booted as leader, has been accused of retailing the most damaging leaks about Julia Gillard and her allies. Political watchers are still digesting the swamp of bile in which Gillard’s senior supporters buried Rudd during his attempt to recapture the prime ministership in February.

Mark Latham’s The Latham Diaries remains the most entertaining bucket job on his own colleagues published by an Australian politician. John Howard’s ambitions for many years were thwarted by the strategic mutterings and late-night phone calls by adversaries from within his own party, and Billy McMahon was famously outed for his in-house treachery by Gough Whitlam, who called him ”Tiberius on the telephone”.

But those considered rats in the ranks often discover that their own political colleagues have been squirrelling away toxic files on them. When former Queensland Labor senator Mal Colston accepted the Howard government’s support to become deputy president of the Senate, boxes of material on his years of odious behaviour were swiftly dragged out of an attic in a Labor household in Brisbane and dusted off for distribution.

Once Liberal Peter Slipper acceded to the temptation of the Speaker’s chair in the House of Representatives, courtesy of the Gillard government, and declared himself an independent, it seemed only a matter of time before entertaining stories would surface courtesy of his old party.

Nevertheless, the seasonal and time-worn theme is that political parties take refuge in accusing their opponents of operating secretive ”dirt units”.

The single extraordinary feature of the latest confected indignation from Tony Abbott and his colleagues about a ”dirt outfit” operating within Gillard’s office is that Labor has apparently been so incompetent that such an outfit could be traced directly to the Prime Minister’s inner sanctum.

So-called dirty tricks units have been run by both Labor and Coalition governments since Methuselah was a boy – or at least since Malcolm Fraser was prime minister. And always with benign-sounding titles. Fraser’s Government Information Unit – a few former journalists churning out propaganda – had the Labor opposition crying foul.

Bob Hawke’s government perfected the method, combining propaganda with monitoring the media and building mountainous files. Just about anything a Coalition politician had ever said or done could be dragged out and thrown in the opposition’s face if there was a chance of claiming hypocrisy or a gaffe. It was called the National Media Liaison Service – known by the more fearsome sobriquet, ”aNiMaLS”.

The conservative opposition screamed blue murder and promised to abolish it. Which John Howard’s government promptly did … replacing it with a similar outfit called the Government Members’ Secretariat, aided and abetted by a string of ministerial staffers working in every capital city just so they didn’t miss anything.

Then Rudd shocked everyone by introducing a new code of conduct barring them from media monitoring, researching the opposition and direct election campaigning.

Which is why, presumably, Julia Gillard’s director of strategy, Nick Reece, found it necessary to put his own fingerprints on a confidential document to ministerial staff suggesting they investigate the ”younger days” of Coalition MPs – articles they may have written, right back to student days, and any fund-raising, companies or court cases in which they might have been entangled. Here was aNiMaLS reborn, right in the PM’s office, operating so poorly that it couldn’t even keep its own secret. Reece left the PM’s office this week for the presumably calmer waters of academia.

Meanwhile, both parties have their Black Ops squads. These are the political staffers and operatives out in the branches who inhabit anonymously the comments columns of political blog sites, sniping at and ”correcting” opinion pieces that are considered to be against their particular party’s interests, tweeting under fake names and, masquerading as ordinary listeners, lending their voices to talkback radio when an issue in their interests is running, or when they’ve got an opponent in a corner and want to do as much damage as possible without leaving fingerprints.

Dirt units? Old hat.

Tony Wright is national affairs editor.