Australia seems to have its very own Kelly/Gilligan affair with some differences. The person playing the role of Andrew Gilligan is Opposition Leader, Mark Latham. Defence Department Deputy Secretary, Ron Bonighton is Kelly. While David Kelly was not in a position to know the information that he was supposed to have passed on, Bonighton was. However, the substance of the affair is eerily similar. Has the Government disregarded the information provided by the public service, and has it misused information provided to it by the public service to try to discredit a whistleblower (in this case Latham)? Of course, this being an Australian soap, there is no suicide thrown in to complicate things, we hope.
One of the most significant disjunctions between how the denizens of the parliamentary ecosystem view the world and how we lower phyla do is the question of lying. Politicians think it is important to prove that your opponent is lying. Voters don’t because they take it as a given that all politicians lie.
Viewed through this prism it really doesn’t matter whether Mark Latham is lying or not about briefings by public servants and when or if the ALP formulated policy on troop withdrawals. The coalition has wasted a week trying to prove that he is. What they should have been saying is not that he is lying and so can’t be trusted. What they should be saying is that he isn’t paying attention to this serious issue, and so shouldn’t be trusted, and that he is reckless.
That is not to say that they don’t have to show that he is lying. It is a threshold question, but it is a threshold that can be skipped over very quickly. There is no need for the government to still be knocking on the door.
Still, even with that reservation, I think the government won the parliamentary debate. I watched most of the motion of censure on datacast, with the exception of the Prime Minister’s speech. Latham’s delivery was bombastic and hectoring. Not what you’d expect from a man that reads his kids to sleep at night. Costello, who followed him, was by contrast cool and forensic, with an emotional edge, but one that was kept appropriately under control. His line? This is a “question of character”. Interestingly this is the title of a revisionist biography of John Fitzgerald Kennedy , as well as a question that was often asked about Bill Clinton (see this article from The New American).
Both sides of politics borrow heavily from, and are frequently enamoured of, US political figures. The use of this phrase is not only redolent of that relationship, but should be a warning to Costello. The question of character never did harm the careers, or the public’s affection for, JFK or Bill Clinton. It also, perhaps unconsciously, punctuates how derivative of Clinton policy formulations, and campaign strategy and tactics the Latham approach is.
The second speaker for the Opposition was Julia Gillard. Her speech cut a pattern that was duplicated by the Opposition speakers who followed. She did little to defend Latham, instead focusing on integrity issues of the government’s.
I am not sure who is winning the broader debate. Campbell Newman’s win in Brisbane should send shivers down John Howard’s spine because it shows that when confronted with two people who both say the other is a liar, the public will choose energy over apathy. Which is not to say that Howard is a Tim Quinn, but there is a perception that he is not setting the agenda anymore, just as there was a perception in Brisbane that Tim Quinn was not looking ahead.
Robert Hill’s move today to ensure that Latham has a note-taker at any future briefings may be an effective ploy. The difference between this fracas and the usual political rumble is that normally innocent bystanders – public servants – have been dragged in by both sides. The result of this is that we now have Latham in collision with a very senior public servant in circumstances where Latham is almost certainly misrepresenting what was said to him.
I say “almost certainly” very advisedly. I like Latham’s style and the change he has brought to Australian politics. I like the fact that he is prepared to go out on a limb, not just on issues, but on ideas. I want to think the best of him, but it strains my credulity to believe that a senior public servant told him that the War in Iraq, and the justifications for it, “stink” – either on or off the record. Anyone who has ever dealt with public servants knows how careful they are to only ever say things like that by careful implication and with a thick shield of plausible deniability.
Truth may not matter as Latham certainly seems to have the press on side. How else can one explain the ABC’s (shades again of Gilligan) appalling reporting of the incident? Faced with an official denial they ran the story last night on the 7:00 p.m. bulletin with a report that a “friend” of Mr Bonighton had rung them and said that knowing Bonighton they were sure Latham’s version of the story was correct. It seems that ABC journalists haven’t heard of hearsay. Why not interview his mother, siblings, all his ex-girlfriends or maybe his dachshund to see what he might or might not have said? Whoever let that go to air ought to be bounced down a couple of grades. The rule with un-named sources is that they should be in a position to know either first or secondhand, not guess. The only reason that anyone could have even included something like that in the story would have been to give the impression that it was one against two.
We have a long way to go to the election, and at the moment Latham is ahead. Many people believe Howard to be a liar, as shown in opinion polls. They probably now think the same thing about Latham. That will only affect Latham’s advantage if it can be shown to be indicative of some other vice. The danger for Latham is not that he has not told the truth, but that he has been reckless about it. There are other events in his life that can be sewn together to demonstrate a pattern of behaviour. At the last election we found that voters favoured Howard over Beazley because while they thought Howard represented the past and Beazley the future, they had confidence that Howard could at least deliver. Latham needs to be very careful that he doesn’t get himself a reputation for unreliability out of all of this.

I’d just returned from dinner with a friend from when I worked in a university. We had enjoyed a wide-ranging conversation over some tasty Indonesian food – words like ontology and epistemology were used freely. So I decided to veg out a little and let my brain slow down before retiring.
What better way than watch a bit of the Footy Show? However, just my luck they were having an extended discussion about the limits of behaviour in footy. First it was sledging, including the fairness of a Bulldogs player’s comment to an Essendon player who has just recovered from cancer. Well, apparently this player had subsequently apologised etc, but they all do, don’t they? The real question is: what kind of a person thinks it is acceptable to comment derisively on a life threatening condition just to get a ‘psychological advantage’ on the field? I recommend therapy.
Sam ‘the Cro-Magnon’ Newman naturally took the yobbo position, but Eddie McGuire and the now decidedly Snaggish Dermot Brereton demurred.
I’ve had a go at Eddie in a couple of my OLO essays, but it’s his ubiquity I really dislike, plus the garbage he appears in. He is actually a reasonably smart man, and he knows that there is a little more to life than footy. Witness his promotion of women in the Collingwood hierarchy.
But then on came the new Melbourne president who was roundly rubbished as he missed the first game of the season because he was somewhere else helping out Oxfam. Both Eddie and Sam got into him. In response he said directly that there is indeed life outside footy, and perhaps starving kids should rate higher than a game of footy.
Footy generally is in crisis. Both rugby and AFL can really get hurt if they don’t clean up their act. The image of the thuggish, insensitive brute who’ll do anything to win is no longer very attractive.
And so why continue to tolerate moronic behaviour from people off field like Sam Newman? He was once a terrific, and as I recall pretty fair, player. And he is clearly no fool with at times a quick wit. But he has adopted this persona of the buffoon, which – going by the press reports – obviously spills over into his own private life. Despite being a great player, good looking and making a mint for doing not much, he is a very angry man and it comes out in his insensitivity.
Most men grow up a little as they pass through their 30s. Issues like rape, assault, poverty, illness, etc are a little too serious to allow stupid comments to stand unchallenged. Footy is just a game, a totally contrived set of limited experiences, and a tiny fragment of real life. If the boys on footy shows want to talk about real life, they really should be prepared to think a little harder.

THE new Premier of Tasmania, Paul Lennon, has long been my kind of politician – no nonsense, tell it exactly how you see it, and reject political correctness with enthusiasm.
Yesterday, in a statement running to just three sentences, Paul Lennon confirmed why he is the kind of politician those of us fed up with political correctness and weak kneed politicians should give every possible encouragement.
The appointment of Richard Butler as Governor of Tasmania was always a risk. On Tuesday he made a speech proving just how big a risk he is. He said the US “reserved the right to beat the living daylights out of anyone who threatened it”.
This was the latest in a series of political speeches by His Excellency, and not surprisingly, the Liberal Party, and especially the rather curious Senator Eric Abetz, jumped all over him.
The Premier ignored the political grandstanding, spoke to the Governor, and then issued this very blunt statement:
“Premier Paul Lennon today said he had spoken to Governor Richard Butler, who had agreed that he would no longer comment on foreign or domestic policy.
Mr Lennon said this undertaking was in line with the Governor’s commitment to former Premier Jim Bacon, as stated to the House of Assembly on 20 August, 2003.
I expect this undertaking to be strictly adhered to.”
Cop that, Your Excellency!
Governor Butler is not the first to transgress the very clear conventions relating to vice regal statements. He probably won’t be the last.
But if he does so again I have not the slightest doubt his tenure as Her Majesty’s representative in Tasmania will unceremoniously end.
If he wants to know how tough Paul Lennon is, I suggest he have a quiet chat to the Greens Leader, Senator Bob Brown.
When asked whether the incoming Premier would be “as bad a (ex-Liberal Premier) Robin Gray” (from the greenies point of view), Senator Brown said “he will be far worse than Robin Gray ever was!”
One suspects Paul Lennon wears this comment as a badge of honour!

There is something decidedly Oedipal about federal politics these days. Here is the overtly patriarchal John Howard (stern, authoritative, self–righteous) brawling with the brash, energetic and hungry Mark Latham over ownership of the motherland. Latham made the character of this conflict obvious when he made that crack about the desperation of a politician at the end of his career. And it is very relevant; Howard’s body language shows a man under growing pressure.
In coming down from his lofty throne and into the political bear pit, Howard has already lost vital ground. He has recognised Latham as a genuine alternative leader, and thus given him all the credibility that Crean and before him Beazley could never achieve. The fact that this latest fight (over Iraq briefings) was started by Alexander Downer, the patriarch’s idiot half-brother, is significant. Downer always gives the impression of someone who thinks he is capable of mixing in it with the big kids, but can never quite manage it. Someone always had to come in to clean it up for him.
Latham, on the other hand, is a natural brawler. He has kept that part of himself under wraps as leader, but he is not likely to suddenly fall apart as the temperature goes up. The big difference is that Latham – unlike Howard and Downer, not to mention Crean and Beazley – is genuinely smart. His intellectual ability is much greater than what we have some to expect from our political leaders. So complexity does not phase him like it did the previous leaders, because he is not restricted to what his advisers tell him after they have had time to work it out.
Howard in attack mode is never a pretty sight. His inherent negativity emerges and shapes his face into a mask of cold hostility. Howard has always been like the kid who despite being given what he wants somehow suspects it is all a trick and can’t enjoy it. He has never risen to the challenge of leadership, instead playing it safe as a politician and Liberal Party leader. His supposed Big Win – the GST – was in fact a policy decided on years ago by the global corporate sector, and Howard never accepted the social cost of this or any other political decision that shifted wealth so dramatically upwards.
Latham, for all his faults, has the potential to be something better. He is now setting agendas in national politics, and despite the intractable nature of some of the issues, he is making decisions. In doing this he is showing up not only Howard’s intellectual conservatism, but how it stultifies more imaginative responses to policy issues.
The media, acting with their reflexive destructiveness, try to worry Latham’s decisions to death with a thousand increasingly inane questions. For the media, only political disaster is interesting. They want everyone to crash and burn because it makes for a spectacular show. Latham cannot and should not rely on Howard’s method of dealing with the media – that is, to refuse to engage in any serious analysis of his actions. He is at last a pro-active Labor leader, and he has to welcome the attention and use the media to get the electorate alongside (at least Labor can’t complain, as they did under Beazley and Crean, that they get no attention from the media).
But this will only work if Latham accepts personal authority. If he has to vet every comment with his advisers, staff and otherwise, he will falter, and then Howard’s unrelenting hostility will hit home.
We have an interesting contest. Latham is taking risks, he has flushed Howard out, and so far he is handling the heat. If he can stay focused, he’ll win the election because he shows up Howard’s real weaknesses. John Howard looks more and more like a man whose suit is suddenly too big for him.