The Prime Minister’s spin on today’s Mike Seccombe ethanol scoop (PM’s officials labelled as ethanol spies) is so transparent, so predictable, so lame and so typically cowardly that he really is, now, doing little more than exposing his complete contempt for any voter with a brain by even trying it on.
Now we have coal-face Australian embassy staff at the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) joining that long line of public servants, ADF personnel, anonymous advisers and sundry Howard fall-takers who have in their bemused day been subtly maneuvered, by this most devious of Prime Ministers, into absorbing the worst of whatever the scandal of the day may, or may not, bring down.
Here is what Honest John had to say today about our Free Market government’s poxy case of retrograde, 1950s, State-mandated protectionism, as reported in the Herald. Watch how the firewall manoeuvre, in all its magnificent subtlety, is set in motion, just in case it turns out to be needed later. My bold:
But Mr Howard said there was nothing wrong with the phone calls.”What the embassy was doing, and I’ve no doubt it made inquiries, what the embassy was doing the normal thing that a post would do because the government was considering a change of policy to remove the excise exemption,” he told Sky News. “Whenever a decision like that is taken some companies benefit, and some companies are disadvantaged. I am sure that inquiries were made, that was an entirely routine proper thing to have been done.”
Mr Howard said the information gathered was routine, about the size of the shipment and its planned departure time. He said the government may have first heard about the shipment from Manildra. “I think in factthat we first would have heard from Manildra about the possibility of the shipment coming,” he said. “I’m not the least embarrassed about the fact the embassy made inquiries, that’s their job.”
Now it may seem on the face of this that the Prime Minister is defending the embassy staff for their ‘four phone calls a day’ zeal here, but that is wrong. He is only ‘defending’ the embassy staff in the same way that Max Moore-Wilton ‘defended’ the Royal Australian Navy and Defence Department people on the day he announced his own retirement as head of the Prime Minister’s Department, when he was quoted on kids overboard in an Australian article by Dennis Shanahan (18 December), as follows. My bold:
“I understand the criticisms, and, of course, mistakes were made. But all of the people concerned did what they could to the best of their ability. I stand by them 100 percent. There was no malice.”
Again, it sounds like Moore-Wilton is defending the RAN and the bureaucrats. In fact, by introducing the idea that they need to be defended, he is doing precisely the opposite – setting them up, in a gutless mock-innocent way, for him or his successors, should future developments require it, to shaft them completely.
Webdiary readers may recall my Christmas Letter to our Leader, in which I requested the PM to take on board full and explicit responsibility for all aspects of Operation Relex, precisely because the games his team were playing had become so obvious. It came as no surprise to me, then, when I read this Shanahan interview just a few days after Liberal minister Mrs Danna Vale had acknowledged receipt of my PM’s letter. In turn, I sent her this further email. Introducing it here will help amplify why the PM’s comments in ‘defence’ of the embassy staff today are nothing of the sort, are equally just a grubby preliminary act in the now-standard firewall process. My bold:
From: Jack Robertson, BALMAIN NSW 2041
To: Ms Nicholls, Electoral Office for Ms Danna Vale, MP
Information copies: All Federal MPs and Senators; the Parliamentary Press Gallery
18 December 2002
Dear Ms Nicholls,
Thank you for acknowledging receipt of my letter to the Prime Minister, of 14 December 2002, in which I expressed serious concern over unanswered Human Rights Watch allegations of brutality during Operation Relex made against our Australian Defence Force (ADF).
Ms Nicholls, in this holiday period, I would be grateful if you could urge Ms Vale to bring this matter to the attention of the Prime Minister as a matter of considerable priority. I draw your attention in particular to press reports today of imminent preparations for war (although noting the PM’s comments on them), and suggest that it would be unfair of us to deploy our men and women to Iraq with any allegations hanging over their heads.
On what I can only consider a more ominous note, I noted the recent resignation of Mr Howard’s Cabinet Permanent Secretary, Mr Max Moore-Wilton, and was particularly unsettled by his comments on the so-called Children Overboard affair quoted in the front page article of today’s Australian as follows: “I understand the criticisms, and, of course, mistakes were made. But all of the people concerned did what they could to the best of their ability. I stand by them 100 percent. There was no malice.”
Ms Nicholls, I would be grateful if you would ask Ms Vale to stress urgently to the PM that, in fact, despite these words, Mr Moore-Wilton is actually NOT standing by anyone ‘100 percent’, as he is now heading off to some lucrative and unaccountable position in private industry (arguably, in a similar way as did Mr Peter Reith last year). Since, also like Mr Reith, Mr Moore-Wilton was a very powerful and influential man at the very epicentre of Operation Relex, the last election campaign and what can only now be described as your government’s sloppiness, incompetence, recklessness or economy with the truth, its wilful ignorance, and/or the outright malicious dishonesty that resulted from this combination during the kids overboard matter, you will naturally understand my growing anxiety as to whether or not the men and women responsible for exposing our ADF people to the allegations in the Human Rights Watch Report are truly committed to standing by them.
As you may be aware, Ms Nicholls, when a public official or politician starts to say things like: ‘I stand by my subordinates 100 percent’, even as they cut and run, it is usually the time to start watching your back! And if I may be perfectly frank, I personally do not believe anything Mr Moore-Wilton says, I do not ever trust him, I do not think he should have been a senior public servant in the first place, and I do not believe he cares one bit for anyone else in Australia but himself. (I do, on the other hand, think that he is a liar, a thug, an intellectual coward, a bully, a wrecker and an opportunist.) Naturally, you will understand why I am so keen not to allow any member of our ADF to be screwed by him, and similar non-military people, in any way.
To that end, Ms Nicholls, please urge Ms Vale to bring my growing concerns, and the respectful requests I make of the Prime Minister in my previous letter, immediately and urgently to the appropriate people’s attention, in particular to that of Mr Howard, and Mr Moore-Wilton himself, who naturally will remain responsible for any and all of his decisions and actions during his time as Prime Minister’s Department head long, long, long after his appointment technically expires on Friday.
Ms Nicholls, thank you for your prompt and courteous response in the first instance.
Jack Robertson
***
Nothing further from Mrs Vale, and sure enough, with utter predictability, just a few months later, that great and fearless and honourable ex-Public Servant Max the Axe – with his fat public purse payout tucked snugly in his bank account, and with his fat snout now buried deeply and safely in the utterly-unscrutinised pig-trough that is the newly-privatised Australian Airports Free Market Game – showed us what he meant when said he was ‘standing by the kids overboard crew 100 percent’. This from the Sunday program’s 64th birthday special on the PM a few weeks ago. My bold:
JOHN LYONS: The Government’s position on the so called “children overboard” issue also polarised the nation. Clearly, sections of the government misled the public but supporters of the government now blame the defence forces.
MAX MOORE-WILTON: In future I think the defence force including he captain of the vessel should be more careful in the reports they give to their superiors because the one thing that’s never been said, I think clearly enough was, this report would never have past unless the captain of the vessel at the time had said something. Now the captain of the vessel has been regarded by the senate and others as a semi hero.
Forgive my by-now standard bile, Daniel Moye, but I put it to you and fellow conservatives and small ‘l’ Liberals that Mr Max Moore-Wilton, like everything he represents, is a foul, opportunistic destroyer of Westminster conventions and principles, and a self-incriminating enemy of the health of Australian civic life.
But I digress. My more relevant point is to demonstrate the pattern, to show more clearly why I am contemptuously sceptical of the PM’s apparently sincere ‘defence’ of embassy staff and their exposed role as politically-manipulated ‘spies’ in this matter.
Notice how the PM’s language becomes abstract in tense and voice, oh-so-subtly disengaging itself from the actuality of the Manildra case – as if our PM is an aging Sir Robert Menzies conducting a fatherly tutorial in Westminster & Civic Administration 101, rather than an incumbent Prime Minister caught red-handed misusing DFAT channels and assets to enable rank political favouritism, and then misleading Parliament thoroughly about it. Such is Howard’s now-instinctive capacity and appetite for removing himself from the specific consequences of his style of governance when the specific consequences of his style of governance backfire on him. Examine the habitual way that he says: “I have no doubt (the Embassy) made enquiries”, and “I am sure that enquiries were made” (as if he is musing on detached first principles), instead of saying simply: “Yes, the embassy made enquiries”, and “Yes, enquiries were made” (as he surely knew and probably directed then, and as he in any case absolutely would know now).
It’s precisely the same mode of speech as when he generally preferred to argue: “If a country like Iraq is allowed to keep WMD, it would be dangerous if we did not invade”, rather than the more concrete: “Iraq has WMD, so we must invade”; and “I don’t want the kind of people who throw children overboard in this country” rather than: “These people threw children overboard, so I don’t want them here”.
Executive government by foolproof Motherhood statement, firewalling-as-you-go.
The truth on Manildra? My guess is that the Prime Minister, or more probably one of his tame anonymous underlings, picked up the phone (or whatever) last year and left relevant embassy staff in no uncertainty about what he required – hard, specific information about this shipment, way above and beyond the ‘normal routine thing’ of DFAT practice. However it was done, all such instructions would have naturally been conveyed in that soft, clubby, oh-by-the-way off-the-record mode, the greasy cogs of our once frank and fearless and proper Public Service turning ever-more easily and automatically at his unspoken wink-and-nod, lubricated as it has been by long years of politically-loaded appointment and patronage. Precisely the same way as Howard fixers spoke by phone directly to the Commanding Officer of the SASR at the height of the Tampa crisis and various naval Captains during Operation Relex intercepts, equally doubtless leaving these coal-face operators in no doubt of the lack of policy compromise he demanded (regardless of their own on-the-spot operational judgements), and yet equally leaving almost nothing on the official Public Record for Parliament or his Citizens to nail him down with later.
So, my prediction on this latest buck-passing outbreak is hardly rocket science: if Ethanol-gate proves to have any legs at all with the public (if it gets past Howard’s first defence, that of public apathy), then ultimately – once the Prime Minister’s Department has directed DFAT to conduct an internal enquiry into what commercial spying (tut-tut) the Embassy staff did in fact do at the government’s behest – it will transpire that some staff were perhaps a little zealous in their pursuit of information; that inexperienced junior DFAT personnel possibly overstepped the bounds of the DFAT ‘routine proper thing’, blah blah blah. And so ‘lessons will be learned’, and ‘procedures will be tightened’, and somewhere deep in the lower reaches of DFAT, another few decent and honest public servants who tried hard to do the right thing on an unwritten wink-and-a-nod basis will have the Westminster scales torn from their eyes, and learn to make bloody well sure that they get something in bloody writing next time around. And hell, the PM will possibly even say something statesmanlike and magnanimous and generous to wrap the latest storm-in-a-teacup up in his usual relaxed and comfortable, populist, Public Opinion-proofing, prophylactic persona.
Such as: “Well, obviously, Kerry, in the end I have to take full responsibility for these small errors of judgement at the Embassy, even if perhaps they went a bit overboard (whoops!) on their Trafigura enquiries. And I do that, I really do. I mean, it’s my responsibility in the end, I accept that, of course I accept that. And you know, our DFAT people are truly excellent people, and I stand by them 100 percent. But I mean, you can’t expect Old Bailey standards of perfect judgement all the time, especially given that our DFAT staff are under so much pressure in these uncertain TERROR times.”
And then The Australian’s editorial writers will write another mildly wrist-tapping apologia and a wink-wink call for tighter accountability next time, and then a Janet Albrechtsen will line up and have another go at us sad, nit-picking Lefty wannabe elites for our ‘anti-Howard obsessions’, and then Paul Kelly will drone on over the weekend in his sanctifying way about how the ALP is missing the point on Manildra anyway, which is the Howard government’s on-going failure to fully re-embrace economic reform, and blah blah blah.
And the whole thing will blow over, and the government will have got away with lying through its teeth once more, to cover its bum for blatantly feathering the nest of its big end of town mates, in a dirty and hypocritical Protectionist episode that makes a total mockery of the vicious treatment meted out not so long ago, by this government, to every battling waterfront worker who ever had an alsation dog set on him in the name of ‘global economic competitiveness’.
And Howard’s popularity ratings won’t budge an inch, and white will turn a darker shade of black, and one day, pretty soon, when someone grown-up and honest in the government or public service says: “Terror alert!” and it’s actually for real, not one of us will take them at their word, anyway.
Again, sorry sorry sorry to harp, but this relatively minor kerfuffle has it all. It captures beautifully the cowardly, corrosive, buck-passing, arse-covering sickness of this now out-of-control and civically-bankrupted gaggle of conmen and women we call Federal Government. Howard’s personal tactical armoury, and thus that of the entire crowd, is now nothing but a grab-bag of all our most base Human instincts. Division, populist stirring, bureaucratic delay and ‘security’ suppression, policy hypocrisy and piecemeal opportunism, waffling obfuscation, faked conviction, endless condescending exploitation of the battler, the Anzac, the non-existent Ordinary Australian.
Howard is like a school-yard gossip-stirrer, setting up fight after fight after exhausting, community-cleaving fight, and then standing back to await the arrival of the schoolmarm – Electorally-Usable Public Opinion – so he can lord it up as the Statesmanlike Teacher’s Pet, well above the domestic fray. (“Hey, I’m not saying I believe this myself, Penny, but I heard Timmy say that Betty said that maybe Jimmy said that you said that refugees are terrorists and we should reintroduce Capital Punishment so we can get the bastards who did this! Eh? Eh? Eh?”)
And there, too, are all the other kids in the playground – there’s Peter, and Phillip, and Brendon, and Amanda, and Tony, who all should know better – all playing his dirty game, even jumping in there defending the grubby little bastard whenever anyone who is not in his gang catches him at it red-handed, as Costello is defending now. There’s a deputy mug born every second, I suppose.
Oh look, maybe I am obsessed now, and maybe this sort of transparent tosh doesn’t matter to most people – especially when it comes to mouse poo like ethanol and public moneys and rich, industry-protected Liberal Party donors. But it matters a hell of a lot to me, because it represents a pattern, and the more and more I observe the way this gutless government firewalls its way clean out of any hint of electoral trouble (whether it be Iraq reconstruction casualty-grief, or WMD lies fallout, or kids overboard, or Education Report censorship, or plasma TV or phone card mischief, or whatever), the more I worry what such shameless adroitness might one day mean, when it comes to assuming full responsibility for what our soldiers, sailors and airmen might or might not have been forced to do during Operation Relex.
All in the name of an uncompromising, election-winning Border Protection beat-up.