The lost boat crossing our endless divide. Image by Webdiary artist Martin Davies. www.daviesart.com

John Howard is on the ropes. His tactic to keep himself upright – telling his troops to prepare for an early election – is defensive, not aggressive. He needs his MPs to cheer him on during what could be the worst week of his political career.

Simon Crean has painstakingly built a platform for a potentially devastating assault on Howard’s fitness for office as blind press gallery courtiers rave on about Howard’s ‘golden moment’ and Bob Carr’s tilt at windmills.

Let’s start with Manildra. If the Senate does not pass legislation by Thursday to endorse Howard’s giveaways to his mate Dick Honan, his latest exercise in crony capitalism will collapse. Honan will keep his taxpayer subsidy and be entitled to a refund of $20 million in excise he’s paid the Government. Honan’s competitors could import ethanol from Brazil once again and claim compensation for their massive losses after Howard scuttled their last import attempt.

The Senate has only one condition to pass the Howard/Honan law – the release of documents surrounding the deal. Howard won’t do it. Why??? What is in those documents that is so damaging he’s willing to see his deal collapse? Mike Seccombe’s recent Sydney Morning Herald scoop on Howard using our diplomats to spy on Honan’s competitors could be a clue, as could the famous minute of the meeting between Howard and Honan before Howard ordered that Honan be protected from competition. Howard lied to Parliament about that meeting – assuring the Australian people more than once that it never took place (Howard meets Honan: You be the judge whether he lied about it and Competitive Capitalism versus Crony Capitalism: The Difference Between Labor and Liberal). He was sprung by an honest public servant who released the minutes under an FOI request, but large parts of it were blacked out. The Senate wants the black removed.

John Howard does not want the Australian people to know the truth about this matter, and it seems he’s prepared to trash the deal he said was so vital to the future of our ethanol industry to avoid them finding out.

Tony Abbott is major headache number two, and again the crux of the issue is Howard’s desire to keep the public in the dark. Abbott hasn’t been himself in Parliament since his hypocritical murmours of sympathy for Pauline Hanson saw him hit in the face with his key role in her downfall through his preposterously-named Honest Politics Trust (HPT). Exposure of his lies and the secrecy of his donors didn’t stop the heavyweights of political journalism frightening reporters off chasing the story of the inexcusable failure of the Australian Electoral Commission to fulfil its duty to voters to enforce political donation disclosure laws in the case of the HPT. Webdiary has revealed that the AEC backed down on its 1998 demand to Abbott to disclose AHP’s donors without asking him a single question, seeing his legal advice, or taking its own (AEC took Abbott’s word for it to keep ‘honest politics’ donors secret).

 

 

Labor, freaked out by hostile media reaction to its attempt to press the issue, its own guilty secrets on disclosure and threats by Howard to fight fire with fire if necessary, saw Labor leave it alone last week.

But Pauline Hanson’s letter to broadcaster Alan Jones (Pauline Hanson: truth will set me free) has lit a fire under the story at a time when the AEC is fighting to restore its credibility in the light of suggestions that Abbott could have misled the AEC about his slush fund, a criminal offence (Tony Abbott: No such thing as the public’s right to know, More questions for Abbott on honest politics trust and Dear Margo …. Tony Abbott writes).

Think about it – Pauline Hanson is in jail for three years for misleading the Queensland Electoral Commission!

In addition, Democrats Senator Andrew Murray told the ABC Insiders program today he had provided information to the AEC about similar search-and-destroy missions against his Party in Western Australia by two of the same Liberal Party players involved in the HPT. Murray thinks this will help persuade the AEC to order Abbott to disclose his donors (Call for names of donors to ‘honest politics’ fund, Tricks of the trade).

Abbott’s recent exposure as a serial liar means his credibility is shot to pieces (Now Abbott lies about lying, copies Howard’s Manildra). That means Howard’s manager of government business in the House of Representatives is a dead duck in a week when Howard will need all the help he can get. Why is it so important to keep the donors secret that Abbott is prepared to die a slow political death to avoid the disclosure of their identities?

Then there’s the really big one. The leak of intelligence whistleblower Andrew Wilkie’s top secret ONA report on Iraq to Government-friendly journalist Andrew Bolt in June began to haunt Howard last week after his government brazenly briefed government backbencher Sandy Macdonald on its contents to hit Wilkie over the head with in the parliamentary inquiry into Howard’s pre-war intelligence.

The leak of Wilkie’s report is a serious breach of security and a criminal offence which went unnoticed back in June. The Macdonald drama lifted the lid on the scandal, revealing that ONA had referred the leak to the Australian Federal Police for investigation on July 4. NINE WEEKS later, the AFP had not interviewed Bolt! The AFP now joins Australian Electoral Commission as an ‘independent’ body under strong suspicion of having been so politicised under John Howard that it no longer performs its duty without fear or favour.

I rang the AFP last week to ask when the investigation began and why Bolt had not been interviewed. The reply: “Following a thorough evaluation, the AFP moved into investigation phase YESTERDAY.” The AFP said it was also investigating the use of top secret material by Macdonald. In other words, a government MP is under criminal investigation and the leaker could well be a government staffer or minister guilty of a serious crime and a serious breach of security in a security-conscious Australia.

I was the subject of an AFP investigation many years ago when I was leaked a Simon Crean Cabinet submission. These types of leaks – unlike leaks of classified security documents like Wilkie’s – are usually ignored, because often it’s politicians doing the leaking. I was interviewed at the Canberra headquarters of the AFP within days of Crean’s referral, and said “no comment” to all questions asked because my source was confidential. But the police had good reason to interview me. I could have got the document anonymously in the mail or found it in a rubbish bin, and in either case could and would have been frank with the AFP. So why wasn’t Andrew Bolt interviewed? Two reasons spring to mind – either the police already knew who leaked it and didn’t want to pursue the matter, or had decided not to investigate at all.

This is an intolerable situation and, as other writers have pointed out, makes a despicable comparison with Australian defence force officer Merv Jenkins, who took his own life in Washington after vicious government retaliation for his failure to obey a directive not to give US intelligence contacts information on East Timor prior to the independence vote despite government-to-government agreements to do so (see Mike Carlton’s A leak by the bucketful and Michelle Grattan’s It’s no secret: let he who is without spin…).

But the significance of the Government’s Bolt play is much greater than further proof of its entrenched double standards and dangerous politicisation of Australia’s core democratic institutions. If it’s OK to leak intelligence to discredit the whistleblower, why isn’t it OK to release intelligence to refute Wilkie’s accusations that Howard lied about his reasons for invading Iraq? Why not declassify the intelligence which would prove Howard’s constant claims in arguing the case for war that invading Iraq would REDUCE the risk of terrorism, REDUCE the risk of WMDs finding their way into the hands of terrorists, and make the world a SAFER place forAustralians? Why won’t Howard disprove Wilkie’s assertions by proving his own case?

He sure needs to now. Sensational documents just released by the British parliamentary inquiry into Blair’s stated reasons for war reveal what the British Joint Intelligence Committee told Blair (and the Australian intelligence services) six weeks before the war:

“The JIC assessed that al-Qaeda and associated groups continued to represent by far the greatest terrorist threat to western interests, and that threat would be heightened by military action against Iraq,” the British parliamentary report says.

“The JIC report, ‘International Terrorism: War with Iraq’, also said there was no evidence Saddam Hussein wanted to use any chemical or biological weapons in terrorist attacks or that he planned to pass them on to al-Qaeda. “However, it judged that in the event of imminent regime collapse there would be a risk of transfer of such material, whether or not as a deliberate regime policy.” (Australia was told: war will fuel terror).

Wilkie made these very points upon his resignation from ONA before the war. Why did Howard invade? Didn’t he care about increasing the threat of terrorism? Did he judge that our security reliance on the United States was so large that he had to agree to a request from a mad president? So large that he ignored the best available intelligence and passionate warnings from Indonesia and and other neighbours that invading Iraq without UN sanction would greatly destablise the region, thus increasing the risk to the safety of Australians?

Howard’s spin is starting to turn on him in dangerous ways. Why spend hundreds of millions to invade a country of no threat to us, taking the risks of a transfer of WMDs to terrorists and the creation of new alliances between terrorist groups? Why not spend all those millions on improving our internal security to keep us safe?

Last week’s revelations that Howard took the threat of terrorism so seriously that outsourced private firms had access to areas containing crucial security information about transport and customs checks raise questions about his good faith on terror. Big questions. Our airports are still insecure. Experts have been warning for months that nothing has been done to protect trucks carrying chemicals from terrorist attack. What is going on?

There could be an early election alright, but if there is don’t see it as a sign of strength. Howard’s rainbow has faded. He’s on the run, and his best bet to preserve his regime is to go to an election before Labor gets its leadership act together.

Peter Costello announced on Thursday that he’d travel to the Middle East to meet Israeli and Palestinian leaders. Costello’s preparing for leadership big time. A Howard early election play could be Howard’s last card to stop Costello becoming Prime Minister by the end of the year.

The latest intelligence revelations out of Britian are in The Observer: Revealed: new doubts on Blair’s Iraq dossier