{"id":115,"date":"2012-12-22T23:51:59","date_gmt":"2012-12-22T23:51:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/australiansforhonestpolitics.wordpress.com\/?p=115"},"modified":"2019-04-13T23:24:26","modified_gmt":"2019-04-13T13:24:26","slug":"overlooking-australias-watergate","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.nofibs.com.au\/overlooking-australias-watergate\/","title":{"rendered":"Overlooking Australia\u2019s Watergate"},"content":{"rendered":"

By\u00a0Victoria Rollinson
\n<\/a> December 15, 2012
\n<\/a> Source:\u00a0victoriarollison.com<\/a><\/p>\n

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The Watergate scandal was, apparently, rather big news at the time. People went to prison, the President of the USA was forced to resign and investigative reporters, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein became household names. Nixon\u2019s Republican party came undone through a conspiracy to find dirt on their rivals in the Democratic Party. Dirt that was to be used in an election smear campaign. In the end, they sufficiently smeared themselves out of office, when Nixon\u2019s replacement, President Ford, lost the 1976 election to Democrat Jimmy Carter. As scandals go, I can see that this one was very newsworthy. When President Nixon said he had no knowledge of the conspiracy, it took the work of investigative journalists to prove he was lying. Woodward and Bernstein investigated this conspiracy for two years. It was the story of their careers.<\/p>\n

The Watergate scandal has left an indelible mark on our language \u2013 political scandals are now nicknamed \u2018gates\u2019.\u00a0 In Australia, we\u2019ve had the famous OzCar affair (Utegate<\/a>), which contributed to the demise of Malcolm Turnbull\u2019s leadership of the LNP opposition. Over the last two days another \u2018gate\u2019 has been born \u2013 Ashbygate. To be entirely accurate, this gate was actually born in independent media over the last ten months (Independent Australia<\/a>\u00a0including contributors Peter Wicks, Vince O\u2019Grady and editor David Donovan,\u00a0Crikey<\/a>, and\u00a0Vex News<\/a>). After thousands of words were exchanged via independent news sites and social media about the very clear and obvious conspiracy behind the Peter Slipper sexual harassment case, it wasn\u2019t until Federal Court Justice Steven Rares threw the case out on Wednesday that the mainstream media decided the story warranted attention. But why had it not received any attention before?<\/p>\n

The similarities between the Watergate, Utegate and Ashbygate affair are obvious \u2013 they are all examples of a political party getting so obsessed with discrediting their rivals that they end up damaging themselves. Rather than inspiring the voting public through their plans for the nation, they instead try to win by damaging their rivals. It\u2019s like a runner who knows they can\u2019t beat their opponent with speed and fitness, so they try to club them in the knee and ultimately end up tripping on their own weapon. Dirty tricks. The dirty tricks backfiring. The innocent victims of the dirty tricks winning out. It\u2019s the classic hero villain tale being played out on a real political stage. It\u2019s no wonder that the news media loves this sort of story. It\u2019s the type of story that an investigative reporter would be proud to expose. It\u2019s the type of story that gets a journalist\u2019s name on the front page. Except for, well, right now.<\/p>\n

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Justice Rares\u2019s findings concluded the bleeding obvious, and at the same time reported the one fact that the mainstream media had refused to go anywhere near \u2013 that Ashby had concocted the sexual harassment claim to deliberately damage Peter Slipper and in turn, to destabilise the Labor government and ultimately perhaps to topple it altogether. As Justice Rares said:<\/p>\n

\u201cThere was no hint in contemporaneous texts with his friends, of Mr Ashby feeling upset as a result of sexual harassment. Rather those texts suggested that he was planning to use the record of his texts with Mr Slipper to empower others in a way that would affect the balance of power in the House of Representatives.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The key three words in this quote are \u2018to empower others\u2019. Which others exactly? Mal Brough was named by Justice Rares as being up to his eyeballs in Ashbygate. That seems pretty serious to me. A recently pre-selected Liberal candidate conspiring with the Speaker\u2019s staffer to bring about a spurious sexual harassment claim in order to affect the government\u2019s balance of power. We know that Christopher Pyne met with Ashby before the court case. This too is incredibly serious. Is a senior Liberal, the Manager of Opposition Business no less, engaged in a conspiracy to bring down the government? And what about Abbott? Remember that Nixon\u2019s major miscalculation in the Watergate scandal was to deny knowledge of the conspiracy. When recorded conversations in the White House proved he was lying, he was forced to resign, his credibility ruined.<\/p>\n

Abbott has always claimed he had \u2018no specific knowledge\u2019 of Ashby\u2019s court case until it was announced by Steve Lewis on Saturday April 21. When it was revealed that the press release that Abbott\u2019s office sent out about Ashby\u2019s court case was written the Friday night before Abbott was meant to have any specific knowledge of the conspiracy, he came up with the wholly unconvincing story that his server timestamp was wrong by\u00a010 hours<\/a>.\u00a0You would expect, with such sordid and damning evidence of a full scale conspiracy on the part of the Leader of the Opposition, that the mainstream media would be crawling all over this juicy and, in my view, incredibly alarming news story. But they\u2019re not.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve spent some time trying to work out why this is and I haven\u2019t been able to decide which of the following scenarios is correct. Perhaps it\u2019s a mixture of the three:<\/p>\n

1) Mainstream political journalists don\u2019t actually have any investigative skills. They physically can not report political news without trying to give it some sort of \u2018they\u2019re just as bad as each other\u2019 context. They also can\u2019t uncover anything for themselves, preferring to wait for others to do the hard work for them. In this case it was Justice Rares who provided the facts that they should have discovered for themselves. Along with independent writers and bloggers. Mainstream journalists will turn even the most shocking and newsworthy political events into chatter about political tactics because this is the only way they know how to report politics.\u00a0For an example of this, read\u00a0Michele Grattan\u2019s take on Ashbygate<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Some of the key areas of the Ashbygate conspiracy which need to be investigated, but so far are being ignored by the mainstream media are:<\/p>\n