Antipodean Watergate: What did Tony know and when did he know it?

21 April 2012 front page

 

At 1am in the morning of 21 April 2012 The Daily Telegraph online published a series of articles and an editorial^** breaking news that the then Speaker of the House of Representatives Peter Slipper was being taken to court by a member of his staff.

 

On that same day Opposition Leader Tony Abbott issued a media release titled Statement on Peter Slipper MP.

 

The timing of this media release is now a subject of interest, as there is speculation that Abbott knew the basic facts concerning the application to the court before news broke in the Australian media.

 

The Sydney Morning Herald 13 December 2012:

 

The metadata of the media release on the Ashby matter sent by Mr Abbott's office to media outlets indicates it was "created" at 11.08pm on Friday, April 20, 2012 - before News Limited published its exclusive story on the Saturday.

Asked to explain the discrepancy between the time the document was apparently created and transmitted to the media at 9.17am on the Saturday, Mr Abbott's office said that during April the computer server timestamps were sometimes out by up to 10 hours.

AAP saw several other documents on an office computer which showed the same discrepancy.

"Our records clearly show that the press release was drafted, converted into a PDF, and issued on the morning of the April 21, 2012," a spokesman for Mr Abbott told AAP. [my red bolding]

 

Abbott’s maths just don’t add up. In endeavouring to explain away what at first glance appears to be a pre-emptive media release, he forgets to check the Internet and therefore does not discover the fact that his Statement on Peter Slipper MP media release is quoted in the published transcript of an 8am radio show a whole 1 hour and 10 minutes before the revised time he gives for transmission by his office of that same media release.

ABC AM Staffer accuses Slipper of sexual harrasment

Adam Harvey reported this story on Saturday, April 21, 2012 08:07:00

 

ELIZABETH JACKSON: The Federal Opposition has called for the Prime Minister to stand down the Parliamentary Speaker Peter Slipper after allegations today that he sexually harassed a young male staffer and misused taxpayer-funded Cabcharges.

In a statement issues this morning the Opposition Leader, Tony Abbott, said it was "incumbent on the Prime Minister to require him to stand aside until the matters were concluded before the courts"…. [my red bolding]

Obviously the media release began its journey before the start of the business day, so when was it created, where and by whom?

 

Footnote:

^**Read extracts of the allegations made against Speaker Peter Slipper

^**Sexual harassment allegations include claims of bizarre behaviour

^**Editorial: A scandal that is no small matter

^**Crisis: Court case a slippery slope for Gillard

Update:

14 December 2012 snapshot of the document properties

of the April 2012 media release

Statement on Peter Slipper MP

supplied to Australian Parliament House by Tony Abbott

 

UPDATE 17 December 2012:

 

I have been sent the original, unedited PDFs by a journalist. Looking at the PDFs & the date formatting, it seems the date output by MS Word 2007 has defaulted to a “null time zone” format, meaning it is timestamped with the local time....

Some testing by twitter users with Word 2007 & Adobe Acrobat have confirmed that a file output by Word 2007 with a null time zone will be reverted to Zulu time upon being edited & saved in Adobe Acrobat as there is no timezone information available so Acrobat assumes Zulu time. This does mean that the original files were output at 23:08 (& 32 seconds) on 20/04/12 in the AEST (+10hrs) time zone, meaning Abbott’s office was not only aware of the impending report from News LTD, but had enough time to prepare a statement the night before. [Sortius 10 Hours of Bullshit ]

 

UPDATE 18 December 2012:

 

The Australian today; The Department of Parliamentary Services, however, backed Mr Abbott's explanations on Monday after The Australian raised the issue earlier in the day. "The date stamp on the document in question is incorrect," said a DPS spokeswoman. "The press release was created on the 21 April, 2012.

"DPS technical staff can see that the original Word document was saved at 9.07am on April 21, 2012 AEST. The document was converted to a PDF at 9.08am on April 21, 2012 AEST.
"The time on the date stamp is 10 hours behind AEST due to a technical problem."

This limited explanation does not explain why it was only the PC of one particular staffer which was affected and only one particular media release among the multitude Abbott sent out in 2012.





Dennis Shanahan finally loses any grip on reality

Mal Brough (top) and Dennis Shanahan (bottom)

 

Dennis Shanahan writing in The Australian on 12 December 2012:

 

FORMER Howard government minister and putative MP for Fisher, Mal Brough, is the latest political casualty in the ongoing scandals surrounding Peter Slipper….

But the real political victim is now Brough, who stands accused of working with Ashby and co-worker Karen Doane in an underhanded political scheme based on disloyalty, political preferment, duplicity, and lies - all aimed at bringing down Slipper and promoting Brough….

In the face of what is set out below, one wonders in what alternative reality this political editor now dwells if he can seriously apply the term “victim” to this man.

Justice Rares findings concerning Mal Brough in his Ashby v Commonwealth of Australia and Peter Slipper judgment of 12 December 2012:

 

135 Mr Ashby asserted to Mr Harmer that his justification for his disloyalty as an employee in providing copies of Mr Slipper’s 2009 and 2010 diaries was that he wished to place the material in the public domain. That was, his assertion went, because he “believed that the conduct was morally and legally wrong and he felt aggrieved that he had been placed in the situation of becoming, as he understood it, exposed to (and potentially implicated in) what he regarded as the wrongful conduct of a public official”: [116] above. The words I have emphasised were ambiguous. If they referred to Mr Slipper’s conduct on the days covered by the 2009 and 2010 diary entries he surreptitiously sent to Mr Brough and Mr Lewis, there is no evidence to support Mr Ashby’s description or that he had any knowledge of particular conduct of Mr Slipper that was morally or legally wrong prior to him or Ms Doane sending the diary extracts to Mr Brough and Mr Lewis.

136 …..Rather, Mr Ashby’s and Ms Doane’s conduct at that point indicated that he and she were anxious to supply information to Mr Brough and Mr Lewis so that they could use it to assemble an attack on Mr Slipper, if they could find sufficient material to do so, using the diary entries and other evidence…..

138 I am also satisfied that Mr Ashby and Ms Doane by about 29 March 2012 were in a combination with Mr Brough to cause Mr Slipper as much political and public damage as they could inflict on him….

141 Mr Brough was unlikely to have been offering to assist Ms Doane and Mr Ashby in seeing Mr Russell QC for advice or looking for new careers out of pure altruism. Realistically, his preparedness to act for them was created and fed by their willingness to act against Mr Slipper’s interests and assisting Mr Brough’s and the LNP’s interests in destabilising Mr Slipper’s position as Speaker and damaging him in the eyes of his electorate…..

142…. Certainly, the nature of the allegations that Mr Brough, Ms Doane and Mr Ashby had provided Mr Lewis in about late March and early April 2012 would have suggested to a political journalist that there would now be more than one news story about Mr Slipper to pursue….

146 Mr Ashby and Mr Lewis had planned that articles about Mr Slipper’s use of travel entitlements would be published shortly before these proceedings were filed. They both knew that Mr Lewis would be able to publish further articles on the subject matter as soon as it was filed in Court in the originating application. Ms Doane and Mr Brough had also discussed the timing and sequence of publication of stories by Mr Lewis. So much is clear from Mr Ashby’s texts to Mr Nagle of 10 April 2012, Glen of 11 April 2012 and Ms Doane’s email to Mr Brough of 10 April 2012: see [82], [90], [86]. The planning reveals that Mr Ashby calculated how he would attack, and use the press to attack, Mr Slipper.

147 Mr Ashby had planned with Mr Lewis, and probably separately with Ms Doane and Mr Brough, the sequence of publications so as to raise the more serious allegations in the originating process, after the stories of 16 April 2012 appeared. The timing of those 16 April stories was linked to when the originating application would be filed. Once Mr Ashby began seeing Harmers and went into “lock down”, Mr Brough and Mr Lewis became anxious to know when the proceedings would be ready to be filed. Hence their strenuous attempts to contact Mr Ashby once he began to act on Mr McClellan’s advice to filter media contact through him. Mr Ashby had emphasised in his text to Mr Lewis on 10 April 2012 that “We need to act fast mate”. And Mr Brough told Ms Doane on learning that, eventually, Mr McClellan would meet Mr Lewis “Everything will be fine”: [94].

196 Having read all of the text messages on Mr Ashby’s mobile phone, as Mr Ashby’s senior counsel invited me to do, as well as the other evidence, I have reached the firm conclusion that Mr Ashby’s predominant purpose for bringing these proceedings was to pursue a political attack against Mr Slipper and not to vindicate any legal claim he may have for which the right to bring proceedings exists. Mr Ashby began planning that attack at least by the beginning of February 2012. As Mr Ashby and Ms Doane agreed in their texts of 30 March 2012 what they were doing “will tip the govt to Mal’s [Brough] and the LNP’s advantage”: [66]. It may be a coincidence that Mr Ashby suggested to Mr Slipper the idea of becoming Speaker just as Mr Brough began to move towards challenging Mr Slipper for LNP pre-selection for his seat and Mr Ashby ended up in an alliance in late March 2012 with Mr Brough to bring down Mr Slipper after he became Speaker….

http://youtu.be/AEWfsUO7YZY

* Photographs found at Google Images

UPDATE:

Justice Rares found that Mal Brough had known in early April 2012 that an application was to be filed by James Hunter Ashby. Court records show that it was filed on Friday 20 April 2012.

This is what Oppostion Leader Tony Abbott told the media on 13-14 December 2012:

'I think that Mal Brough was perfectly and properly endorsed by the Liberal National Party. He's been quite transparent and upfront about his involvement and, as I said, the matter is now subject to appeal,'

Smoking the difference on either side of the Pacific Ocean

The difference between cigarettes from the US and Australia
@Illdrinn

How pro-development state and local government is whittling away at environmental protection on the NSW Mid & Far North Coast

 

The NSW Northern Rivers Catchment Management Authority’s Regional State of the Environment 2012 report speaks volumes about the attitude of Richmond Valley, Clarence Valley, Coffs Harbour, Kempsey and Nambucca councils in relation to land outside of the national parks portfolio. All show reduced total areas for land afforded environmental protection under local planning instruments.

 

Across the entire NSW North Coast there has only been 4,618 hectares of additional land afforded environmental protection under the most recent local environmental plans.

Despite the existence of a well-established park and reserve system, effective habitat on the North Coast is now only classified as good through to very poor.