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.