By Shaun Carney
In a rush to score points against the PM, Malcolm Turnbull has scuttled himself.
WHAT a shambles. Kevin Rudd and Wayne Swan are off the hook. Malcolm Turnbull, a lifelong alpha type, is weakened and reduced to making implausible excuses about being duped. And the Walter Mitty figure at the centre of it all, senior public servant Godwin Grech, issues a rambling, cockamamie defence for a series of totally unacceptable actions - from the psychiatric ward of a Canberra hospital, no less.
Illustration: Dyson
Until now, the consensus view of the regrettably-named Utegate has been that Turnbull’s greatest mistake was in being impulsive on June 19 by calling for Rudd and Swan to resign. Earlier that day, Grech had given testimony to a Senate committee that portrayed Rudd as a liar. Turnbull, fired up by Grech’s appearance, had supposedly overreached with his resignation call.
What we’ve seen in the past 24 hours calls for a new assessment. Turnbull’s grand misjudgment was not in relying on Grech - although that was clearly ill-advised - but in believing that Rudd, the former bureaucrat addicted to process, with his dreams of being a player on the world stage, would endanger his life’s work by doing something as mundane as propping up a car dealer.
This was always at the heart of Turnbull’s assault on Rudd: his conviction that the PM had misdirected public resources under the OzCar scheme to a friend and supporter, Ipswich car dealer John Grant - the man who had lent Rudd a ute. Only if he was convinced that Rudd had done this could it have been worthwhile for Turnbull to have pursued the issue.
If not, well, it was bound to turn to ashes, which it has. Grech admits to faking an email, purporting to have come from Rudd’s economic adviser, Andrew Charlton, and asking for special consideration for Grant. This bogus document was central to Turnbull’s case against Rudd.
But reading the Auditor-General’s report on the affair, issued yesterday, along with Grech’s self-justifications in the report’s appendix and in yesterday’s Australian leaves one wondering why a bloke so seriously unwell could a) be so convincing to Turnbull and other senior Liberals and b) be given responsibility for an important Government program.
On several occasions, the report descends into bathos. It finds that, rather than one of Rudd’s mates getting special treatment, it was in fact a distressed car dealer identified by Grech as a donor to the Liberal Party to whom he lavished the most attention.
Indeed, Grech says in the appendix that not only did he tout the dealer’s Liberal connections to an official at Credit Suisse who was himself a Liberal activist as ‘‘leverage’’, he later told Rudd that if he could arrange finance for the dealer, it would give the Prime Minister a ‘‘good public relations opportunity as it would help you appear impartial’’. Neither Rudd nor any of the other people at the meeting recalled the conversation taking place.
As for the directing of successive updates on the handling of Grant’s request for assistance to Swan’s home fax in Brisbane - which at the height of furore in June was allegedly proof that the Treasurer was in on the conspiracy to ‘‘look after’’ a Labor mate - it turns out that Grech was behind it. After they started to mount up at chez Swan, a departmental liaison officer had to ask Grech to stop sending them.
Grech is unwell and that needs to be taken into consideration when assessing his explanation of his behaviour.
The greatest inconsistency is his justification for trying to set up Rudd - essentially trying to bring him down for lying to Parliament. Somehow, he argues that this was connected to his worries about the Coalition possibly blocking the OzCar legislation in the Senate, even though the Coalition had pledged to back it.
He also insists that Charlton had sent an email about Grant but that it must have been deleted and so, in what he terms a ‘‘misjudgment’’, rather than making a file note he dollied up a version of the email and sent it to himself. This was the email shown to Turnbull and deputy Senate leader Eric Abetz by Grech in Sydney on June 12 - a week before Abetz asked a series of pre-arranged questions of Grech during the Senate committee hearing.
By that stage, Grech had already destroyed his professional life. And by swallowing Grech’s story, Turnbull had taken some serious steps towards smashing his own political credibility.
At one level it’s not hard to see why Turnbull fell for it. Grech imagined himself as a player. He was, by many accounts, not averse to displaying his sympathies for the non-Labor side of politics and had given some of its leading players politically valuable information since the change of government in late 2007.
But at another level, it is hard to understand. It is simply not realistic to believe that Rudd and Swan, after more than 11 years in opposition and only a little more than a year in government, and facing the global financial crisis, had set about establishing spiv central over a car dealership and would jeopardise everything for it.
It does come down to judgment. Even if Grech’s previous gifts had been good quality, the story about Rudd throwing away his prime ministership in return for the loan of a 13-year-old ute from John Grant was too good to be true. If Turnbull can restore his public standing from here, it will be the greatest political recovery in modern politics.
Shaun Carney is associate editor.