Catallaxy Files

Never believe anything until it’s been officially denied is a very cynical approach to modern politics. Today, The Australian has published the denial.

IT was something of a shock to read Piers Akerman in Sydney’s Daily Telegraph this week outlining how Kevin Rudd helped devise a “rancid turd” strategy in the 1995 Queensland state election to demonise the Coalition on health.

It was even more of a shock when he revealed that Wayne Sanderson, an ABC journalist at the time, claimed this was told to him by a “senior campaign official” within the ALP.

I can reveal without a shadow of doubt the identity of that official. It is someone I have known and trusted for years. As George Bush senior once said: “I am that man.”

At the time, I was press secretary to then Queensland health minister Jim Elder, so while I had a pretty busy election in that role, I was well down the pecking order of campaign officials. Still, Sanderson wouldn’t be the first journalist to paint his sources as being more important than they actually are.

But it’s time for a few facts. Firstly, while I can confirm I used the word “turd”, I didn’t use the word “rancid”. My word was “smelly” – how could such an object be otherwise?

So as best I can work out the whole denial turns on the fact that journalist Wayne Sanderson (yes, that’s our old friend) says ‘rancid’ and Andrew Fraser said ‘smelly’. Fraser goes on to make a big thing over he fact that he never said the word ‘rancid’ and we are then expected to believe that that whole of the rest of the story isn’t true.

But what did Sanderson say?

I was eventually told by a senior campaign official that they had a rather glorious title for the style of campaigning they were adopting. They said that it came under the rancid turd theory. Now, allow me, if you are game, to elaborate. This particular theory goes like this: if you have a problem in a particular area, such as health, then you look for the ugliest, nastiest unmentionable in that same area and you throw it at your opponents—the theory being that by the time they have got the smell off their suits, the campaign is over.

Okay – so substitute the word ‘smelly’ and ‘rancid’ and consider how that story changes. Well, actually it doesn’t change at all. It is also not clear that Fraser’s comments and Sanderson’s comments are inconsistent either. Fraser may well have said ‘smelly’ and Sanderson then says that this is covered by the ‘rancid turd theory’. Fraser is also remembering back over a period of 15 years.

To my mind that component of the Fraser admission is a sideshow. What it does do is confirm the Sanderson account. The Goss government deliberately set out to mislead the voters through an advertising campaign. As I suggested before, there is an element of voter beware – and as we know the voters in the 1995 Queensland election did not take kindly to this.

Unfortunately for Labor, I think the smell ended up on the wrong suits, so to speak. Even worse for them was the damage it did to Wayne Goss’ standing and credibility. It had been their most potent political weapon and, as the coalition’s campaign director observed after the campaign, that campaign allowed the coalition for the first time to target Wayne Goss’ standing.

The far more important question is who decided the undertake that misleading advertising? Piers Akerman picks up the story.

IF you thought there was something smelly about the so-called health debate, you would be entirely correct. It was nothing more than a re-run of the strategy adopted by Queensland Labor’s Goss government in 1995, a strategy formulated by the two most senior public servants in premier Wayne Goss’s inner-circle, Kevin Rudd and Wayne Swan, in concert with Mike Kaiser, the then ALP state secretary.

As best I can work out Rudd and Swan are only mentioned once each in the Sanderson document – Rudd is described as supporting the Hilmer reforms, how times change. So Fraser has now confirmed that Rudd was involved, as was Swan. Fraser tries to suggest that they only had a peripheral in the campaign.

Both helped out in the campaign, but they weren’t involved in the day-to-day work and planning.

But how would he know? By his own admission he was a lowly official on the campaign, so he wouldn’t have been party to senior meetings or serious decision making. But then perhaps he was a senior official as Sanderson suggests. Of course, Sanderson hasn’t said who he spoke to; Fraser is assuming that Sanderson had only spoken to him.

So where does this leave us? All up we now have a confirmation of the basic facts, but no credible denial of the role that Rudd and Swan played in the 1995 misleading health ads. We also know that Rudd and Swan, fifteen years later, are trying the same stunt.
Update: Myrddin Seren, in comments, raises a good point. At the 1995 election Kevin Rudd was a senior public servant – why was he helping out in the campaign at all? By this time Wayne Swan was a sitting federal MP and as the former State Secretary it is quite appropriate that he ‘helped out in the campaign’.
Update II: Badm0f0 suggests that Rudd wasn’t a public servant at the time of the 1995 Queenland election. I can’t find a definitive date for when Rudd left the public service, but news reports that I have managed to find speak of him in the past tense. So I think we should accept Bad’s memory as being correct.
Update III: Wayne Sanderson emails to deny that he was MichaelF.