The Great Ute Scandal has been bubbling along for weeks but I ignored it, partly because scandals are rarely interesting and partly because I couldn’t get to the starting point of working out what wrongdoing was supposed to have taken place (compare for example the Manildra business, which involved large sums of public money and provoked no serious concern). But in the last day or two the stakes have been raised dramatically, based on the alleged email from the PM’s office urging a prompt response to the concerns of a car dealer who contributed a car to Rudd’s campaign.
Whatever the significance of the putative email may have been, Rudd’s outright denial that any such email was sent means that it will be a major crisis for him if the email turns up, and possibly a terminal one if it turns out that the email was suppressed. On the other hand, if it can be proved that the email published by the Telegraph and referred to by Turnbull was in fact a fake, the consequences will be dire for Turnbull at least (I don’t suppose the Tele could lose much credibility). As my recent spam crisis demonstrates, I’m no tech expert, but I would have thought that the headers on an email would make it pretty easy to check whether it had been sent and that erasing all trace of an email would be just about impossible. And it would be grossly irresponsible to publish an alleged email if you received it with the identifying info removed.
Update
The news that the email was a fake confirms that the outcome will be bad for Turnbull, and could be catastrophic. The worst case, but a plausible one on the evidence to hand, is that the email was the product of a fraud cooked up between Liberal staffers and one or more corrupt Treasury officials. Even the best case, that the email was fabricated for some personal reason, and passed to the Liberals along with other leaks about the car scheme, doesn’t look good. I guess, given the twists and turns so far, it’s also necessary to consider the Machiavellian possible of a (highly successful) agent provocateur, luring Turnbull into a trap, as happened (IIRC) with Ralph Willis in 1996.
Further update
It now appears that the worst-case scenario is pretty close to the truth. Grech has apparently been working as a source of leaks to the Liberal party for a long period*. Apart from the obvious disastrous implications for the Liberals, this point also casts doubt on what remains of the case against Swan. If Grech was working for the Libs all along, he could easily have generated a large volume of emails, reports and so on, without any particular pressure from the government
* The term “mole” is commonly used in such cases, but the original idea of a mole was one of an agent in place who did nothing but burrow nto the target organisation, waiting for the time to act.
John Quiggin 
Double or nothing, you’re basically saying. The stakes have been reaised so high now that somebody’s got to lose some skin.
very similar to the utterances given under privilege in the South Aust State parliament not so long ago.
all this semem
sorry pressed submit by mistake.
i meant to say
all this seems storm in a teacup silly compared to whats happening right now in Persia.
Oz is one of the governments opening the doors to the injured in Tehran.
It is a strange that an email that neither the sender nor the recipient is able or willing to produce should then appear in the Tele. The email may well be a fake. The Liberal Party does have some form in this regard. At the last election members of the Liberal Party were found guilty of electoral fraud and previously Senator Hefferan was forced to make an embarrassing retraction because evidence he presented against Justice Kirby was subsequently found to be false.
This ‘event’ is small beers – politicians privilege all sorts of people over others. They mislead the public all the time. A great diversion to show ‘democracy in action’.
No techie either but it is possible I think to some extent to replicate the headers but no idea if this should be easily detectable by any competent techie. Only going off an April Fools joke from a Cairns blogger which sent out a PR Release from Council media office with headers sourced from a Council email and also disclaimer footer ….. apparently some of the recipient media fell for it and did turn up for the media event or at least had to make direct enquiries to verify it.
Bringing the AFP into it not only raises the stakes, but is also about the only way to credibly establish who dunnit. Their IT forensics staff are more than capable of detecting attempted deletions from local hard drives, should anyone have been so niiave as to think that was enough. In any case, these days the email server(s) at the site (parliament) should be saving a copy of all that passes through it, for precisely this reason. It isn’t like 5 years back when disk space was still a significant expense to consider. Heck, I’ve got more than 1TB at home and even that is small by today’s standards.
Let the cards fall where they may…but check the staffers for the hard right in the NSW Liberal Party along the way – they’ve got history, afterall 😉
The truly amazing thing is that Turnbull would base his accusations on an alleged email which he now concedes he has never even seen, and presumably didn’t think it worth his while to verify. The ‘Telegraph’ must be touched that at least one reader retains such blind faith in their integrity.
It is not possible to create false Government emails. All public service emails have rigorous to: and from: fields plus server details, that are always accessible to system administrators in backups if they passed through Government computers.
This issue is total bull from Turnbull.
If he (or any Liberal hack) have created a false document (as they did in the seat of Lindsay) for political processes – Turnbull should be ejected from Parliament.
He either produces the email, with the normal public service “mail header” and time stamp, or he should get kicked out of Parliament.
Australian democracy should not be jeopardised by false documents from foul right-wingers.
Turnbull has not produced nor has he seen the letter yet despite the fact that there is documentary proof that the Treasurer has kept an extremely keen interest although he denied any such thing and despite the fact that a Treasury official stated that from his recollection there was an email… Malcolm Turnbull is the story.
If he has not seen the email but journalists who have obtained it swear that it is genuine then you have a warped sense of priorities.
I have the feeling this is going to backfire badly on Turnbull. What was so interesting also was why Grech’s supervisor seemed to give him no credibility. It has all the hallmarks of a hard right cook up and whats more its small bikkies compared to the Manildra affair (and the Tampa affair and the AWB affair and the countless other coalition “mates” that benefitted under Howard – all those board appointments eg Windschuttle and Albrechtsen and countless others.
Its actually quite a pathetic incident and I think the federal police should be brought in – if nothing else but to clean out the muckrakers…and silence the likes of the perennially obnoxious Tony Abbott.
I agree with Alice that it will backfire on Turnbull because I cannot understand why the PM would deny, deny and deny the existence of an email if it actually existed.
Perhaps the email was deleted from backups as well and logs rewritten – these are tech issues and can probably be falsified with sufficient knowledge. Not that I am saying they were, but IT evidence is falsifiable.
By calling in the AFP early Rudd is indicating that he doesn’t believe the issue has substance, otherwise he has gambled wildly- Something he doesn’t appear to do in other circumstances. The evidence from the public servant was not compelling and he has every reason to be nervous as it could cost him his job under the PS Code of Conduct. There will be evidence on his email account if such a document exists and therefore tracable by police through the IT support systems of government. Turnbull may end up weakening his recent gains in popularity by his recklessness. The claims have credibility however as both Liberal and Labor seem inclined to help out mates when in government. There is plenty of evidence of that in State governments too. Both sides will be hurt by these accusations.
The real issue is not this particular email.
The issue is how noxious rightwingers use false documents to corrupt Australian politics.
“Terith” Khemlani (sp?)
1996 Ralph Willis letters
Heffernan’s Kirby document
Lindsay Islamic leaflet
Liberal Party hack’s false Jon Stanhope website in Canberra
and now Turnbull’s bullshit.
Turnbull needs to be inteviewed under the same guidelines as applied to building workers. If he fails to give honest answers, he goes to gaol.
The email evidence will only be there if it has not been removed – emails can disappear, logs can be altered, backups faulty and so forth. IT records are no more secure than any other – in some ways less so. There is an entire industry of security because of this.
nanks
I do not think this applies to Australian Public Service systems.
In fact, I am sure that government departments can always retrieve all and any official business email.
This is the law?
So the AFP have a very easy task.
Shorter nanks: even if nobody has seen it and there is absolutely no evidence it ever existed, you can’t say it didn’t.
Presumably the intended implication of this extraoedinary line of reasoning is that we (and especially the media) should discuss the issues in a ‘balanced’ way that gives space and credibility to arguments that assume the email is real.
This is becoming a predictable conservative rhetorical strategy. Justice Kirby may well have used Commonwealth cars to pick up male prostitutes even if the hard evidence was forged. Climate change denialists deserve equal respect to anyone else because you can’t prove they are wrong. It’s obvious Mahomed Haneef was part of a terrorist network because he couldn’t prove he wasn’t. Saddam had WMDs because nobody could prove he didn’t. Iran is secretly developing nukes because there is no proof they are not.
It takes ‘absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence’ to the level of a comprehensive generic epistomelogy in which all assertions they like deserve serious consideration regardless of the lack of supporting evidence. The very act of making a claim generates a prima facie plausibility and the onus is on others to prove it’s not true. Statements made to the detriment of enemies are accepted at face value while denials are dismissed as self-serving lies or distortions.
Then they have the gall to make snide remarks about post-modernism.
Interesting analysis here on the utehoax…
http://www.thepoliticalsword.com/2009/06/20/default.aspx
Im inlcined to agree – if Rudd or Swan were trying to do a favour for a mate…would it really be solicited in the form of a cheery informal “Hi Godwin” fully recordable email from the PM’s office?
I dont think so.
I suspect the police may now ask Mr Turnbull for his “copies” and hey presto – suddenly Malcolm “didnt actually see the originals” (I thought he was looking a bit pale in the Sunday papers). I would suggest they need to search some coalition hard drives for the originals.
Nanks, IT security is quite separate to officer usage in the public service. It would require a level of corruption doesn’t exist in Australia to erase the evidence and to have the AFP also fail to notice the erasure from all the back up tapes. I doubt that all the officers concerned would risk their own freedoms and/or job for the PM or the Treasurer.
I’m not an expert, but I know enough to be confident that no-one in the PMs or Treasurer’s office has a fraction of the expertise that would be needed to wipe out the traces of an email once it had been sent and received. If, as seems clear, the supposed erasure took place weeks after the email was sent, I doubt that even a team of IT specialists could do the job reliably, covering their own tracks after the event.
In the olden days (ie Unix) two well known techniques for backdoor access could give a person root (superuser), from which they could scrub logs or even generate forgeries to cover the times from first attack to logout. However, to the best of my failing memory, our sysadmin knew of ways to determine that logs had been modified in such a manner, so it presumably would only fool newby sysadmin staff. I think it was AusCert that would regularly inform sysadmins of various attack attributes and ways of detecting them, and preventing them.
In any case, the politics of it seem to rest on three points:
a) the existence of the email and some indication of its provenance;
b) if a), then who really sent it;
c) if b), then who received it, both the first receiver and all cc, bcc.
Point (a) has been elevated by Kevin Rudd as he has based his strategy, for dealing with the opposition, entirely upon the trust of his staff. That is commendable and I applaud it, but boy is it a courageous thing to do. If it turns out that the email is real and also came from the PMO, then Kevin’s attacks upon the opposition may be boomerangs for him.
Point (a) can obviously cause serious ructions in the Liberal party for Malcolm Turnbull, if the email turns out to be a forgery (say, one that is spoofed and then routed through an anonymising server on way to the journalist in question). If on the other hand it exists and came from either the PMO or Swan’s office, then the evidence of that should be somewhere in the system. Even a delete from disk, followed by a rewrite of other data over the top of the original file location, is not enough to make certain it cannot be detected. While we tend to think of the data as binary on the disk it does in fact leave a distinct magnetic pattern, which is not entirely eliminated by a single rewrite with new data. IT forensics involves detection of this sort of deleted data, among other things. For this reason, and others, I sincerely hope for Rudd’s sake, and to be magnanimous, for his staff and for Turnbull, that the email is a clever forgery generated outside of the PS system. But I doubt it.
What alarms me about the whole issue is that the surfacing of alleged emails, and the like, and they manner in which the Liberals are using these, has the same stench of lowdown dirty tricks that the Republicans play (I’d include the Democrats too, except they haven’t been in power for eight years and I’m blowed if I can recall the nasty stuff by them – no doubt I’ll be set straight on that). We just don’t need this level of viciousness by any member of parliament. The Prime Minister has in my opinion taken the correct approach of calling in the AFP to investigate whether the email exists, and given that, who is the originator.
Perhaps the email was deleted from backups as well and logs rewritten – these are tech issues and can probably be falsified with sufficient knowledge. Not that I am saying they were, but IT evidence is falsifiable.
It would not be falsifiable by anyone outside the IT department. I presume that the PM’s office and Treasury have seperate IT infrastructure and support so it would actually need someone or some people with access to both the PM and Treasury department IT support. Below is a starting checklist of all the things a competent IT person would need to do to falsify the evidence.
* Delete the actual emails from all PM office servers
* Delete the actual emails from all PM office backups
* Re-write log files on all PM servers the email passed through
* Upload re-written logs to PM office backups
* Delete the actual emails from all Treasury servers
* Delete the actual emails from all Treasury backups
* Re-write log files on all Treasury servers the email passed through
* Upload re-written logs to Treasury backups
Perform an analysis of the likely path the email used to get between the PM and Treasury office and then
* Re-write log files on all intermediate servers the email passed through
* Upload re-written logs to wherever those logs are backed up to.
Even if an IT person did all the above they would still go to bed at night wondering if they found every step the email made on the path from PM to Treasury. And it would need multiple IT people as I doubt there is a single user that has access to both the PM’s servers and the Treasury server’s. So we’re talking about a conspicacy of at least two IT users and quite likely more. Tape backups often require multiple people to get access to and re-writing them in a way that would not be immediately obvious might require re-writing the entire backup which would be a tricky thing to do. The point I’m trying to make is that you would need an IT conspiracy to conceal the email properly and that is something that would be difficult to acheive. Its not as simple as ordering one person in one IT department to delete an email off the server.
All this presumes the Australian Federal Police would perform a competent investigation. After reading in the Haneef transcripts showing that Australia’s premier anti-terrorism interrogators didn’t know what Skype is you have to wonder if that is a reasonable assumption. If the AFP is as dumb as they appeared on that occasion then they may not find anything even if the emails exist and no active attempt has been made to hide them.
Well then …how about someone analysing Godwins print outs to ascertain whether they match the paper type where he says he printed them out? Instructions to print – wouldnt they show on a computer and can they be erased? How come there are no print details (like date and time) if its treasury….shouldnt there be a date and time printed and how did they get to the newspapers without Grech apparently being able to find his own originals and who told Mal(…evolent?)?. There are holes in this.
Here we go … interminable tedious speculation about how the absence of evidence might possibly be explained. If you read the corresponding thread over at Larvatus Prodeo you’ll find conspiracy theories that it was all a plot by Julia Gillard to get rid of Rudd, or Rudd to get rid of Swan, or the ALP to get rid of Turnbull, or Costello for a bit of a laugh … indeed once we abandon evidence in favour of speculation we can invent pretty well any alternative reality we choose.
If someone wants to make serious allegations on the basis of an artefact, the onus is on them to produce it and verify its authenticity beyond reasonable doubt. This applies to digital files just as much as any other artefact. Until they do that, they should be ignored. Adopting any other approach makes sensible discussion and analysis impossible.
I agree with Ken. Mal should put up or shut up. Its just dirt raking which the coalition have proved themselves adept at concocting before today and the lot of them happily turned a blind eye to Howards pals and brother (Manildra – that couldnt have been anymore blatant a case of profiteering – oh and then there was the dubious firepower exec ex minister under Howard). The coalition have a reputation for this sort of thing. Its a joke.
My limited understanding of such things is that it used to be the case that if there is a poorly configured mail server around, then all that someone would need to do to fake an email would be telnet to the right port of the mail server, and type in the headers and body of the fake mail. I wouldn’t be surprised if it is still easy for people to fake emails.
PS the preview is running very slowly and really slowing down the process of typing this comment right now, hope this is not a long term problem.
As Jill Rush, swio, Ken Lovell, Chris Warrent et al. have stated, it is not really likely that this email – whether genuine or a spoofed one – would have originated within the parliamnetary network *and* then be removed without trace. It would be one heck of a job and would involve multiple perps. Given this, it is most likely an external (to parliamentary IT systems) spoofed forgery.
If this is true then it reflects poorly upon the newspaper for not checking its veracity in some way (eg, by asking the individual who was meant to have sent it), and also upon the Liberal party for making it public without having first established its veracity.
I think that one way or another blood will be spilt. Looks like politicians need to do more than just beware the Ides of March. Not a good look.
Is anyone else having trouble with preview? It works fine for me.
I dont seem to have preview
Sorry you mean this square where we type? Mine is working.
This is a test: preview italic and bold both work. It is pretty quick too, so no, no trouble with it for me.
To go back to my previous post this is the email header as it appeared on an April Fools prank from a Cairns blogger generated as I understand it from outside Council servers etc entirely and at least to many media recipients appearing to be genuinely from the Council media officer.
From: Anderson Sonja [mailto:media.officer@cairns.qld.gov.au]
Sent: Wednesday, 1 April 2009 6:25 AM
Cc: ‘4kz’; ‘A Hodge – The Australian’; ‘AAP News’; ‘Advance Cairns’; ‘Le Comte Ann’; ‘Barton Nicole’; ‘Belinda Featherstone’; ‘Blake Alan’; ‘Bonneau Sno’; ‘Kier Shorey – ABC’; ‘Bronwyn Cummings – Cairns Post’; ‘Bruce Woolley(ABC regional manager)’; ‘Cairns News Papers – Editor’; ‘Cairns Post’; ‘Cairns Post’; ‘Cairns Sun ‘; ‘Carla Keith’; ‘Channel Seven’; ‘Cochrane Margaret’; ‘Cooper Linda’; ‘Damon Guppy – Cairns Post’; ‘Darren Nelson – ABC’; ‘Debra Best – Channel Seven’; ‘Debra Murray – WIN Tv’; ‘Desley Boyle’; ‘Easy Listening 846 (E-mail)’; ‘Fagand – Queensland Newspapers’; ‘Dix Fiona’; ‘Forsyth Diane’; ‘Gavin King – Cairns Post’; ‘Genine – City Life’; ‘Gregory Paul’; ‘Jackie – BBM’; ‘Jason O’Brien’; ‘Joy Wilson – Cairns Newspapers’
Subject: media release Cairns Mayor launches memoir book
It’s easy enough to make up a spoof email to fool a paper like the Tele. But obviously, if one had been sent to the Treasury, they would have replied to the putative sender in the PM’s office, and the jig would be up.
It looks increasingly clear that no email was sent by the PM’s office or received by the Treasury, and that as a result Turnbull is on very thin ice.
John, I not sure if Government departments still use colour coded tags but if the John Grant file had a ‘blue tag’ then the AFP will have no trouble working out who gave the green light for Godwin to go ahead.
Chris Warren says “He either produces the email, with the normal public service “mail header” and time stamp, or he should get kicked out of Parliament.
Australian democracy should not be jeopardised by false documents from foul right-wingers.”
Irony alert Chris. On the one hand you are denouncing democracy being jeopardised, but at the same time demanding that a democratically-elected Member of Parliament be summarily “kicked out of Parliament”.
“The issue is how noxious rightwingers use false documents to corrupt Australian politics.
“Terith” Khemlani (sp?)
1996 Ralph Willis letters”
Chris, the Ralph Willis affair involved Willis using fake documents to discredit political opponents. Even if Willis was set up with fake documents, it was his responsibility to check out their veracity before using them.
Just one small point. As a senior Treasury official Godwin Grech would have known the Ozcar initiative was a political hot potato from its inception. Any experienced bureaucrat receiving an email from the Prime Minister’s Office would surely have kept a back-up hard copy as well as ensuring it was retained on his computer. Grech obviously did not do this because he has not produced a copy and both the PM and Treasury experts can find no record of such an email in the week around the date he thought he might have received it. It makes one wonder how reliable he is as a witness.
I really think that Malcolm has to admit he flew a kite with this one.
But its just sad at the end of the day, if this is what it takes to score points in politics – a gamble on a smear. I was saying to my ever patient husband – what is wrong with politics these days…??There were times when politicians had dignity (werent there?) and could rise above the “attack dog sneerings” or “false smearings” by people like Tony Abbott (and now Malcolm) with a certain savoir faire!
Lets move away from the attack dog style and get some elegance back.
The sophisticated and subtle entrancement of politics has gone missing and in its place???…lies, lies, damned lies and media beat ups!
Its just sad. They dont really convince any of us with this sort of rubbish and its just so, so, so uninspiring.
There are two different issues at work here.
To produce a document that looks the genuine article is trivial. Emails are plain text — there’s no magic. I could, if I so wished, probably produce an email from anyone to anyone else on any topic I chose. It’s just a matter of getting a sample of the genuine article in order to get the right server names. Not too hard. Unless you use digital signatures, there’s simply no way for a third party to categorically prove or refute the authenticity of such an email, short of “he said, she said”.
Then there is the server-side considerations. Many organisations store a copy of all emails that cross their servers from internal sources. In any half-decent organisation the copies are also available in backup form. A sufficiently deep search can determine whether such an email was sent using the organisation’s own servers; though this doesn’t stop people using web mail providers to perform an end-run around such archival systems. Deleting evidence from archives and backups is difficult and would require a larger coverup.
To recap: creating a false email requires one person. Deleting an email from a well-run IT system would require at least two (the person ordering the coverup and an IT administrator having access to both email servers and backups).
At this point Occam’s Razor suggests to me that Turnbull and/or the Tele have been shown a falsie.
Interestingly, Rudd’s bluster is letting Swan get off the hook. Swan is fare more severely compromised – he claimed having no knowledge of the matter in Parliament, yet PS records show that he got correspondence forwarded to his private fax. That’s a smoking gun, bloodied footprint and signed confession at the scene. But attention is tied up by the Turnbull-Rudd poker game. Swan could get by in the shadows.
I watched Grech live. I thought he was lying and getting more uncomfortable by the minute. I wouldnt trust Grech as far as I could kick him. Someone got to Grech with something. Even his own supervisor ontradicted his credibility. I dont think he has any. He twisted under questioning and then played the sympathy card “woe is me …no public servant should find themselves in my position.” Yeah right. I think Grech has been played.
His lack of conviction was in complete contrast to the importance of the task.
All these jabbering journalists – not one is looking at their own camp.
It was the Steve Lewis – the “journalist” – who proffered the email. Not one journo or politician, that I’ve noticed, have demanded that he fess up.
The Australian media are beating this up in their own interests.
No doubt about the ALP – they eat their own.
No doubt Grech will be bundled off “for health reasons”
As far as Grech goes, I’d give him the benefit of the doubt for now – his superior repeatedly cut in and ran interference, and I reckon it wasn’t for Godwin’s sake that he did that. If AFP interview him he should be able to give a clear statement of events as he believes them, without someone watching over his shoulder.
I’m prepared to believe (for now) that he knew he was in the thick of it and felt fairly stressed by the situation, especially when his superior interrupted so often. That would have to be unsettling. However, as Alice says, he may have been played.
I think Jacques is correct in saying that Swan is probably the more exposed person, in terms of circumstantial evidence. However, Grech may have deliberately sent sitreps to Swan’s home fax for whatever reason I won’t speculate, and it may not have been at Swan’s request.
This will take some time to play out…
Here is Turnbull’s desperate bullying tirade.
Notice how this Turnbull takes no notice of the poor staffers replies.
Turnbull is obviously a VERY dangerous character.
******************************************************
“Let me give you some advice because I think you have a very promising career ahead of you,” Mr Turnbull is quoted as saying.
“Integrity is the most important thing in the career of a young man.”
Mr Charlton said he replied: “Thank you for the advice. I don’t feel any pressure to lie.”
Mr Turnbull continued: “This whole OzCar issue will be very damaging for you. Let me just give you some friendly advice.
“You should not lie to protect your boss.”
Mr Charlton: “I have not.”
Mr Tyurnbull: “You know and I know there is documentary evidence that you have lied.”
Mr Charlton: “There is not.”
Mr Turnbull: “Andrew, you know that there is documentary evidence. This could be very damaging for you.”
Mr Charlton: “I have not had any contact with Mr Grant.”
Mr Turnbull: “Ah well, I advise you to consider your action carefully.”
Alice, I also watch the Senate hearing live.
I saw the chair Senator Hurley quite openly prevent Mr Grech from answering Senator Abetz questions.
I saw Mr Martine (Mr Grech’s departmental superior) openly shut down Mr Grech from answering questions.
I saw Senator Cameron ask Mr Grech if Gay Hull’s inquire on behalf of a constituent of was special (as opposed to John Grant, Rudd’s mate).
Mr Grech’s answer was NO!
Shame on Rudd and Swan for putting a public servant into a position of having to find a form of words that would satisfy his oath of honesty to the Senate and having to keep his job.
The public service will take note of how poorly he was treated.
I also note that it is contempt of the Senate to prevent someone to answer questions to the best of their knowledge (Alice no doubt saw this at the beginning of the hearing when the chair Senator Hurley read the proforma rules at the start of the hearing).
Rudd and Swan are charged with misleading Parliament over a nothing issue.
How stupid are they!
I also note that there are twenty plus sweet young Gen Y’s in the PMO looking after the PM’s electronic image.
Do you think that they know their way around computers and the protocols?
Go figure!
Is Allan being a bit too coy?
How does one know that there are twenty sweet young Gen Ys in the PMO?
What is your conflict of interest?
What employer allows you to watch proceedings live in work time?
I am surprised to find many think that evidence could not be falsified or removed and that any number of toadies and cowards would not collude. You must have very different work experiences to mine. And why assume by default that the official history of the state apparatus is a true and honest account. What history supports that?
Now I do not mean to imply that any of the versions of utegate are correct or not. How could I or any of us know the true events? It is just a diversion from the main game of supporting the powerful with enormous sums of money and pivilege. It is of no account in substance anyway. If Rudd goes a Rudd-a-like takes his place, if Turnbull goes, so what.
“I watched Grech live. I thought he was lying and getting more uncomfortable by the minute. I wouldnt trust Grech as far as I could kick him.” – Alice
I thought the exact same thing about Lindy Chamberlain and the dingo …….