The Fog Of War

CHANNEL TEN reporter and Walkley award winner Hugh Riminton has published a follow-up piece in the Age today that should be read, especially by anyone who saw this little blog’s thoughts a day or two ago. Riminton points out that the copy of Kirkham QC’s draft report he has seen suggests subterfuge and double dealing at Defence, and one of the points he makes is quite alarming. As he puts it: 

To take one example: ''[Her] room was not plastered with shaving foam,'' as I had reported last year. Kirkham discovered that it was not shaving foam but ''Jif cleaning liquid''. It was smeared on her door - or in his phrasing ''applied'' - in sufficient volume to stain the carpet. By publicly denying it was shaving foam but not revealing it was another similar agent, Defence exposes itself to questions over whether it is distorting or withholding information and misleading the public.

Riminton has a physical copy of the report, one assumes, and it would be a great favour if he were to post it somewhere – or promise to do so when he has mined whatever journalistic advantage remains in keeping the contents to himself. There is more than idle curiosity to this hope because the mess in Stephen Smith’s portfolio gets more ludicrous as it grows murkier. If Defence erased mention of the Jif and did so to mislead, as Riminton says it did, then it is playing very fast and loose with the truth and someone must be held to account.

But at the same time, other citations in Riminton’s defence of last year’s Scoop Of The Year don’t really help his defence all that much. That’s why an open copy of the leaked report would be so handy.

Consider: 

RIMINTON 2011: Kate maintains that during that conversation, Commodore Kafer said "he'd like me to address my division (of cadets) because they'll be angry". Specifically, she says Commodore Kafer said "it might help if she apologised (to her classmates) for bringing the division into disrepute by going to the media".

SMITH, March 7, 2012: The Commandant did not order or advise the female officer cadet to apologise to cadets in her Division for having gone to the media;

RIMINTON 2012:  well, actually, Riminton has nothing to say that would resolve the discrepancy between Kirkham’s report and his words of last year.

See, it really would be nice to see that leaked report. And then there is this: 

RIMINTON 2011: As Kate left Commodore Kafer's office she walked past a sergeant. In a growling sneer, he said, "You've gotta be kidding, don't you?"

SMITH, March 7, 2012: No Sergeant had spoken offensively to the female officer cadet on leaving the Commandant’s office

RIMINTON 2012: Kate's account that she was advised to apologise to her cadet peers for going to the media, that she was sneered at by a sergeant, and that she was abused by cadets at a morning assembly on April 6, 2011, is also dismissed. But if Kate was not subject to vilification or abuse, if her consistent and detailed accounts are unreliable, Kirkham offers no explanation as to why, on the day after the story broke, deputy commandant Paul Petersen felt it prudent to move Kate ''away from her peers'' to accommodation in the officers' mess.

But the biggest mystery of all is this: Kirkham says Kate was not abused at that morning assembly, for that is how Defence summarises his findings, when Riminton’s said she was called a slut. Riminton now wonders how thorough Kirkham’s investigation must have been for this information not to have found its way into the report.

So, what to believe?

Kirkham is incompetent or crooked.

Defence is incompetent and crooked

Riminton is incompetent, crooked and being played by Stephen Smith

Kate is a liar

Stephen Smith is incompetent, rash and not feeding Riminton the full truth

and, most baffling,

Every single soul who attended that morning assembly is so crooked and such an accomplished liar that a QC could not winkle the truth out of one of them.

A copy of the draft report would be handy for all to see. Perhaps, instead of leaking it to a sympathetic reporter (as he almost certainly did), Minister Smith might like to table Kirkham's handiwork in the House. Then we can all have a look.

A Crew To Make You Vomit

WE KNOW they are incompetent, and the closed ranks around Craig Thomson demonstrate a stomach-turning tolerance for the reeking stink of the walking dead, but those deficiencies in the Gillard government are easy enough to understand. When a mob of congenital campus politicians is promoted above its experience and aptitude, as happened late in 2007, it is only natural its members will bring with them the postures and abstractions they perfected in student union dust-ups over the need to proclaim Parkville and similar precincts sustainable, gay-friendly nuclear-free zones.

As for tolerating the presence on the backbench of the throbbing member for Dobell while simultaneously having Fair Work's lickspittles stall any and all inquiries, well that is has been matter of sheer survival. Starving men have been known to eat their own excrement, and a knife-edge government facing a famine of votes was never going to spit out Thomson, no matter how reluctant his colleagues might be to leave him within unsupervised sniffing distance of a daughter’s bicycle seat. When this mob is swept away, it may even be possible after a period of years  to enjoy a good laugh at our current PM’s crew, just  as we all do now at Jim Cairns, his absurdist economics and the deceits that surrounded the burlesque fling with Juni Morosi.

But there is one thing decent people will find much harder to forgive or forget, even when time has softened memories: this government’s sleaze and smears. There was a race riot at the Lobby restaurant on Australia Day because some genius thought there were votes to be gained by stirring one up. And today, more of the anything-to-win same. With the help of Channel Ten and a strategic leak, commandant of the Australian Defence Force Academy Bruce Kafer's good name is once again being sullied. The brush this time is a snatch lifted from the unedited report into the ADFA Skype scandal. 

Now isn’t that just the remarkable coincidence! Channel Ten broadcast the first allegations against Kafer, and today we see it is Channel Ten once again spreading the toxic word. A pair of Ten reporters won a Walkley award for reports that, as we now know, were wrong in element and whole, so the current preference for echoing the original allegations, however feebly, was entirely predictable. It is certainly easier than admitting their Scoop Of The Year trophy was undeserved.

But what of a government that operates this way? Is there no standard of decency it will not violate in the name of cheap advantage? A rhetorical question, obviously.

We have had some low, rum sorts in Canberra over the past century or so, but none can match this polyglot of sleaze which purports to be a government. Unlike cabinet comrade Craig Emerson, Defence Minister Stephen Smith is not known to have slept with our PM, but he has certainly been infected with all the strains of shamelessness that characterise her career, especially the sly use of the knife.

Smith’s office, the obvious source of the latest leak, could put the matter to rest by releasing the final, edited report on the Skype affair. It is the investigation taxpayers funded and whose findings we all have a moral right to examine. But Smith sits on it, his handmaidens in the press add to the calumnies, and where the nation needs adults we get circus clowns.

There is only one remedy, one way to flush the filth.

An election. Now!