THE biggest casualty in the Utegate fiasco has not been Malcolm Turnbull or Kevin Rudd or Wayne Swan or the oddly-named Godwin Grech, whose unusual handle meant he was almost pre-ordained to wind up as a bit player in some low-rent antipodean rehash of a John Grisham thriller.
The biggest casualty has been the taxpaying, voting public, which has watched the nation’s political leadership descend into an orgy of ludicrous name-calling, one-upmanship and abuse.
[Note: There’s some proper ute-related action in this YouTube vid.]
The allegations at the centre of the Utegate affair were deeply serious. As such, it’s a bit rich to declare boldly that any discussion of the affair was, of itself, a waste of time. It wasn’t a waste of time at all.
The allegations went to the probity of the Prime Minister - now proven to have been utterly baseless, the construction of fantasists who sought to destroy the Labor Government by resorting to a confected email.
The allegations also went to the probity of the Treasurer and, belatedly, he has denied any conflict of interest, although some questions still remain.
But while it’s not a waste of Parliament’s time - or, rather, your time - that these allegations are pursued, what has been offensive to the public is the sleight of hand and posturing that has infected the discussion on both sides of the political divide.
It’s not as if there’s a shortage of important issues to be discussed by our parliamentarians at the moment.
There’s this thing called the global financial crisis that the public is much more interested in. Especially those who have been sacked from their jobs.
A lot of people are interested in the emissions trading scheme, whether the nation has done enough to adjust its behaviour to deal with climate change, or whether we risk blindly supporting a faddish and iffy scientific theory at tremendous cost to workers in the mining and energy industries.
We’re at war with the Taliban in Afghanistan. Our biggest bank is thumbing its nose at the Reserve over interest rates. Our hospitals continue to struggle, amid an ongoing debate over whether a federal takeover of the health system could deliver better patient care.
There are a few things there that we should probably be concentrating on.
I started writing this piece yesterday afternoon just before 3.30pm, having just sat through 70-odd minutes of Question Time. If you were also unlucky enough to endure the spectacle you’d probably agree that our MPs should have had their pay docked for this non-event.
You had a sheepish Opposition, its credibility shredded over its calls for the PM to quit off the back of a hoax email, gingerly taking repeated points of order in what seemed an attempt to filibuster - that is, to drag things out and minimise the Government’s chances to clobber the now hapless Mr Turnbull. And we had a Government determined to do nothing but that, going in like a killer whale tormenting a moribund seal, tossing the member for Wentworth’s carcass around for a while to the amusement of nobody but themselves.
The public has been let down in two ways throughout this affair.
It has been let down by a Government more interested in making maximum mileage out of a hoax email involving the PM rather than immediately and thoroughly responding to a series of emails involving the Treasurer, which created the very stark impression that Wayne Swan had gone the extra yard for Ipswich car dealer John Grant, a friend and neighbour of Mr Rudd who has given a free ute to the PM and a cheap one to the Treasurer.
It wasn’t until Monday night, a full three days after the ute story blew up, that the Treasurer’s office finally released the emails showing what Mr Swan had or hadn’t done in terms of his representations on behalf of Mr Grant.
It doesn’t matter either, as Labor has claimed Mr Grant did not ultimately get a cent through the OzCars scheme.
What mattered was that the Treasurer had told Parliament that neither he nor his office had done anything on behalf of Mr Grant, when they actually had even if it amounted to nought.
The tactics of the Opposition were worse. As the AFP raided Godwin Grech’s Canberra home on Monday, confirming later that day that the email was a hoax - amid reports on our new website The Punch that the police also want to speak to one of Mr Turnbull’s former staff members about the affair - the entire Opposition case had crumbled.
A crestfallen Mr Turnbull, who briefly left the chamber in a futile bid to get his act together, returned for a Question Time where, to borrow Keating’s old line on Hewson, he was like a lizard on a rock - alive but looking dead.
But it wasn’t until yesterday morning, having woken to see that every newspaper in the country had rightly given him a kicking over Monday’s debacle, that Mr Turnbull reluctantly took to the airwaves to confirm that the email he’d based his quit call on was indeed a fake and that the whole thing had been a cock-up.
The final point on this affair should, in my view, go way back to where it began with a fact that would have none of the subsequent malarky possible.
Why on earth does a politician who, as a backbencher, gets paid three times the minimum wage need a free ute in the first place, regardless of whether he declares it or not? Especially when he goes on to pull in more than $250,000 as Opposition Leader, more than $330,000 as PM and has such a whopping family income that he could buy five new utes with the loose change in his wife’s purse and not feel the pinch?
The next poll will be fascinating. You would think Turnbull will cop it and go down. But don’t be surprised if the minor parties and undecideds get a kick-along as a result of Utegate because many voters will simply look at the conduct of both parties and shake their heads.
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