As I recently wrote, Anthony Albanese is all out of issues to campaign on. Naturally, then, he’s started throwing dirt. And lying about it.
The target of the new dirt campaign is, of course, opposition leader Peter Dutton. Dutton is fast overcoming a, let’s be charitable, charisma deficit, to leave Albanese behind in the preferred PM polls. He may not have looks on his side, but his credibility is fast rising.
So, Labor is seeking to throw shade on Dutton’s personal wealth. Which is kind of rich (pardon the pun), given that Albanese has amassed a fortune of roughly $15 million and a six-figure investment property income, by doing nothing but politics for his entire adult life.
What are they accusing Dutton of? Essentially, smart investments.
Peter Dutton has been accused of “highly unusual” share trades following a report that the opposition leader bought stocks in major banks in 2009 just before the Rudd government announced a $4bn stimulus package.
A news.com.au report said Mr Dutton disclosed a flurry of investments in banks during the global financial crisis, when the shares were at record lows. The report said Mr Dutton had not declared share transactions during the previous three years.
So, buying low in order to sell high? That’s called smart investment.
What Labor are trying to imply is some form of insider trading. Prior to the official announcement, only the opposition leader was briefed. But that wasn’t Peter Dutton: it was Malcolm Turnbull.
Maybe Dutton picked up on some parliamentary scuttlebutt, or maybe it was just obvious what Kevin Rudd and Wayne Swan were about to do. After all, they’d already announced a raft of stimulus measures in the months beforehand, and the GFC was a banking crisis. Put two and two together.
Dirt units are nothing new in politics. But most governments are smart enough to put a firewall of plausible deniability between themselves and the dirt. In keeping with the witless incompetence voters have become accustomed to, Albanese immediately wrong-footed himself on this one and landed face first in his own mud pie.
When the dirt throwing was met with a palpable wall of disgust, Albanese flatly denied having anything to do with the smear campaign. Then his chosen smearer let the truth slip.
Labor MP Andrew Charlton said the quiet part out loud on Wednesday night, when he revealed the prime minister’s office was behind a story published this week about Peter Dutton’s share trades during the Global Financial Crisis.
Charlton had gone on the ABC’s 7.30 to criticise the opposition leader’s share purchases on the eve of the government’s bank bailout in 2009, following a story that had dogged Dutton since being published by news.com.au on Tuesday.
It’s a sign of how deep in the poo Albanese really is that even the usually reliably lickspittle ABC is doing its job for once.
Then questions turned to when Charlton first learnt of the facts that had made his “jaw fall to the floor”. The first-term MP admitted it had been more than a week. And by whom was he told of this shocking new intelligence? “By the prime minister’s office, who was looking at it,” Charlton said.
Just like that, Albo gets caught out.
The Parramatta MP confirmed what Dutton had been saying: the story about his share purchases had come from the prime minister’s “dirt unit” – the group of political staffers tasked with digging up unfavourable material about their rivals and delivering it to the public, often through the mainstream media.
“As Andrew Charlton pointed out last night ... the prime minister’s office were shopping this around last week, and they’ve shopped it to a number of journos, one’s picked it up, but this is how the government operates, and they’re throwing mud,” Dutton said on Seven’s Sunrise on Thursday.
This is not the last, and certainly not the grubbiest, personal attack Labor have launched on Dutton. Just last month, they were caught circulating a deceptively edited quote from the opposition leader’s wife.
The problem with throwing mud, as Albanese is fast finding out, is that you’re throwing it into a hurricane-force headwind. You end up getting splattered from head to foot yourself.
Such was the case last year, when Albanese came under fire for accepting flight upgrades from Qantas. While that story didn’t come from a dirt unit, coalition Senator Bridget McKenzie leapt on it to lead the coalition’s attack, only to realise that she, too, had been lax in declaring flight upgrades.
Sure enough, trying to attack Dutton over his investments is sending a big ol’ mud pie right back in the PM’s face. The questions immediately turned to Albanese’s lucrative property portfolio, his six-figure rental income and whether he negatively gears his investment properties. Albanese pointedly avoided the last question. After all, abolishing negative gearing is a red-hot issue for the Labor backbench.
