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OzCar - blinded by a mole?

By Jo Page - posted Friday, 3 July 2009


Before the OzCar email scandal sinks into the morass just below the surface of living memory let us consider whose interests the "fake" email has served. Apart from providing the Prime Minister with his Triumph of the Will and discrediting Opposition Leader Malcolm Turnbull, the scandal has exposed the tenuous relationships between politicians and public servants.

A senior public servant has been openly accused of colluding with the Opposition and of being a mole for the Liberal Party over several years. This moved Public Service Commissioner Lynelle Briggs to make the bizarre claim that public servants generally had no reason for making contact with Opposition MPs. She made no distinction between public servants generally and those most senior public servants whose contact with the Opposition often takes the form of giving evidence to various Parliamentary Committees. In this case, some commentators have asked us to believe that a senior public servant colluded with the Opposition to fabricate the evidence on which he was expecting to give evidence on oath to a Senate Committee.

There is of course no evidence to support those claims - unless one adopts the definition of “evidence” used by Barry Cassidy when interviewing Tony Abbott MP on ABC Insiders on Sunday, June 28. “There is evidence” said Cassidy, “the allegation is out there and hasn’t been denied”.

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Who could possibly have faked an email with a view to implicating the Prime Minister? Indeed who had the inside knowledge that a representation from the PM would probably come in the form of an email from senior adviser Dr Andrew Charlton to senior Treasury official Godwin Grech - the one-man band dealing with representations from 240 car dealers who urgently needed refinancing?

In advance of the Australian Federal Police findings, we don’t know the answer to these questions. But Finance Minister Tanner was already telling Sky News and the Parliament in the week of June 22, 2009 that the “fake” email originated from the Treasury system and was therefore concocted by someone in Treasury, perhaps even by Grech. Later that week in Parliament Tanner refused to tell Julie Bishop (Deputy Leader of the Opposition) what the source of his information had been. As she pointed out the only AFP media release dated June 20 said that:

“Preliminary results of those forensic examinations indicate that the email referred to at the centre of this investigation has been created by a person or persons other than the purported author of the email.”

It went on to state: “a 42-year-old Calwell man has been interviewed by the AFP in relation to this matter and it will be alleged that the interview is consistent with preliminary forensic advice.” Even without Tanner’s elaboration the AFP already seemed to be pointing the finger at Grech.

What could possibly have motivated a very senior public servant of 20 years experience to produce any such fake? The only explanation so far made public by innuendo from the government and media commentators is that Opposition Leader Malcolm Turnbull together with Senator Eric Abetz “muscled” Grech into faking the email and using his recollection of that fake email to give false testimony to the Senate.

That claim does not stand up against the known facts. The first indication that the Prime Minister may have sought to give an advantage his friend John Grant, the Ipswich car dealer, came with evidence Grech gave to the Senate committee examining Treasury estimates on June 4, 2009. At that time “… I have had representations from the Prime Minister's Office and from the Treasurer's Office, who have simply been seeking to refer dealership cases that they have become aware of. They have simply referred those people to me to try to help them.”

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Questioned further in the same hearing Grech said, “The Prime Minister’s Office certainly made representations which have basically involved their alerting me to a situation confronting particular car dealers”.

And again, responding to further questioning Grech said he thought only one case had been received from the Prime Minister’s Office. He agreed also that of two cases referred from the Treasurer’s Office one was the same as the PMO representation. But none of this should be regarded as irregular because Grech stated “the representations that were made by both the Prime Minister’s Office and the Treasurer’s Office were professional and consistent with what I would expect from a relationship between a ministerial staffer and a public servant”.

That same day Malcolm Turnbull “surprised” Prime Minister Rudd with a question in Question Time about whether anyone from his office had made representations on behalf of John Grant. Rudd said the only representation he could recall was a representation from a car dealer he received while attending a fund raising event in the electorate of Bennelong. Before Question Time ended the PM informed the House that neither he nor any member of his staff had intervened on behalf of John Grant. For his part Senator Abetz followed up Grech’s evidence to Senate Estimates by submitting questions on notice and almost immediately made a formal Freedom of Information (FOI) request for relevant papers.

The Abetz FOI request led Treasury to search its system for any email relating to a representation from the PM’s office on behalf of John Grant. According to evidence by David Martine, Grech’s boss, at a later Senate hearing (June 19) no such email could be found. Grech himself was said to have been involved in the search.

The “fake” email therefore lay dormant until Malcolm Turnbull made a cryptic reference to it during what he called a “private conversation” with Dr Andrew Charlton at the Press Gallery’s Mid Winter Ball on June 17. Mysteriously this “private conversation” was photographed not by any journalist or photographer present, but on the Prime Minister’s personal Blackberry. Twenty-four hours later the photograph was widely published along with claims that Turnbull had “bullied” Charlton.

Two days later Godwin Grech was called to the Senate Economics Legislation Committee along with his superior officer David Martine, the General Manager of the Financial Systems Division, Treasury. Viewers of the Sky News APAC telecast or readers of Hansard could testify that Grech did not behave in the manner of someone who had colluded in advance with members of the Opposition as media reports later claimed (Daily Telegraph, June 25). In fact he approached his duty with some trepidation for quite different reasons. That morning he was reported to have sent Treasury Secretary Ken Henry an email advising that senior News Ltd journalist Steven Lewis had phoned him four times the day before seeking a copy of the email allegedly sent to Grech by Dr Andrew Charlton. Where Lewis had received his information is not known but Grech himself was aware that David Martine was briefed to deny its existence. Yet Grech told Henry he had denied to Steve Lewis matters that he would feel obliged to reveal when questioned by the Senate Committee. Labor Senators seemed to be aware of this admission during the hearing because Senator Cameron asked questions about what Grech had told Lewis.

The Committee was ostensibly reviewing the “Car Dealership Financing Guarantee Appropriation Bill 2009”. Much of the time allocated to the inquiry on the morning of Friday, June 19 was taken up by a series of questions from Liberal Senator Eric Abetz (Tasmania) and frequent interruptions by Labor Senators Doug Cameron and Louise Pratt with some sideline commentary from Senator Barnaby Joyce.

The Chair (Labor Senator Annette Hurley) proved unable to contain the volatile Cameron. She did however assist Grech’s superior officer David Martine in his persistent and blatant efforts to stop Grech from answering questions. In effect Martine insisted that as the senior Treasury official the committee should accept his assurance that no email from Dr Charlton in relation to John Grant existed.

Grech on the other hand seemed determined to place on record his recollection that he had received such an email. He said for example: “My recollection is the Treasurer’s Office alluded to Mr Grant at least being some type of associate of the Prime Minister’s.”

Then, under further pressure came the now notoriously equivocal statement “my recollection may well be totally false or faulty, but my recollection - and it is a big qualification - but my recollection is that there was short email from the PMO to me which very simply alerted me to the case of John Grant, but I do not have the email”.

Again when after numerous interventions he was allowed to answer he acknowledged that in the last 24 hours “As diligent a search as possible” to trace the elusive email had been undertaken. But then he went on to say: “But, and I do not hide from this, it was certainly my understanding that the original representation with respect to Mr Grant came from the Prime Minister’s Office.” And furthermore he said he had done nothing about that representation for the simple reason that the Treasurer’s Office was already urging him to assist John Grant.

Grech was prevented from answering further questions in which Senator Abetz tried to jog his memory by quoting from the purported text of an email from Charlton. “I have to defer to seniority of Mr Martine on that issue”, he said.

Various emails between Grech and the Treasurer’s Office had been tabled at the beginning of the committee’s deliberations. These dealt with the process resulting in Grant’s mobile phone number being given to the CEO of Ford Credit during a meeting to discuss the $500 million loan Ford Credit was seeking from the government. Much of Grech’s evidence from the June 19 hearing was consistent with and elaborated on those emails. Strangely none of that evidence has been queried.

Late in the day (June 19) the Prime Minister held a press conference rejecting Malcolm Turnbull’s call for his resignation and asserting that whatever email Steve Lewis intended to publish the following day must be fake. A diligent search of Prime Minister and Cabinet and Treasury systems he had been advised, showed no such email existed and the version that was claimed to exist must be a fake.

Not much more than 48 hours later, after a raid on Godwin Grech’s home in the Canberra suburb of Calwell the AFP was announcing that “the email referred to at the centre of this investigation has been created by a person or persons other than the reported author”. In other words the police found an email that was not created by Charlton. That of itself does not make the email fake. So who did create it, when was it created and what did it say? Unfortunately the leaks about the AFP investigation have not extended to this detail.

We may have to wait until Godwin Grech or some other person is charged with specific offences or for the report by the Auditor-General expected at the end of July before we are enlightened. Only then might we begin to understand why a very senior, widely respected public servant of 20 years experience would insist on putting his recollection of a “fake” email on the public record under oath, especially if he himself had any part in “faking” the document.

Perhaps we can take our lead from the Delphic utterance from Treasury Secretary Ken Henry when ambushed by the media. “All will be revealed,” he was quoted as saying.

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About the Author

Jo Page is a former public servant with experience of sitting alongside senior officers at Senate Estimates hearings.

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