Jacqueline Maley has an article in today’s Fairfax media musing about who might succeed Julia Gillard as Labor leader after an election loss later this year.

It seems a tad premature in the circumstances, though only slightly more so than the subject of this post, which addresses the question: what options if any does Labor have if we reach April/May and Labor’s opinion poll ratings remain stubbornly stuck at around 33-35% primary vote and 47% or thereabouts two party preferred?

Polling for federal Labor improved somewhat over the last 3-4 months of 2012, partly because people began to realise that Abbott had been bullshitting them about the impact of Labor’s carbon pricing regime and perhaps also partly due to a grudging recognition that Julia Gillard, whatever her shortcomings, is a tough and feisty PM. Perhaps too we’re seeing the beginnings of public realisation that Australia’s economic position is actually very strong and that Abbott has been bullshitting on that front too.  People have begun spending again (rather than saving more and more while reducing debt) and consumers generally are feeling less pessimistic.  Those are certainly promising signs for the Gillard government, as is  what appears at the time of writing to be a “done deal” on the US fiscal cliff standoff.

Overall Labor actually has a very attractive political story to tell: one of the world’s strongest economies; generally competent economic management (leaving aside its clinging for too long to a “surplus at all costs” promise – but that’s expectation management rather than economic management per se); a highly successful legislative record despite minority government constraints; and achieving seemingly durable settlements of two of Australia’s most intractable environmental issues, namely Murray-Darling waters and Tasmanian forestry.

If in the next 3-4 months the government can also fashion a plausible long-term funding model for the  National Disability Insurance Scheme and the Gonski education reforms, an unlikely election victory in the second half of this year might yet be conjured, something that seemed utterly inconceivable only a few months ago.

But what if it isn’t? What if if becomes unavoidably apparent by April-May that swinging voters have made up their minds adversely about the Gillard government? Will federal Caucus members just shrug their shoulders resignedly and passively accept the inevitability of electoral obliteration? Somehow I doubt it.

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Australia is one of the most prosperous and best-governed nations on earth.  Our politicians, at least at national level, are mostly competent, honest and hard-working.

And yet our mainstream media conveys an almost opposite impression, and the blogosphere and twitterverse project an even more extreme vision of universal incompetent, corrupt political venality and double-dealing.

Personal smears and attack campaign strategies have long been a staple of politics both here and overseas, basically because they work.  People love hearing and retelling malicious stories about others, especially the wealthy and powerful.  However, over the last couple of years Australia has experienced a perfect storm of factors conducive to political smear tactics: a hung parliament with an Opposition leader determined to blast his way into an early power takeover by adopting Richo’s “whatever it takes” approach; a disgruntled former Labor leader convinced he’s been unfairly deposed and equally willing to do whatever it takes to get revenge and conceivably even re-take his stolen crown; and a mainstream media experiencing relentlessly declining income and therefore increasingly desperate to attract eyeballs  through tabloid sensationalism. The combination has resulted in a toxic political environment not seen since the last days of the Whitlam government.

However, at least from my personal and unusually non-partisan perspective, the remarkable thing about the assorted smear campaigns from both sides is that, with a couple of exceptions, they are either confected or trivial. This post is aimed at demonstrating that proposition in relation to each of the major smear stories of 2012.  I’ll take them in chronological order:

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There has now been quite a bit of discussion about this week’s dismissal of James Ashby’s sexual harassment proceedings against former Speaker of the House of Representatives Peter Slipper for abuse of process (although nowhere near as much as the salacious coverage when Ashby’s ambush claim was first launched on 20 April. I wrote about the seemingly slender merits of Ashby’s claim shortly afterwards.

I want to focus on the role of Michael Harmer, Ashby’s aptly named lawyer, in orchestrating what Richard “Justinian” Ackland rightly calls  a “shakedown” and “one of the grubbiest, underhand, unmeritorious, political assaults on a government in recent democratic memory, fanned by leading adornments of the Liberal Party”.

The core of the abuse of process involved in this case is also succinctly summarised by Ackland:

The judge explained the inclusion of allegations about misuse of Cabcharge dockets and a previous sexual relationship between Slipper and a young member of his staff, were designed to injure the parliamentarian for no legitimate forensic purpose.

They were irrelevant and scandalous, and were designed to maximise and inflame the media coverage.

Those superfluous flourishes were withdrawn when the statement of claim was filed a month after the originating application.

The real purpose of this litigation was to fire-up an attack not just on Slipper but on the government, and to seek to bring about its downfall.

 It’s worth spelling out exactly why Harmer’s (and Ashby’s) conduct was so disgraceful, especially in Australia’s common law legal system.

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You have to wonder why even a young-ish Julia Gillard didn’t smell a rat given Bruce Wilson’s eyes …

The hive-mind that is the Canberra Press Gallery has apparently decided that PM Julia Gillard’s activities at Slater & Gordon in the 1990s are to be deemed a non-story. Presumably they think the fact that she survived journalists’ probing for over an hour only a few weeks ago proves that there’s nothing in it, at least in the absence of evidence that she knew the money her ex-boyfriend union secretary Bruce Wilson used to buy a house in the name of his crony Ralph Blewitt was actually stolen from the AWU.

However, on a dispassionate analysis three stories published in the Fairfax media in the last few days raise new and very real and serious questions about Gillard’s behaviour at that time.  See Property Links PM to Stolen Funds, The Man Who Knew Too Much and PM vouched for union body caught in corruption scandal.

Giving false information to officials?

In the last of these three stories it is reported that:

A TRADE union association from which hundreds of thousands of dollars were stolen by a former boyfriend of the Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, was only registered after Ms Gillard vouched for its legitimacy to authorities in Western Australia.

Ms Gillard – then a salaried partner with the law firm Slater & Gordon – wrote to the WA Corporate Affairs Commission in mid-1992 confirming that the Australian Workers Union Workplace Reform Association was a legitimate organisation under WA law.

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