wallydownundy

Australia’s suffering one of the oddest -gate affairs. (Since Watergate every political crisis is -gated, like ‘Iguana-gate’ last year). Right now Ute-gate looks set to bring down the Leader of the Opposition, Malcolm Turnbull.

For those in North America, a Ute is short for utility vehicle. In other words, a pick-up truck!

Where to begin? And how to abbreviate?

Earlier this year Opposition Leader stunned Parliament by accusing Prime Minister Kevin Rudd of using undue influence to gain a used car dealer priority access to Treasury funds. (When all car financiers left Australia the government stepped in with emergency funding.) Seems this car dealer lent Rudd a used vehicle for electioneering purposes. Influence for mates? How dare he! (Until then I thought that’s what government was - silly me.)

The “smoking gun” was an email in the hands of Turnbull. Seems he failed to check the email’s authenticity before calling for the Prime Minister to resign.

Are you with me still?

Weeks later the Auditor General releases an official report. The email was a fake. Rudd did nothing wrong. Turnbull shot out of the gate too early. (The fake email’s author is a senior Treasury public servant now residing in a Canberra mental hospital.)

All pretty tatty even before you factor in two significant issues.

First - and worst - it appears to validate his claims of “never knowing the email was a fake”, Turnbull released documents. Included was a Q&A script used to coach the fake email’s author before he testified to the Senate. Oops. Seems you can’t coach a witness before a Parliamentary Inquiry. (Again, we’re all learning here!)

Second - and fatal - was the lost opportunity for Turnbull to respond like a…hmmm…national leader. Peter Hartcher from “The Sydney Morning Herald” captures it perfectly in today’s edition:

THE hue and cry over Godwin Grech and the fake email left the Australian electorate with one big question: does Malcolm Turnbull have the judgment to be prime minister?

Yesterday he had a prime opportunity to start addressing that question, to tell Australia what he had learnt from the debacle, how he would do things differently in future.

But instead of trying to restore the confidence of voters, he conducted a narrow, legalistic exercise to exonerate himself. (See full article here.)

Every day innocent Australians are killed in auto accidents. Yet it isn’t every day that a political career is killed by a used car - especially when, at the time of the accident,  that car is garaged a few thousand miles away from the victim.