Michael Ronaldson (Victoria, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Veterans' Affairs) Share this | Hansard source

As Senator Brandis says, there are the missing files as well as the missing money and the missing explanations. I want to demonstrate how low this government and this Prime Minister have sunk. I want to talk about a gentleman by the name of Mr McTernan. Andrew Probyn's article on 2 March this year went a long way towards explaining this. He quoted a comment made by Mr McTernan, who of course worked for former Prime Minister Blair in Britain for 12 years. Mr McTernan is quoted in the article as saying:

The key is to realise that you don't need to tell the whole truth, just nothing but the truth … Don't lie. Don't equivocate. But set out a defensible truth: one that you will not have to expand, modify or resile from.

Andrew Probyn goes on to say:

The thing about plausible deniability or defensible truth is that it encourages approximations of what really happened.

And when approximations of the truth are published or alleged, spinners like Mr McTernan delight in knowing the people they are handling—in this case Ms Gillard—can deny the veracity of the approximations without dealing with the underlying truth. Mr McTernan has clearly well briefed the Prime Minister in relation to those words.

I want to finish with Mr McTernan in the context of the Prime Minister's disgraceful misogyny speech. In the Weekend Australian on 6 October Chris Kenny made this comment:

The theme is hard to miss and the aim is transparent. Labor wants to portray conservative criticism of Gillard as attacks on women.

The genesis of this tactic is illuminating. McTernan, a former adviser to British Labor Prime Minister Tony Blair, was brought to Australia by former South Australian Premier Mike Rann.

He is now the communications director for Ms Gillard. The article goes on:

In a column for Britain's Daily Telegraph in 2010, McTernan declared: "The Coalition has a problem with women." He argued spending cuts proposed by the Conservative and Liberal Democrat Coalition in Britain were unpopular with female voters. "This gender gap is a real and pressing problem for (British PM David) Cameron, he wrote.

Last year another column on law and order issues was headed: "How many women today feel the Coalition is protecting them?" And just in case you missed the angle, a few months later McTernan focused on women promoted in British Labor's reshuffle, turning it against Cameron: "The PM has a problem with women and he knows it."

We know the depths that this Prime Minister and this party will sink to. We have seen the work of John McTernan in the last month. We know he was deliberately put on by this Prime Minister to achieve what he has tried to achieve in the last month, and it is not about good policy; it is about dirty politics. When you look at the comments he made about David Cameron, when you look at the comments he made about the Conservative Party in Britain and when you look at the comments made by the Prime Minister, two and two still equals four. I finish on this note: we all know the book by Graham Richardson, Whatever it takes. Well, the Prime Minister has written the Labor Party bible, and she stands utterly condemned. (Time expired)