[Kabar-indonesia] IHT: In Australia, Scandals Dog Labor Party

[Joyo3]

International Herald Tribune
November 15, 2006

In Australia, Scandals Dog Labor Party

By Tim Johnston

It has been a bad couple of weeks for the Australian Labor
Party. In national polls, it had been pulling ahead of the
coalition government of Prime Minister John Howard, but a
string of recent state government scandals have seen it
slip.

The country has watched in appalled fascination as one
crisis has followed another, propelling the party into
damage control.

A minister in New South Wales is alleged to have used
government funds to pay for drugs and sex with an underage
boy; a minister in Queensland who accepted a loan of 300,000
Australian dollars, or about $230,000, from a mining magnate
while he was holding the Industrial Relations portfolio;
another former Queensland minister who is suspected of
trying to use extortion to get herself a high-paying job in
the public sector after she was forced to resign; and a West
Australian minister who lied on oath to a corruption
commission investigating a suspect property deal.

It was a former Labor prime minister, Paul Keating, who
warned 20 years ago that Australia was in danger of becoming
a "banana republic," and some of his fellow countrymen say
they can see his prediction coming to pass - even if he was
talking about the trade deficit rather than errant
politicians.

Howard and his Liberal Party-led coalition have had their
own difficulties in recent weeks. The central bank has
lifted interest rates, and many fear the move could push
important parts of the economy into recession. The prime
minister has also been forced into an embarrassing U-turn on
environmental policy since it became clear that Australia's
prolonged drought had convinced much of the electorate that
climate change needed to be near the top of the political
agenda.

But despite this a survey carried out by Newspoll for The
Australian newspaper shows that support for the Labor Party
has dropped by four percentage points in the past two weeks.

But the polls also reveal a broader disenchantment with
politics in general. The coalition lost one percentage
point, indicating that many respondents had been turned off
by both parties.

"Australia has a fairly low opinion of its politicians,"
says Michael McKinley, a political scientist at the
Australian National University in Canberra. "There have been
too many scandals at state and federal level for people to
believe in the integrity of the system anymore."

Labor's disastrous run began Nov. 6 in Western Australia, at
a hearing of the state's Corruption and Crime Commission.
The state minister for small business, Norm Marlborough, was
giving evidence in an inquiry into a suspect property deal
in which the developers had employed a disgraced former
state premier, Brian Burke, who had been convicted on fraud
charges, as a lobbyist.

Marlborough said he spoke to Burke regularly, but had no
special arrangements about their communications. The
commission's counsel, Stephen Hall, then pounced, producing
records which showed that he had bought a cellphone in his
wife's name almost exclusively to communicate with Burke.
The records showed that since February, 309 calls had been
made between Burke and Marlborough using the phone,
sometimes as many as 10 times a day.

The hearing then descended close to farce.

"Was this phone intended to be a secret phone?" Hall asked.

"Not that - no" said Marlborough.

"When I say that, was it a phone that was intended to be
known about only by you and Mr. Burke?"

"I suppose, yes."

"Well, isn't that a secret?" asked an incredulous Hall.

"Well, it's not the definition I would put on it," said
Marlborough, who lost his job later that day.

Media comment has been split between those who are shocked
that Western Australia is again embroiled in scandal and
those who are amused at the ineptitude of the conspirators.

A day after Marlborough's humiliation, Labor's nightmare
moved to the other side of the continent when the Minister
for Aboriginal Affairs in the state of New South Wales,
Milton Orkopoulos, was arrested and charged with 30
offenses, including having sex with underage boys and
providing one of them with drugs. He is also alleged to have
paid one of the boys a "salary" of 250 dollars a week out of
government funds provided for his electoral office.

Orkopoulos has denied the charges, but the state branch of
the Labor Party is pulling itself apart over allegations of
a cover-up. The debate has now become who knew about the
allegations and when. Some party workers said they reported
their suspicions as much as 10 years ago. On Tuesday,
Orkopoulos was admitted to an intensive care ward in a
hospital near his home after apparently attempting to commit
suicide. The hospital says he is now recovering.

On Nov. 9, two days after the Orkopoulos case broke, the
Labor Party was again embroiled in allegations of
questionable behavior. It emerged that a former minister for
industrial relations in the government of the state of
Queensland, Gordon Nuttall, had taken a 300,000-dollar loan
from the head of Australia's largest independent coal
producer, without declaring his interest to Parliament. The
money was apparently used to fund house purchases for his
children.

Nuttall is currently being investigated by the Queensland
Crime and Misconduct Commission, while Ken Talbot, who
controls the company, Macarthur Coal, has temporarily
stepped down as chief executive while the investigation is
going on.

Both men deny there was any impropriety in the loan.

A new scandal erupted in Queensland this week. Merri Rose,
the former state tourism minister who was forced to resign
in 2004 after a staffer successfully brought a case against
her for bullying, is to appear in court accused of
threatening a public servant while attempting to secure a
job.

She allegedly used blackmail to try to get a high-paying
public-sector job, although it has not emerged who she is
accused of trying to extort, or how.

McKinley says the scandals that have emerged recently are
part of a larger, endemic problem.

"The history of state politics is a history of corruption,"
he said.

McKinley believes that although there are a number of
notable exceptions, the more able state politicians
generally aspire to a career in national politics, leaving
the less qualified to fill many of the senior posts in the
states. State governments, which control areas such as
health, education and planning, also present numerous
opportunities for petty corruption and power plays.

McKinley also points to a broader degeneration in Australian
politics as a whole, saying that although people are
required by law to vote, the system tends to protect the
status quo and stifle innovative policy making, making it
increasingly difficult for the electorate to distinguish
between the different parties' platforms.

McKinley believes that few politicians available on the
ballot paper truly represent the concerns of the average
voter.

"We have a system of unrepresentative democracy. You are
required to vote, but there is not a lot of product
differentiation in those you can vote for," he says.

"The Labour Party looks like the Liberal Party in exile."

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