Ok, I guess you’ve all heard about the Australian Federal Police raid on Labor offices and the homes of Labor staffers.
And I guess you’ve heard the various accusations and counter-accusations today. Labor calling it politically motivated, while Turnbull is upset that the integrity of the AFP is being questioned.
Of course, the AFP is an independent body and it does things independently, and so the decision to do this raid during an election campaign was made in an independent way on the basis of a complaint from another independent body, the NBN company, which is run by a whole new group of independent people appointed by Tony Abbott after the 2013 election because the independent people that Labor had appointed were far too independent and wouldn’t have understood the necessity of rolling it out more quickly and ensuring that everyone had access by 2016.
Anyway, it’s just as well that the NBN is an independent body because apparently an NBN staff member accompanied the AFP on their raid. Not just as a member of the public but as a “special officer”. The role of the special officer was apparently to take photos and send them back to the independent NBN before Labor could have the documents sealed under parliamentary privilege.
I’m wondering if this will be part of the new standard operating procedure of the AFP. Like in the case of Mal Brough and James Ashby, will they ask Peter Slipper to accompanying them in any raid? Or will Craig Thomson go along if they have necessity to investigate Kathy Jackson and her independent partner, Michael Lawler, who was a member of the independent Fair Work Australia. Or perhaps, a rival bikie will accompany them if they raid a bikie gang at some future point.
The only thing that confuses me is that NBNco was saying that the documents were “incorrect” and “just a draft”, so I just can’t understand why it was necessary for a police raid over such unimportant documents. After all, there was no police raid when it appeared that Andrew Bolt may have been shown classified documents. Neither was there a raid over the leak in the Defence White Paper.
So why did the AFP think that this was more important than any of the others. It can’t have simply been because these documents were showing how incompetent Turnbull was as Communications Minister, because that wouldn’t be very independent, would it?
Still, I guess we’ll just have to wait until after the election to find out what was discovered in the raid…
Unless there’s a leak from the NBNco “special” officer or one of the people he sent the photos of the sealed evidence… Actually, wouldn’t the passing on of sealed evidence be a leak?
I guess when they investigated that one, they’d need a “special officer” from the Labor Party.
