Now, Katie Gallagher is accused of misleading Parliament. Of course, this is not a hanging offence! I remember hearing that a number of times over the past few years.
“So and so has been accused of something that’s technically against the rules, but let’s be fair, it’s not a hanging offence…”
I was always tempted to point out that Chopper Read admitted to murder but, well, here in Australia, that’s not a hanging offence… just a very serious crime that will have you jailed for years. Not a hanging offence though, because we don’t have capital punishment in this country.
Logically then, if a politician were to be guilty of murder, he or she could be sent to jail but they wouldn’t lose their ministry because, it isn’t a “hanging offence!”
In the good old days, if a politician misled Parliament they’d be expected to stand down. If you didn’t know something, then you didn’t make something up; you took the question on notice and replied when you had all the facts. Under John Howard, it became, “Look, Sir Les may have given incorrect information but he was under a misapprehension so he didn’t deliberately mislead, so we can forgive him (or her)!”
Anyway, back to the “embattled” senator.
It seems that a large number of people aren’t sure what this is all about, but that hasn’t stopped certain people from declaring that she’s guilty. Let’s be clear, misleading Parliament is not only not a hanging offence, but it’s not even against the law and as such, she doesn’t deserve the presumption of innocence.
So what’s actually happened? To recap:
- Before the 2019 election, there was an alleged incident in what was alleged to be a minister’s office. However, subsequent events have been unable to find any proof that Linda Reynold’s was a minister so we have to work on the theory that they’re may or may not have been something that happened in her office.
- After someone ordered the steam-cleaning of the office on a Sunday, it was thought that it wouldn’t be a good idea to inform the PM because he’d be as cross as Punch about the waste of taxpayer money with the Sunday penalty rates.
- One Liberal staffer was sacked because he came into work after hours which is apparently a sackable offence because nothing else was ever proven.
- A few years later, Brittany Higgins made a complaint which I won’t go into here because I’m sure you all know about this.
- When asked whether he knew about the incident, Scott Morrison announced that he wasn’t told by anyone. When asked about his office knowing, he said that he wasn’t sure who knew what and, being a busy man, he didn’t have time to ask them, so he appointed Phil Gaetjens to inquire who knew what and when.
- Around this time, it was suggested that Labor may have known about the “late work” incident and that they were planning to weaponise it to make the government look bad.
- Katy Gallagher denied this in the Senate.
It has since emerged that it’s possible that David Sharaz may have told Senator Gallagher and, if she knew when she said that she didn’t, she’s guilty of misleading Parliament. While it would be obviously the right thing to do to ask Phil Gaetjens to launch an inquiry into which Labor MPs knew what when, he’s still busy trying to find out about who knew anything in the previous PM’s office. So far, he doesn’t seem to have found any evidence that any of them knew anything about anything, even if most of the Liberal MPs knew about the man who was sacked for working late.
We’ve reached a point where a number of people are suggesting that Labor used this to bring down the Morrison government as though this is what was uppermost in people’s mind at the last election and not the Coalition’s constant announcements followed up by sweet bugger all, Scott’s refusal to hold a hose but happy to hold a pose, the Sports Rorts, the text messages that formed the basis of a report that cost over half million dollars which said that droughts were caused by a lack of rain, the fact that it wasn’t a race and just about everything else about them.
So how does this all play out?
Well, I suspect that Labor will try to ignore it, the Coalition will try to make an issue of it and come July they’ll start to realise that it’s not the sort of issue that the media will stay interested in. Once it’s been established that someone has done the wrong thing, they tend to bay for blood before losing interest when they don’t get any. (I am aware that even those who aren’t in the Murdoch stable stay on Labor’s case a little longer than the others. The Murdoch media don’t stay on something like this for too long though, because they have other things to blame Labor for such as world-wide inflation or the way the debt rose when the Coalition were in government or the pharmacists who won’t give anyone two month’s supply which they say is because of the shortages caused by people getting two month’s supply!)
And, if the Liberals have any sense, they won’t want to pursue it because it just reminds people of the whole sorry incident. Of course, that’s a pretty big qualifier!
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