‘It’s a job that rewards cold patience’: Inside the party dirt units
With the NSW election just weeks away, the small teams of loyalists who look for mud to throw at their political opponents are in full swing.
By Jordan Baker
A junior Liberal staffer was the first to stumble across a video, hidden in the recesses of YouTube, of former NSW Labor leader Michael Daley saying youth jobs were being taken by “people ... from Asia with PhDs”. The staffer turned it into a South Park meme, and posted it on Facebook.
Where the staffer saw a joke, his bosses saw an electoral king hit. It was swiftly removed from Facebook. “We sat on it for four weeks,” says John Macgowan, a former member of the Liberal Party’s dirt (which is officially known as its tactical) unit. It was a tight secret – not even senior ministers knew until the 11th hour – until they dropped the bomb via The Daily Telegraphless than a week before the March 2019 election.
It blew up Daley’s campaign, and sent Labor into frenzied damage control. Senior figures from both sides say the comments alone did not cost Daley the election, even though they led to swings against him among Chinese voters. But they did cost him his nerve, which contributed to a disastrous debate performance in the final days of the campaign. Daley fumbled basic questions on the cost of his policies, which sent his approval plummeting.
“That’s what really ended it,” says an experienced member of Labor’s dirt (officially known as its strategy) unit, on the condition of anonymity so he could speak freely. “He was under pressure. They were smashing him on it. [Those errors] undermine the confidence of people around you.” It was nothing personal, says Macgowan; just politics. “I actually really like Michael Daley.”
Dirt units have been a fixture of Australian politics for decades. In NSW, they are in full swing, and will remain so until the March 25 election. They do exactly what their title suggests: gather dirt on their opponents. That can range from embarrassing social media posts to technical violations (such as Finance Minister Damien Tudehope’s resignation over the toll road investments of his superannuation fund). They scour publicly available material then hand damning evidence to a journalist, “point them in the right direction”, says the Labor strategist, “and let them go”. Their fingerprints are nowhere near the story.
Political history is pockmarked with their victims. Labor sparked Bronwyn Bishop’s Choppergate scandal, leading to her resignation as speaker over a $5227 helicopter ride from Melbourne to Geelong for a Liberal fundraiser. It also caught the LNP’s candidate for the 2018 Longman byelection wrongly claiming to have won a prestigious military medal. “That’s not a dirty trick,” says the Labor strategist. “It’s comparing the claim with reality.” The same Liberal team that discovered Daley’s comments also distributed a video of Labor leader Bill Shorten at the wedding of Chinese donor Huang Xiangmo.
Macgowan, who now runs a corporate intelligence consultancy, says the digging is painstaking and boring. The unit’s main job is to keep an exhaustive file on what opponents have said, so the ministers can play gotcha. “If [Opposition Leader Chris Minns] says something, the Liberals can go back and say, ‘ha, on this date, he said this’.” Scandal hunting intensifies as an election approaches, and focuses on three things: social media posts, land and property information, and business records. Macgowan would joke, when he trained an initiate, that “we want to know how stupid people are, and how much money they have”.
Peter Phelps, a former Liberal upper house MP who is now the executive officer of the office of the premier, Dominic Perrottet, patiently combed through years of hard copy Randwick City Council records to examine Daley’s voting history as a councillor (the Telegraph wrote a series of stories saying donors had development applications approved). Macgowan estimates about 400 hours were devoted to examining how Chris Bowen – now the climate change minister – voted at Fairfield council. It led to a story about a toilet.
Property searches are a rich seam (during this campaign, Labor MP Jo Haylen helped announce a policy to make keeping pets easier for tenants; a few hours later, another story emerged, saying Haylen did not allow pets at her own holiday rental). So are social media posts. Macgowan says he’s read 280,000 words in Facebook posts, the equivalent of James Joyce’s Ulysses. “It’s a job that rewards cold patience,” he says.
Historic posts are increasingly difficult to find on social media sites, due to algorithms and privacy controls (Macgowan has developed his own software to tackle the problem), but the job of scouring the internet still isn’t given to digital natives. “Younger people ... don’t have the radar for the kinds of things we can weaponise,” he says, with the staffer who discovered the Daley comments a case in point. “They see that crap every day. It’s a job for old political hands.”
New candidates can be rich fodder, too. Serving politicians know the traps and avoid them; newcomers are more naive, particularly if they represent minor parties with loose vetting procedures. If a dirt unit can unleash a scandal on their main opponent’s candidate after nominations have closed, the chances of victory in that seat skyrocket.
Before last year’s federal election, Labor doorknockers discovered the address provided to the Australian Electoral Commission by the LNP’s candidate for the marginal seat of Lilley, Vivian Lobo, was vacant. It’s legal to live outside the electorate, but not to provide a false address. Lobo said his move took longer than planned, but the AEC referred him to the federal police. Labor’s Annika Wells won the seat with a comfortable swing. “[Candidate scrutiny is] not seen as glamorous work, but it’s incredibly important,” says the Labor strategist. “We look for anything that goes to character, or anything that’s not legal or technical.”
Macgowan considers candidate research a public service, pointing out that corrupt former Labor MP Eddie Obeid came into parliament via a casual vacancy (when the candidate is appointed by the party to replace another, rather than face an election) in the upper house. “Once you elect a politician, you’ve got them for life, even if they do one term they’ll be a fixture in public life forever,” says Macgowan. “If you don’t find these things out about them, they’ll do enormous damage.”
Dirt units savour their victories. But their purpose is not to hunt for a knock-out blow; it’s to wear down and fluster the opposition. “People still vote on the really key issues; the economy, healthcare, education,” says the Labor strategist. “It’s about tying up their resources. It’s about putting pressure on them. When their leader has to prepare for a press conference, they are distracted. They think, ‘am I going to get a question about this idiot?’ That creates internal pressure. There’s a chain of resentment – ‘why are we wasting time on your person?’ It spirals quickly.”
Macgowan agrees. “We’re trying to suck up the oxygen and time of the other side,” he says. “There are three currencies; money, manpower and time. You can get more money, you can get more volunteers, you can’t get time back if you’ve wasted it.”
Sometimes, the hits are inside jobs. Perrottet admitted wearing a Nazi uniform to his 21st when prodded by one of his colleagues. “The whole story was based on a photograph,” says the Labor strategist. “But no one has ever seen the photo. That’s not a Labor hit. How would anyone in Labor know that?” Labor hopeful Khal Asfour resignedfrom the party’s upper house ticket after intense scrutiny of his expenses was triggered by questions about his probity in parliament by his former ally, Tania Mihailuk (who has left Labor for One Nation). Stories about a raunchy party that prompted the resignation of Labor’s star candidate for Monaro, former Canberra Raiders captain Terry Campese, came from his own personal connections.
“You get a lot of internal hits,” says the Labor strategist. “Often the most effective ones come from your own side. It’s triggered by self-interest; your faction is trying to take someone out so someone else can take the slot.”
Even in this bloody sport, there are rules of engagement. Affairs tend to be off limits unless there’s a public interest factor involved, such as a power differential or a minister using a government credit card for a tryst. Those stories can backfire, too (another reason why dirt units keep their fingerprints off them). A video of a married former police minister attending a gay men’s spa in 2010 garnered sympathy for the minister (that story did not come from the parties’ dirt unit; the original source is still unclear, although some suspect it came from within the police force). Justifications that he was a blackmail risk failed to convince the public that the expose was anything but nasty muckraking.
There are other limits, too, such as taste (nothing too weird for the papers to run) and newsworthiness. The parties also walk a fine line when it comes to using publicly funded staff for political purposes, especially as the government always has more manpower than the opposition. “I won’t take public money for it,” says Macgowan. “I think if there is to be any reform in staffing full stop, they have to draw a line under using public funds to pay for political operatives.”
The parties disagree about which is better at dirt. NSW Labor was a well-oiled machine under Carr and Iemma. Macgowan says the Liberal Party now has the edge, with an experienced, highly trained core group that travels the country and sometimes the world. “Every couple of generations, they’ll grab a few people and say, ‘here’s what you’ll do now’,” says Macgowan. “At any one time in conservative politics, there are about a dozen dudes – and we’re all dudes – who do this work. And when one of us leaves, they’ll get another guy.”
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A senior Labor frontbencher, speaking on the condition of anonymity, agrees. “They’re much better at getting the leads and ruthlessly chasing them down,” they say. “When Daley was on council, those records were not digitised. They have a really systematic way of doing it.” The Labor strategist, however, said the Liberals aren’t better, just louder.
For the record, the aspiring journalist who filmed Daley’s comments at a voters’ forum in the Blue Mountains and uploaded it online – breaking the story that turned the 2019 NSW election – was Daniel Pizarro, who now works as a television journalist for the Seven Network in South Australia’s Spencer Gulf. He’s had a little credit, but not much. “I do wish I’d had more recognition,” he says.