Labor’s dark art of the political verbal exposed

Earlier in the week, sound, fury and internal Liberal Party squabbling ensued when Scott Morrison parachuted the former Labor National President, Warren Mundine, into the seat of Gilmore on the NSW south coast, dispensing with the locally preselected Grant Schultz, son of the late former Liberal MP for Hume, Alby Schulz.

The PM pronounced Warren Mundine a good bloke. I know Warren and I can attest to that. He has ancestral ties to the region in Gilmore and in normal circumstances he would be seen as an excellent candidate for the hyper-marginal seat.

The local Liberals were said to be furious. Schultz took his bat and ball and declared he would run as an independent, rendering a triangular contest into an electoral parallelogram. The Speaker of the NSW parliament and Liberal MP for the South Coast, Shelley Hancock, described the move as “one of the darkest days of the Liberal Party.”

Before we knew it, Libs state and federal spent the next three days shrieking angrily at one another from the parapets.

The commonsense response from one’s opponents at these times is to let questions from reporters go through to the keeper in an effort to pretend that one is above it all.

But three days ago, Bill Shorten couldn’t help himself, saying, “The Liberal Party replaced a woman (Ann Sudmalis, who is retiring) with a man (Mundine) who wants to put nuclear reactors in Australia, including Jervis Bay.”

Similar remarks were made by Shorten’s deputy, Tanya Plibersek and other senior Labor MPs.

The problem is Mundine has said no such thing. The story seems to have gained some credence following an interview Mundine did with ABC Illawarra some time ago.

So, let’s go to the third umpire in the form of the transcript of that interview:

ABC journalist: You’re a fan of nuclear power, if we want to talk about energy policy. Jervis Bay is famously a part of Australia which — sorry — Jervis Bay once upon a time was touted as a potential area for a nuclear power plant, in fact, there’s a cement slab still sitting there which is where they were going to put it. Do you think that’s a reasonable idea?

Mundine: As you know, I’m a strong supporter of nuclear power, not because I’m a supporter like I follow a football club – it’s the science. I just was a keynote address speaker at the Australian Geo-science Convention in Adelaide just a month ago where you had a thousand of Australia’s top scientists, and geologists, and we had several hundred overseas scientists sitting at that conference, and not one person at that conference spoke against the use of nuclear power. In fact they said if Australia is going to be an economic growth, an economic power going into the future, you cannot have 100% renewables, you have to have a nuclear power within that mix.

Journalist: Okay, I understand that it’s about the science, but would Jervis Bay be a good place to put it considering its Commonwealth land, and if not, perhaps Port Kembla?

Mundine: Oh, there’s a number of places you could put this, and you know, until you actually sit down and actually look at the research and review of certain areas and that, then you can make a proper decision on where these things could go.

I sought comment from Mundine two days ago and he confirmed he has “never made mention of a nuclear power plant in Jervis Bay.”

This is how a political verbal works. Drop a dubious and unsupported remark into the political conversation at an early stage and let it float into the consciousness. Never mention it again because by then the allegation would need hard evidence of which there is none. By that time, however, the mischief will be gormlessly spread around on social media and elsewhere, often at the urging of anonymous party apparatchiks.

Before you know it, the verbal becomes regarded as fact to the point where it consumes the candidate and obliges him or her to make multiple denials that in the context of our politics today are regarded with cynicism by voters.

For those curious about the politico-legal status of Australia’s tiniest territory, Jervis Bay is a most unusual construct. The roughly 70-square kilometre land mass was gifted by the NSW s government to the feds in 1915 as part of its land allocation which makes up the ACT today, in order to provide the otherwise fledgling landlocked federalès with their very own port and harbour views.

The several hundred residents of Jervis Bay vote in the ACT seat of Jenner, not Gilmore. But three kilometres away is the township of Vincentia then Huskisson, and the major popular centres of Nowra and Kiama.

None of this should matter as the construction of a nuclear reactor in Jervis Bay or anywhere else is not Liberal Party policy but the verballing of Mundine contains just a snifter of circumstantial evidence which helps perpetuate the lie.

In 1969, the Gorton government sought expressions of interest for the construction of a 600 MWe heavy water reactor at Jervis Bay. When Gorton lost the prime ministership to Bill McMahon in 1970, the proposal ran out of steam, so to speak, after a cost analysis undertaken by Treasury showed a new coal fire power station at another location was going to be about a quarter of the price. In the meantime, some preparatory work was done, a few trees were chopped down and some concrete poured which the locals now use as a boat ramp at Murray’s Beach.

Local media outlets have been rustling up the far-fetched story of a nuclear reactor being knocked up in Jervis Bay ever since, and they trot it out on quiet news days every couple of years.

The media may, to some extent, be complicit but Shorten and Labor have attempted to paint Mundine not just as an outsider in Gilmore but a man who has recklessly given the thumbs up to a potential Three Mile Island, Fukushima or God forbid, a Chernobyl in Gilmorian backyards.

But I caught you, Bill, and this verbal is not going to get up.

This article was published in The Australian on 25 January 2019.