OPINION
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If Greens Senator Jordon Steele-John thought the exhortation on his computer to "unf*#ck our future" might help the chaos of Federal Parliament on Wednesday, he would have been disappointed.
Over in the lower house, the future appeared seriously trashed as Malcolm Turnbull entered the debate over the fake document used by Angus Taylor in an attempt to discredit Sydney mayor Clover Moore, a document now being investigated by the NSW police.
Turnbull perfectly timing his cameo on Wednesday was in the part of the traditional ousted leader bent on havoc. Canberrans are getting used to these; Jon Stanhope is playing the same astonishing role on the local stage as we speak.
The incendiary story of Taylor's fake document was ignited again by the news that Scott Morrison had called his neighbour, who happens to be the NSW police commissioner, to check on the status of his investigation.
The fake document has been aptly described as Taylor's Godwin Grech moment. Remember ute-gate? It will be etched on Turnbull's mind. As a senior Treasury official in 2009, Grech set out to help Turnbull by creating a fake email that the Liberals could use to discredit Labor - an email that attempted to implicate a staffer of then prime minister Kevin Rudd in seeking special treatment for a donor. The revelation that it was a fake damaged Turnbull, some judge irreparably, and he was gone as leader before the year was out.
Turnbull was surely gurgling on the inside over the sweet irony this week when he declared that Morrison should never have made that call to police commissioner Mick Fuller.
"It is vitally important that that inquiry that is being conducted by the NSW police ... is seen to be conducted entirely free of political influence," Turnbull said. "Being blunt about it, it is a call I would not have made."
Morrison says he called because he had to make an assessment about the nature of the police investigation before he could make a decision about Angus Taylor continuing to sit on the frontbench. Whatever transpired in that conversation, Morrison concluded the investigation wasn't serious enough for Taylor to stand aside. And so he sits, uncomfortably, on the frontbench as Labor creates an uproar that has dominated the chamber each day this week.
Labor says Morrison's call was inappropriate, for the obvious reason that simply by picking up the phone Morrison conveyed to the commissioner just how much rests on his decision in this case. But it becomes doubly inappropriate given the neighbourly relations between the prime minister and the police commissioner.
Morrison once described him as a "best friend". Possibly, they have even helped take out each other's trash. This point isn't clear. Have they or have they not taken in each other's bins? The bin story was told on Sydney radio last year in an interview between host Ben Fordham and Fuller.
"The bloke who was the most powerful person in the county used to go and get the bins and take them in," Fordham said in the interview, a statement with which Fuller apparently concurred - and with which Morrison concurred in another interview, saying "that's what good neighbours do".
But now everyone is furiously denying that anyone ever ventured near anyone else's bin. It never happened, Fuller says - all just a joke. You can listen to the radio interviews online and judge for yourself. But try establishing the point officially and you will probably run into a brick wall. The police media unit would not answer the bin question when we asked. Quite ignored the email.
You might think Morrison would hesitate before tackling another attempt at a joke, but not so. Hammered over question time about the call with Fuller, Morrison, ever peppy, thought to make light of it: "Did they think I was going to call the parking infringements officer at the southern police station? Or maybe I would call the water police or the dog squad, or perhaps the commander of the police band?" he asked.
Possibly none of the above, but it is to be hoped someone at police HQ can get to the bottom of the fake document. It surely isn't complicated. Someone knows how the Sydney council's annual report detailing the councillors' spending on overseas travel came to be altered, inflating the travel figure astronomically so Taylor could then use it to accuse the Sydney mayor of hypocrisy on climate change (this is a staple tactic of the Harry and Meghan troll brigade - how dare the royal couple campaign on climate change when they fly places?).
Taylor first insisted the fake document came straight from the Sydney council's website. That was debunked after the council released metadata showing no such document was ever on the website. Taylor hasn't corrected the record on that, but has said over and again that neither he nor anyone on his staff fiddled the numbers.
Assuming that is the truth, that only leaves an outsider having a Grech moment of misplaced grandeur - someone wanting to discredit the Sydney mayor and/or help the Liberals. And unless that someone sent the document to Taylor's office anonymously or under a fake email, Taylor's office must know who it is. If it was anonymous, Taylor should say so and fess up to his incompetence in not checking it out. If it came via a third party, Taylor should also say so. His insistence on stubborn repetition of only half an answer is damaging to his government and can only prolong the Coalition's torture at the hands of Labor and of disgruntled former PMs.
Such was the theatre, and it quite overshadowed something more serious that has played out over the past week. While Morrison made light of the scandal in the lower house, his Minister for Indigenous Australians, Ken Wyatt, was on the telly revealing a darker episode.
A member of his staff, Wyatt revealed, had resigned because she could no longer cope with the abuse she and other members of his staff in Canberra and Perth have been receiving since he dared to suggest that if someone identifies as Aboriginal, he accepts them as Aboriginal.
It began in an interview between Wyatt and Sky News's Chris Kenny, where Kenny asked him to respond to claims that author Bruce Pascoe, author of Dark Emu, is not Aboriginal. Wyatt responded that if Pascoe says he is Aboriginal he takes that at face value - after which Kenny decided to pen a column for The Australian newspaper attacking Wyatt's position, questioning Pascoe's Aboriginality and rubbishing his book on Aboriginal prehistory. It was ugly stuff, and uglier still has been the reaction since.
"Even in my own office, my staff are receiving calls in which they are called Cs and other names. In fact, I have had one of my staff resign because she can't cope with being abused," Wyatt told ABC television on Wednesday. "Vitriol doesn't achieve an outcome."
Wyatt's office has not released further detail on this.
Which brings us back, briefly, to Steele-John's unfortunate computer sticker. Liberal senator James McGrath had just finished unloading on the ABC, blasting it as a "giant blancmange, this giant left-wing jelly of progressive views" and offering his three-point plan to "save the ABC from itself", which included allowing advertising, selling off the valuable buildings in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane and moving to the regions, and employing some right-wing presenters (because if you want to find a left-wing presenter you just need to get the staff directory out). Then it was Steele-John's turn - and he wanted to talk about the war memorial.
The Greens senator, who has been on a steep learning curve over his short career, was in a rush to get to the chamber and couldn't print out his speech in time, so grabbed his staffer's computer to read it directly from the screen. Unfortunately and inadvertently - as McGrath had just finishing yelling "shame on the ABC", Morrison was making jokes about unfunny things in the lower chamber, and Ken Wyatt was lifting the lid on very dark things on the telly - Steele-John opened the computer, displaying the sticker on the outside to the Senate chamber. "Let's unf*#ck our future," it said.
Sadly, no one took the advice, Instead, Steele-John wheeled himself back into the chamber an hour later to be admonished and to apologise.