At the Victorian Office of Public Prosecutions a swarthy, middle-aged man is hunched over a desk working his way through an enormous stack of documents, The Dominion Post writes
In Wellington a pile of documents is dropped in a Dominion Post reporter’s letterbox wrapped in a copy of the Otago Daily Times. Further documents follow, delivered by someone who calls himself Batman.
The script for an antipodean John le Carre-style thriller? Sadly no.
Le Carre would have approved of “Batman”. It’s a nice touch, hinting at a sense of self-deprecation on the part of the document dropper, but if Le Carre had been writing the script, the man poring over court records in Melbourne would have been a Russian emigre with a limp, not Labour Party president Mike Williams, and the drop would have been wrapped in the Times Literary Supplement, not the ODT.
Mr Williams’ inquiries and the mysterious letterbox drops were part of a much more prosaic affair — an attempt to link former currency trader, and National Party leader, John Key to a notorious currency deal that landed 1980s sharemarket high-flier Allan Hawkins in jail. Mr Key once worked for the finance company that handled the transaction.
Unfortunately for Labour’s apparatchiks, the signature on the critical document that got them excited was not his, but that of a former Australian colleague who signed his name with a similar flourish.
However, two critical facts have been uncovered by document searches in Melbourne. In an interview last year, Mr Key wrongly stated that he left Elders Merchant Finance a year earlier than he did in 1988 and he wrongly stated that he paid for a 1988 lunch that Australian court documents show was actually paid for by a colleague.
These are matters of grave import that go to the heart of Mr Key’s credibility as a prime ministerial aspirant.
If he cannot be relied upon to remember who paid for the champers with which he and his colleagues toasted his departure 20 years ago, how can he be trusted to run the country? Next thing he’ll be claiming he was unaware the crown limo in which he was being ferried from one place to another was travelling at twice the speed limit, signing his name to artworks he did not produce, rewriting electoral laws to suit his party or pretending not to notice that a political ally has been misleading the public.
But was it really necessary for Labour’s president to drop everything in the middle of an election campaign and fly to Melbourne to pore over 20-year-old court records?
Labour had every right, and every reason, to check out a tip that Mr Key had behaved improperly in the past. If he had, it was legitimate ammunition to fire during the final days of the election campaign. But by revealing its hand before it had the goods, the party has made itself look desperate. It is a blunder it cannot afford.
It is up against a cynical opponent who will stoop to any level to gain power. Instead of playing by the time-honoured rules of the game and smearing his opponents as viciously as they smear him, Mr Key smiles beatifically and steps daintily around the snares Labour lays in his path. It’s not cricket and it’s not politics, but he’s got Labour rattled.
