Residents in the western Sydney seat of Lindsay voiced outrage at the distribution of fake flyers by the Liberal Party yesterday, as further examples emerged of dirty campaign tactics in other hotly contested seats across the west.
"It is a bit pathetic – makes you think they are probably not trustworthy," said a St Marys resident, Jim Carroll. "It is like everything you read you can’t believe now."
His neighbour Sonter Neil was home on Tuesday night and saw what he believes were the Labor operatives accosting the leafleteers. "I just thought it was someone having a blue from the club. Then they started rousing on each other and screaming."
Karen Chijoff, the Liberal candidate for Lindsay, remained out of sight yesterday, even as her office insisted she was out "talking to voters".
Ed Husic, a Labor candidate for the seat of Greenway in the 2004 election who was the subject of a racist letterboxing campaign, said the revelations prove race-baiting is an established Coalition technique.
Mr Husic, a Muslim who lost to the Liberals’ Louise Markus by about 800 votes, said the only difference between the 2004 and 2007 incidents is that this time the perpetrators have been caught.
On the Friday night before the 2004 election, anonymous campaigners plastered Greenway with a leaflet that read: "Ed Husic is a devout Muslim. Ed is working hard to get a better deal for Islam in Greenway." The leaflet carried a picture of Mr Husic, the ALP logo and its campaign slogan, making it appear genuine.
Mr Husic said the issue in Greenway then and Lindsay now was not so much who produced the propaganda but who benefited from it.
A former Liberal Party campaign worker yesterday said the retiring member for Lindsay, Jackie Kelly, had used such dirty tactics before.
Ken Higgs, a booth captain in Lindsay in 2001, said Ms Kelly and her crew printed fake how-to-vote cards in 2001 to capture the preferences of a local action group that was trying to save a former defence site at St Marys.
"It was actually a fake how-to-vote card … intended to deceive voters into voting for Jackie Kelly instead of the Save the ADI site candidate."
Earlier this year Ms Kelly was caught using electorate office resources to support a business distributing clothing bearing the Australian flag.
In Bennelong and Parramatta, candidates have been targeted by Right to Life Australia with a leaflet accusing them of being pro-abortion and supporting "destructive research on human embryos".
RELATED:
Leaflet affair may play to Coalition’s advantage
jserve.write(“/SITE=TAUS/AREA=NEWS.POLITICS/AAMSZ=110X40/”); ipt>Brad Norington – The Australian
November 23, 2007
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,22806708-11949,00.html
AS blunders go, they don’t come any bigger just days before an election when the government of the day is far behind in opinion polls.
And the irony was not lost on political pundits yesterday: Jackie Kelly, once regarded as a Liberal Party hero by John Howard for winning a western Sydney seat deep in Labor’s heartland, could be the doomsayer of the Prime Minister’s political career.
The overwhelming reaction to the bogus leaflet distributed by Kelly’s husband and a small band of Liberal supporters that linked Labor to Muslim terrorists was disgust.
Most political observers accepted the document’s distribution at face value: a desperate, ham-fisted attempt to swing voters in the marginal seat of Lindsay away from Labor to Karen Chijoff, Kelly’s successor as Liberal candidate in Lindsay.
The pamphlet was a clumsy attempt, by modern political standards. It even misspelt "Allah Akbar", the Muslim salute of "God is great".
But what if there were a broader strategy behind the document, intended to help a racist undercurrent that still exists across much of western-oriented Australia to bubble to the surface?
It is not long since the Cronulla riots in Sydney’s south in December 2005 incited Muslim hatred.
The Howard Government won the 2001 election in the wake of the Osama bin Laden-inspired US terrorist attacks on September 11, but an anti-Muslim sentiment was already stirred by the Tampa affair that preceded it.
Some senior Labor figures believe The Australian’s exposure of the so-called "children overboard" affair as a fraud just days before the election did not help Labor’s standing with voters; rather it harmed it.
Why? Because, bizarrely, it brought to the surface once more the fear of invading boatpeople.
Labor appeared to recognise the potential problem yesterday by playing down the arrival of a new boat of asylum-seekers, even if it happily released detail of the Lindsay escapade.
Mr Howard led the charge yesterday in rejecting suggestions that the Lindsay propaganda scandal was orchestrated at higher levels in the party.
Labor strategists agreed, saying the benefit to the Liberals beyond Lindsay was always slight, not worth the effort if it meant Mr Howard was distracted all day from his main message. NSW Liberal Party director Graham Jaeschke said the attempts to link Labor to Muslim terrorists were not helpful to the Liberals’ cause. "We acted swiftly to punish the people involved," he said.
John Wanna, professor of politics at the Australian National University, said tactics like those used in Lindsay generally backfired.
But Professor Wanna said that the public only knew they backfired if they were exposed, and many probably remained hidden. He said the notion that the Lindsay pamphlet was orchestrated at a higher level of the Liberal Party, including its exposure as a fraud, was "ingenious" even if it was unlikely.
"It can blow up in your face if you try to make it part of a bigger agenda," Professor Wanna said. "The problem is that on the bigger agenda you don’t know how it will play out.
"You’ve got no control over it."
Out of 70 calls across the country on commercial talkback radio yesterday, Media Monitors said 90 per cent were negative, with many critical of Kelly.
For angry bloggers venting their spleen in cyberspace, the issue was not accepted as a benign joke, as Kelly suggested. A number of bloggers on news websites and Muslim community forums slammed the leaflet drop as racially inflammatory and have said the Liberal Party stunt will have an influence on who receives their vote this Saturday.