• Greg Barns

20 July 2004
EXCLUSIVE TO APO

The taxpayer-funded Government Members’ Secretariat is doing party political work, according to former government adviser Greg Barns

WHEN Liberal backbencher Jim Lloyd told ABC Radio’s AM program on 7 July that the Howard government’s taxpayer funded Government Members’ Secretariat is ‘there to assist government members in the duties of being a federal member,’ he was being disingenuous. The GMS, as it is known, is no different from its notorious Hawke and Keating government predecessor, the National Media Liaison Service (NMLS). Both are propaganda units, with shadowy objectives, which should be funded by the beneficiaries of their activities - political parties.

Since 1983, when the newly elected Labor government of Bob Hawke established the NMLS, the legitimacy of governments spending taxpayers’ dollars on coat-tailing the opposition’s every word, and pumping out propaganda to backbenchers to ensure the government’s ‘spin’ is reverberating throughout the breadth of this large continent, has rarely been questioned by a compliant and grateful media.

It is only occasionally that these propaganda machines - costing in excess of $1.5 million a year to operate - become objects of scrutiny and controversy. And that’s generally because the machine has bitten the opposition a little too hard and a little too often.

When the Liberal Party spent thirteen years in the wilderness of opposition from 1983-1996 it had one consistent gripe: it was outrageous that the Labor government was spending taxpayers’ money on the NMLS. They promised that when the Liberals were returned to the Treasury benches that nefarious and shadowy unit would be abolished.

In 1995, a neophyte senator from Tasmania, and the man who is now John Howard’s Special Minister of State, Eric Abetz, and the Shadow Administrative Services Minister, now Sports and Arts Minister, Rod Kemp, campaigned relentlessly against NMLS.

On 30 August that year, Senator Abetz characterised NMLS as ‘a $1.5 million free kick in relation to the advertising campaign $1.5 million per annum to try to defeat the Liberal Party, the National Party, the Democrats, the Greens, Independents, anybody other than themselves. The people of Australia, who I am sure have a spirit of fair play embodied within them, would condemn such behaviour.’

Fast forward to July 2004, and you won’t hear a peep out of Senators Abetz or Kemp, or any other member of the Coalition parties, about the ‘child’ of NMLS, the GMS.

When John Howard was elected to office in March 1996 he abolished NMLS and had their Parliament House offices cleaned out within days. But only weeks later, Mr Howard’s own office and other senior Liberal Party heavies were designing and establishing a replacement - the GMS.

When I, along with other chiefs of staff to ministers in the Howard government, attended the regular Tuesday morning briefings with Mr Howard’s senior advisers and the then federal director of the Liberal Party, Lynton Crosby, we were constantly told that the ‘GMS is not the NMLS’. It was a case of say it often enough, and you will believe it.

Of course, the reality is vastly different. The job of the NMLS was to monitor media around Australia and to distribute government media releases to backbenchers and senators’ offices. It was effective and therefore hated by the Liberals because if an opposition spokesperson or leader made a statement or conducted an interview the Hawke and Keating governments would have their hands on it within an hour.

Check through Hansard and you will find Bob Hawke and Paul Keating constantly citing material from transcripts of interviews that John Howard, Andrew Peacock, John Hewson or Alexander Downer had given only hours earlier.

Of course, the Coalition didn’t have the same resources and could never hope to keep track in a timely fashion of every piece of media that the government would churn out seven days a week.

Having seen how effective the NMLS was, but hamstrung by a commitment to abolish it, the Howard government simply outsourced the media watchdog role. Media monitoring companies such as Rehame have made millions of dollars in the past eight years providing thousands of pages of media clippings each day to ministers’ offices and the GMS.

With the media monitoring function outsourced, the Howard government’s GMS has been able to concentrate on assisting backbenchers with marketing material for government programs, dossiers on how to attack Labor policies and strategies for keeping onside with constituents.

Well, at least that was its role. When I worked in the Howard government from 1996-99 the GMS was a benign office, occupying - ironically - the former NMLS offices and run by Lynton Crosby’s wife, Dawn. (Like the ALP, the conservatives are all for keeping it in the family!) But now the GMS is run by a person who is as different to Mrs Crosby as John Howard is to Malcolm Fraser. Enter Gerard Wheeler.

Mr Wheeler is a hardline right-wing member of the Liberal Party who was once part of a group known as the ‘bronweenies’ - young Tories who worshipped Bronwyn Bishop, who for a brief while fancied herself as a saviour of the Liberals after John Hewson lost the 1993 election.

With Mr Wheeler comes an attitude that strikes one as being like that of the rabid anti-communists of 1950s America. Formerly an adviser in Mr Howard’s office, although what he actually did there was always a mystery to most of us, Mr Wheeler is a man who detests the ALP - and the left of the Liberal Party for that matter - with a passion.

Under Mr Wheeler the GMS has become more sharp-edged. Not content with kindly assistance to lonely backbenchers, it is now part of the Howard government’s efforts to destroy a resurgent ALP under Mark Latham.

But is Mr Wheeler’s GMS digging up dirt on Mr Latham and feeding it to an ever-grateful media that publishes it, and then pretends to be outraged by personal attacks on politicians? It’s hard to know. Certainly, given the way governments work, it would be naïve to think that Mr Wheeler and his team didn’t work in closely with the man Mark Latham accuses of running the ‘dirt’ campaign against him, Howard government media adviser Ian Hanke. But whether or not they go further is anyone’s guess.

Perhaps instead of focusing on who is digging up the dirt on who, now is a good time to ask a broader question - should taxpayers’ be funding propaganda units for political parties who happen to be in government?

With billions of dollars spent by each government department in Canberra on marketing government initiatives and programs is it not reasonable to expect that organisations like the NMLS and the GMS are funded by, and work from, their respective party Headquarters, all within a stone’s throw of Parliament House?

The answer is clearly an unambiguous yes. But would a Latham Labor government take that step - not on your life. The NMLS and GMS have become indispensable to governments.

Greg Barns is a former senior advisor to the Howard government. After being disendorsed as Liberal candidate for the Tasmanian seat of Denison he joined the Democrats.