Julia Banks (Image: AAP/Mick Tsikas)

Among the many Matrix-like evasions Prime Minister Scott Morrison was forced to make at COP26 was his failure to answer Andrew Probyn’s question: why had the PM or his office leaked private texts with another world leader to the media? In his address to the National Press Club this week, French ambassador Jean-Pierre Thebault called the act, which no one appears to be disputing, an “unprecedented new low”.

But is it? As it happens, opponents of Morrison have long had an unfortunate habit of finding private information in the public domain.

Michael Towke

We almost never got Morrison the MP, let alone Morrison the PM. Back in 2007, making his first tilt at federal politics, he came up against a local candidate called Michael Towke in the first round of preselection for Cook. He lost, badly (people forget just how badly: it was 82 votes to 8).

But then Morrison made some comments about “issues” around Towke and a series of stories appeared in The Daily Telegraph. As Paul Sheehan detailed, the rookie Morrison had made some powerful friends:

Two senior people within the Liberal Party, whose identity is known to a widening circle within the party, went through Towke’s nomination papers to find every possible discrepancy and weakness. Then they started calling selected journalists to tell them Towke was a liar.

… It is telling that experienced Telegraph journalists appear to have based their stories on sources they trusted, suggesting those doing the leaking were both senior figures and seasoned in dealing with the media.

The stories ended up being factually incorrect and profoundly defamatory, and Towke would receive a settlement from Nationwide News. He later noted that Morrison’s backers (we’ve never found out who, exactly) were “prepared to ruin [his] life” to get Morrison up.

Julia Banks

The former Liberal MP who quit the party soon after the coup against Malcolm Turnbull described the process from the inside in an interview earlier this year, and it’s worth reading the whole account. After the new PM asked her to delay the announcement that she was leaving, she agreed to wait 24 hours:

And that was my first mistake because I’m told afterwards that the PMO’s office, the prime minister’s office, for which, obviously, Morrison is accountable, were backgrounding the press and others, certainly within the party, that I had had a complete sort of emotional breakdown, I had not coped with the coup.

… and then his first press conference, he was asked how do you feel about Julia Banks not recontesting? And I remember watching the television and thinking, ‘What’s he saying?’ He said: ‘All I’m doing right now is checking in with Julia, making sure she’s OK. All that matters at the moment is Julia’s welfare in what has been a really torrid time for her.’

So this whole narrative — which is what he’s very good at, controlling the narrative — and this whole narrative about me being this weak petal that hadn’t coped with coup week and that’s the reason I was leaving was the narrative that they had created and he was complicit, absolutely complicit in it when he did that first presser.

Brittany Higgins

In February Brittany Higgins, a former Liberal Party staffer, went public with allegations she had been raped in Parliament House. She became emblematic of the sickening treatment of women in Parliament in particular and politics in general, and in the process caused Morrison’s government a lot of media headaches. By March, she had written to Morrison’s chief of staff, John Kunkel alleging that “numerous journalists” had told her the PM’s office was backgrounding the media against her and her partner, former reporter David Sharaz.

Asked to “categorically” deny this, Morrison managed nothing better than the following equivocation: “Nothing has been raised with my office from anyone in the gallery making any of those accusations or any discomfort about anything that my office has done.”

It took until May for Kunkel to deliver his report, which found, with almost palpable uncertainty, no “first-hand” evidence of the backgrounding.

Joe Biden

What’s slightly been forgotten in the Emmanuel Macron/Morrison melee is that Macron wasn’t the only world leader having to read about his supposedly confidential dealings with Australia in the papers. After US President Joe Biden “threw us under the bus”, The Australian suddenly had the scoop on a “confidential 15-page document that raises serious doubts about the president’s claim he believed France knew ahead of time that its $90 billion contract with Australia would be terminated”.