Pyne confirms: I had drinks with Slipper's accuser
Jessica Wright
May 1, 2012 - 3:58PM
Christopher Pyne. Photo: Alex Ellinghausen
COALITION frontbencher Christopher Pyne spent almost two hours drinking and chatting with James Ashby a month before the political staffer lodged court documents accusing Speaker Peter Slipper of sexual harassment and misusing Cabcharge dockets.
The National Times has learnt that on the night of March 19, about 9.30pm, Mr Pyne - the manager of opposition business in the House of Representatives - met Mr Ashby and another Slipper staffer in the Speaker's office.
Two separate sources have confirmed details of the meeting to the National Times. Both insist Mr Pyne rang back later the same evening to request Mr Ashby's mobile phone number.
Mr Pyne confirms the meeting took place but says he can "not remember" ever having requested Mr Ashby's mobile number. .......
.....The Liberal Party powerbroker continues to deny he had any prior knowledge of the claims Mr Ashby made in the Federal Court documents or that he had ever had a discussion with the staffer over his concerns about Mr Slipper.
A source close to Mr Slipper's office told the National Times that, during the evening of March 19, Mr Ashby revealed personal details to Mr Pyne, a claim Mr Pyne strenuously denies.
"I have nothing to hide," Mr Pyne said. "I was simply passing the time of day. We had a beer and a political discussion."
Asked if Mr Ashby raised with him any concerns regarding Mr Slipper, Mr Pyne replied, "No. Not at all."
The revelation of the March 19 meeting between Mr Pyne and Mr Ashby and the request for a phone number add to previous statements by Mr Pyne in which he described his contact with Mr Ashby as brief.
Mr Slipper was not in his office on the night of the 19th, as he was presiding over an adjournment debate in the House of Representatives.
After being invited in for a drink, Mr Pyne stayed drinking with Mr Ashby - then a junior media officer in the Speaker's office - and the other unnamed staffer until after 11pm.
When Mr Slipper returned to the office, Mr Pyne left.
Mr Pyne said that it was not unusual for him to socialise with Mr Slipper's staff in the Speaker's absence, saying: "I am the manager of opposition business and part of my responsibilities is that I have a greater level of contact with the Speaker's office than the average member of Parliament."
On Sunday, Mr Pyne told Sky News that the first knowledge he had of Mr Ashby's Federal Court action was when he read about it in the News Ltd press the previous Saturday.
"I had no specific knowledge of these claims before that, of course I've had contact with the Speaker's office, as manager of opposition business over the last six months, but I had no knowledge of these extraordinary serious allegations until I read about them in the newspaper in the News Ltd press," he said.
Asked if he had ever had contact with Mr Ashby during the course of his employment in the Speaker's office, Mr Pyne replied: "How could I not when I walk into the reception in the Speaker's office with Speaker's staffer there; I've said 'hello' to all of them, so I passed the time of day with all of them."
Mr Pyne repeated he had never discussed with the staffer the allegations of the misuse of Cabcharge dockets, nor the sexual harassment claims made in the Federal Court civil case.
Asked on the ABC's 7.30 last week if there was evidence to suggest Mr Ashby had received help from the Coalition in preparing his Federal Court claim, Opposition Leader Tony Abbott replied: "Not that I'm aware of."......
......Mr Ashby resigned as a member of the Liberal National Party and accepted the job as an adviser to Mr Slipper on December 22 last year. ....<cont>
Double standards: why we hate Gillard so much
3 May 2012
806 Comments
To read the mainstream media at the moment, you would think Australia was being ruled by Visigoths or that we had somehow returned to subsistence survival.
Things have gotten so bad in our poor country, apparently, the nation is in such a dire predicament, that a leading journalist has seen fit to say that the prime minister should "fall on her sword".
A former Liberal staffer, a mainstay of media talkfests and panel shows, declared on national television that Julia Gillard should be "kicked to death", a comment that drew virtually zero condemnation in the mainstream media.
Violent metaphors dominate the discussion of the Gillard Government.
A recent article in (appropriately enough) The Punch managed to use all of these expressions in the course of its ranting: "assassination", "bloody execution", "swung a sledgehammer into its own political heartland", "knifed".
The same article put the PM's problems down, in part, to her not having had a baby, and offered this brilliant piece of analysis:
Meanwhile ... middle-of-the-road voters have written her off as bulls**t artist and are declaring themselves for a Liberal leader they largely hate because anything is better than a leader you simply cannot believe.
Yes, that's right. People are longing for the honesty of Tony Abbott.
Lying is, of course, at the heart of the attacks on the Prime Minister herself, which personally, I think is fair enough. Politicians should be called out if they lie.
The hilarious thing about such attacks is that their intensity and the level of sheer repetition they garner would make an outsider think that this was the first time in the history of Australian politics that a government had reneged on a commitment or said one thing and done another.
As anyone who dared criticise John Howard's tangential relationship with the truth will know, many of those now getting the vapours about Julia Gillard's dishonesty were more than willing to excuse such behaviour from him.
In fact, a standard theme of commentary throughout the Howard years, recycled as holy writ by journalists and other sage readers of the political entrails, was that 'the punters' didn't care about Howard's lying.
Anyone who brought up his "non-core promises", his selling of the Iraq War on the basis of Saddam Hussein's non-existent weapons of mass destruction, his and his ministers' knowledge of matters to do with the AWB's dealings with the same Hussein, or his appalling behaviour regarding the children overboard affair, was liable to be treated to chapter and verse about about how such complaints were the sort of thing that only concerned 'Howard haters'.
Decent, ordinary people were too busy getting on with their lives to concern themselves with hairsplitting about what Howard did or didn't say.
Part of the logic governing rationalisations of Coalition dishonesty was that people didn't worry about it because the economy was going so well. Low interest rates, low unemployment, and a booming mining sector stopped any temptation to hand-wring about ethics.
Oh, how times have changed!
Now, we are regularly told, it is the decent ordinary people who are mortally offended by any and all political dishonesty. We are told that they are shocked - shocked! - that a politician might not be as pure as an angel riding a unicorn in the land of clouds and sugar. We are told that having the most successful economy in the world is irrelevant.
The change of narrative is simply extraordinary.
Of course, none of this is to excuse the various problems of the Gillard Government. But there is a point to make about the level of aggressive hysteria that currently infects mainstream commentary about this government.
It cannot simply be explained by the performance of the government or the behaviour of the current prime minister. If economic issues are what matter, then this government is performing as well, arguably better, than the Howard Government, and in much more difficult circumstances.
It cannot simply be explained by the 'scandals' each government brought upon itself.
Maybe you can argue that Gillard's problems with Slipper and Thompson are more serious than Howard's with, say, Mal Colson and the plethora of ministers he had to sack for breaching the code of conduct.
But the differential doesn't explain why so many commentators were willing to excuse Howard's problems but portray Gillard's as some sort of existential crisis for Australian democracy itself.
And honestly, what is more serious than a government committing the nation to war on the basis of demonstrably false intelligence? Compared to that, shifting positions on a price on carbon is small potatoes.
So what's going on?
Stripped of all the self-justifying nonsense used to maintain the rage that currently fills our newspapers and airwaves, there are three pertinent distinctions between this government and the Howard Government: it is a Labor Government, it is a minority government, and the current prime minister is a woman.
Being a Labor government not only alienates the dominant right-wing media, it brings business into public discussion in a way that simply never happens with a Coalition government.
Bad behaviour by Howard was excused by a phalanx of media apologists. Policy disagreements that would have been discussed in backrooms with a Coalition government are now made the subject of multimillion dollar advertising campaigns.
The hung parliament forces the government into deal making that is nearly always interpreted as weakness by the media, and they also tend to preference stability (interpreted as 'strength') over achievement. The buzzword is 'authority'.
Gillard being a woman means she is judged by a different standard, and let's not pretend otherwise. It may not be a decisive matter, but it is one that shifts the balance of interpretation.
When she is tough, she is seen as treacherous and unbecoming. When she prefers compromise and negotiation, she is seen as weak. Oh yeah, and she doesn't have kids: how can she relate to 'normal' people?
The Gillard Government is far from perfect, and ultimately has no-one to blame for its poor standing but itself. All I'm trying to put my finger on is why their bad behaviour is deemed so much more unacceptable than the bad behaviour of the previous Coalition government. Those three reasons are key.
Tim Dunlop was the author of two of Australia's most successful political blogs, The Road To Surfdom and Blogocracy. View his full profile here.
Slipper accuser Ashby was secretly helping rival
Jessica Wright
May 5, 2012/the AGE
James Ashby
THE man who has accused the Speaker, Peter Slipper, of sexual harassment and fraud was actively working against his boss' re-election as he continued to work in Mr Slipper's office.
The Saturday Age can reveal that James Hunter Ashby was actively promoting the preselection campaign of one of Mr Slipper's Liberal National Party political rivals in a series of YouTube videos while he was working as a media adviser to the Speaker.
The Saturday Age has also learnt that Mr Ashby held a secret meeting with another of the Speaker's political rivals and former Howard government minister, Mal Brough, just two weeks before his explosive claims against Mr Slipper were made public ....<cont>
Pyne email surfaces as 'cover-up' claims persist
Jessica Wright
May 3, 2012/the AGE
An email from Christopher Pyne asking for the contact details of James Ashby.
The National Times has obtained a hard copy of an email from the Liberal frontbencher asking for the contact details of the staffer at the centre of sexual harassment allegations against Speaker Peter Slipper.
Mr Pyne has twice this week been forced to alter his account of his dealings with James Hunter Ashby after he said at the weekend his contact with Mr Slipper's former staffer had been brief.....
Altered his account ... Christopher Pyne, left, pictured here with Tony Abbott. Photo: Andrew Meares
... After the National Times revealed on Tuesday that on the night of March 19 Mr Pyne spent almost two hours drinking and chatting with Mr Ashby and another Slipper staffer in the Speaker's office, the Liberal frontbencher defended the meeting, saying: ''I have nothing to hide.'' ....
.....Asked if he had ever sought Mr Ashby's contact details, Mr Pyne replied: ''I don't remember ever having asked for Mr Ashby's number.''
But Mr Pyne again altered his recollection of the March 19 meeting yesterday when the existence of Mr Pyne's email - and a subsequent text message - was revealed by Fairfax Media.
''I don't remember asking for those, but by the same token I could well have,'' he told ABC Radio yesterday when asked if he had sent the email.
Mr Pyne denies having ever spoken with Mr Ashby about the alleged sexual harassment but yesterday qualified his original statement, saying: ''Even if James Ashby had raised these matters with me or anyone else, well, quite frankly he is within his rights to do so.''
The Liberal powerbroker dodged questions over whether he had ever contacted Mr Ashby by email, saying only: ''I've never spoken to James Ashby on the phone and I've never texted him on the phone.''
But in documents obtained by the National Times, Mr Pyne is shown to seek Mr Ashby's mobile number and email address.
Mr Pyne's email was sent to an unnamed staffer in the Speaker's office at 11.01pm on March 19 - minutes after he left the late-night chat session in the Speaker's office - and asks: ''What's James' email address or mobile.''....
Hmmmmmmmm...
By trying to conceal what they might have known and what they might have done, Liberal figures have put the opposition in the frame and weakened its attack on the government when parliament resumes next week. The moral is: guys, best to tell the WHOLE truth.
