Crikey

Good on Jason Koutsoukis. He may not be the most polished, experienced, wise or measured of the denizens of the Canberra Press gallery, but in his column in yesterday’s Sunday Age he managed to show something of how the job could – and should – be done.

I’ve had a bit to say in recent times about whether or not we can trust the Canberra Press Gallery, given their tendency, when under pressure, to choose not to disclose if doing so threatens their access to the noxious drips of what the powerful choose to let the public know.

Koutsoukis managed to give us an insight into how Canberra really works in a piece about the Liberal Party’s attempts to dish the dirt on Julia Gillard. He wrote:

The phone rang one evening last week and a familiar voice at the other end said: “I’ve got something for you. It’s hot.” So hot, I thought I could hear it sizzling. Come down for a “chat”, the man suggested. All very hush-hush and strictly on the QT…

Walking through the corridors of power to meet my trusted source, dreaming of Watergate, I half wished we were meeting in a dingy car park and not the plush ministerial suite where I was headed.

Into the meeting room I waltzed and there was my source beaming behind two glasses of red and a fat manila folder with the most misunderstood noun in the Coalition lexicon scrawled across the front: Gillard.

So this was the rumoured dirt file on Labor’s deputy leader Julia Gillard that was being hawked around the press gallery, and that I’d heard so much about.

My heart sank. I had a vague idea of its contents and believed there wasn’t enough to sustain two paragraphs, let alone a whole story.

So there we have it. Dirt being hawked over glasses of red wine from inside a ministerial suite. We all knew that it happens, of course, but how often do reporters write this kind of stuff – exposing the machinery, rather than becoming part of it?

The Gillard dirt file (which apparently contains no dirt of substance) has, according to Koutsoukis, been doing the rounds. True, no journalist has yet reported this dirt, but nor have they reported the fact of it being hawked around. And they should have.

Otherwise all it takes is a lightning rod – perhaps a story by Glen Milne – for the pent up tension to be released. We know what happens then. We saw it in the Rudd-Scores affair. The whole gallery piles in and a non-story is allowed to dominates a few days of media and politics, with acres of newsprint dedicated to how it will play in voter land, blah blah blah.

Koutsoukis has seemingly pushed the off the record convention to the limit. He has played the game tough. He does not identify his source, but he does let us know the nature of that source, and how they are playing the game.

He has given his readers a glimpse of the undertow of public life.

I don’t like or agree with all of his column but nevertheless it should be read. It is now less likely that the people in that ministerial suite will succeed in finding a journalist willing to be convinced that the Gillard file contains a legitimate news story.

And that in turn slightly increases the chance that we will be engaged with matters of substance as the election approaches.