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Clues aplenty for Premier in the case of the dicey donation

Sometimes the truth in politics can be discerned by what people don’t say, writes Matthew Abraham.

Aug 12, 2022, updated Aug 12, 2022
Digitally altered image: Tom Aldahn/Solstice Media

Digitally altered image: Tom Aldahn/Solstice Media

The curious incident of the dog in the night-time was a walk in the park for Sherlock Holmes.

The obscure clue underwrites the plot in Arthur Conan Doyle’s 1892 short story The Adventure of Silver Blaze, and there it may have remained buried were it not for another, far more recent, mystery. In 2003, British writer Mark Haddon revived the baffling clue for his brilliant novel, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time.

Here’s what was curious about the dog. It didn’t bark when someone stole champion racehorse Silver Blaze from its stables. Why not? Because the thief was no stranger, to the dog or the nag.

“I had grasped the significance of the silence of the dog, for one true inference invariably suggests others,” Holmes explains. “Obviously the midnight visitor was someone whom the dog knew well.” Elementary, my dear Watson.

It was the noise the dog didn’t make that gave the game away.

The incident of Premier Peter Malinauskas, the South Australian Labor Party and the $125,000 election donation from the uber militant building union, the CFMEU, is curious for just the same reason.

It’s the noise the ALP didn’t make that is the puzzle. As Holmes put it so well, one true inference invariably suggests others.

Just to recap. Before the last election, the CFMEU donated a whopping $125,000 to help the Malinauskas Labor machine blitz the March 19 state election. If Labor follows previous form, the size of its victory sets it up for two, maybe three terms, or eight to 12 years, in the big chair.

Last week, the SA branch of the CFMEU was effectively taken over by the union’s strutting, boorish, hardline “no ticket, no start” Victorian outfit, led by John Setka, who has been convicted of harassing his now estranged wife Emma Walters.

After a mounting public backlash, led by a surprisingly chipper Liberal opposition, Malinauskas didn’t jump shirtless in the pool to fix the problem, he just did a good old-fashioned backflip, fully clothed, while eating humble pie.

In his short but stellar political career, the embarrassing and belated backflip is not a manoeuvre the Premier has needed to perform, until this week.

He told his party’s state executive to hand the money back, and they will. How do these things work? Will it be by cheque, money order, a direct bank transfer, or a brown paper bag left on the front doormat of the CFMEU’s Adelaide office?

How common is it for a union to make such a huge donation to a political party across the border?

This whole avoidable mess has so many silent dogs, it’s hard to know where to start.

Why did the Malinauskas Opposition, which ran a strong pro-business policy stance in the run up to its election victory, accept the donation in the first place?

Did it ring any alarm bells, even muffled ones, in the office of the party’s then state secretary, Reggie Martin? Or was it just another day at the office?

Reggie now has a seat in the state’s Legislative Council for at least the next eight years so he’ll have plenty of time to illuminate us, under parliamentary privilege.

But last month he told The Australian’s David Penberthy, who broke the yarn on the Victorian CFMEU’s takeover of the SA branch, that the donation was sought “at the local level” through the union’s SA branch secretary Andrew Sutherland.

He told Penberthy he approached the CFMEU “in the same way we ­approach all affiliated unions” and that the money had ultimately come from the Victorian branch because it was financially stronger than the SA branch and acted like a parent company.

This week, Sutherland told InDaily the $125,000 donation to Labor was made by the Victorian-Tasmanian branch on behalf of its 28,000 members and in cooperation with the SA division’s 2000 members. He said it was not made personally by any official and was no different to donations made by any other union.

CFMEU boss John Setka on a construction site in Melbourne. Photo: AAP/James Ross

How common is it for a union to make such a huge donation to a political party across the border?

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What was in it for the 28,000 Victorian and Tasmanian CFMEU members? Are they all planning to move to Adelaide because the beer’s better?

Premier Malinauskas, when initially trying to defend the donation, said the tactics associated with the Victorian CFMEU had no place in the SA industrial relation landscape. Yet the party he leads was happy to seek and take cash from a branch that has an appalling record of thuggish tactics on building sites.

While Labor was trousering the dough for its election campaign, the Labor leader promised in the very same election campaign to outlaw political donations if elected. He thinks they’re a bad look for democracy. He’s not wrong there.

But as InDaily reported this week, the Premier’s plan is bogged down as the Attorney-General’s Department works through “constitutional issues”.

Attorney-General Kyam Maher thinks they’ll get the legislation before parliament “well and truly before the next election”.

He declared the Malinauskas Government felt very strongly “that election campaigns are a contest of ideas, not a contest of money”.

When did it start feeling “very strongly” about this principle? Before, or after, taking the 125 big ones from the CFMEU?

And will the legislation see taxpayers forced to fill the funding void, effectively donating to parties they may not support?

Most curious of all, however, was the nature of the Premier’s backflip.

He’d rejected sensible calls by the Opposition’s Michelle Lensink, and by Emma Walters, for the ALP to donate the money to domestic violence services, even dismissing Lensink’s suggestion as a “little cute”.

Instead, he was allegedly shocked into action by a CFMEU sticker slapped on a Master Builders Association field car and bent windscreen wipers on MBA boss Will Frogley’s set of wheels. The CFMEU vehemently denies any involvement.

Did the Premier grasp the significance of the curious case of the bent windscreen wipers in the night-time? Did one true inference invariably suggests others? Or was it a handy excuse to do the bleeding obvious?

Elementary, my dear Watson.

Matthew Abraham’s political column is published on Fridays. Matthew can be found on Twitter as @kevcorduroy. It’s a long story.

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