Wayne Sanderson, the man who Piers Ackerman claimed had linked Kevin Rudd and Wayne Swan to the failed ‘rancid turd’ strategy of the 1995 Queensland election, has graciously agreed to give us the full story of what went on in 1995, and to name who it was that actually told him about the rancid turd tactic. As you’ll see, neither Piers, nor Andrew Fraser come out smelling of roses as Sanderson sets the record straight in this guest post.

The internet has an all but infallible memory which makes it a great research tool, but that doesn’t protect what it throws up from being misinterpreted or misrepresented as evidenced by a scatological theory of political campaigning brought to national attention by The Daily Telegraph’s Piers Akerman last week.

Credit it where it’s due, Akerman dug up the transcript of an obscure forum run 15 years ago by the Australian Study of Parliament Group, which turned into something of a post-mortem of the 1995 Queensland State election.

To the surprise of most observers, Wayne Goss’ Labor Government had a near-death experience at the July 15 poll, and soon thereafter lost office when the Court of Disputed Returns ordered a re-election in the seat of Mundingburra, which was won by the Liberal’s Frank Tanti.

A feature of the campaign proper was a dishonest attack by Labor on the health issue. Apart from the seemingly inevitable problems that hospitals throw up, the Goss Government had put a lot of noses out of joint by abolishing local hospital boards.

Towards the end of the campaign and out of the blue, Labor launched attack ads claiming the Coalition was planing to privatise hospitals. From memory, the Coalition took court action to have the ads stopped, but in any event, Labor copped a pasting from most media commentators who pointed out that there was no evidence for the claim.

Still Labor persisted with it, culminating in the “hospital postcards” sent out to voters in various electorates just days before the election, featuring a photo of the local hospital with “For Sale” stamped over it.

With the Goss Government on life support in the immediate aftermath, the ALP campaign was judged to have been a disaster with the postcards emblematic of its many failings. As political reporter for the then state-based 7.30 Report Report I was curious to know, and asked many of the key players, why Labor had persisted with a tactic that had backfired.

Eventually, on the Tuesday after the election, then Labor State Secretary Mike Kaiser explained it to me in a telephone conversation. It derived, he said, from American political campaign thinking of the “hardball” school which held that no tactic was beyond the pale so long as it increases the chance of winning. Whatever it takes, if you will. According to my notes of the conversation, Kaiser recommended a read of “Better than Sex: Confessions of a Political Junkie” by Hunter S Thompson to explain the ethos behind it. According to Kaiser  it went like this: “if you have a problem in one policy area, you cook up the biggest, foulest rancid turd you can on the issue, and throw it into your opponent’s lap, late in the campaign. By the time they clean up the mess, the votes have been counted and you will already have the smell off your suit.”

In fairness to Kaiser, he did no more than explain the thinking. He did not own the tactic, nor the scatological title that he passed on for it – the “rancid turd’ theory – nor did he say who was involved in putting it together. He merely explained the thinking behind it.

About three weeks later, I included reference to that theory in my talk to the political wonks who gathered on August 15 for the APSG forum and have never mentioned it publicly before or since. There it stayed until Akerman came across the forum transcript on the internet and linked Kevin Rudd and Wayne Swan to the tactic in his article.

Now, I did not make that link in my talk, and I have no knowledge of what involvement, if any, Rudd or Swan had in implementing the “rancid turd” theory. To be fair, perhaps one or both argued against it behind closed doors, although as members of the A-Team behind Labor’s failed campaign, they have to carry some of the collective responsibility for it.

Nor do I think, as Akerman argued, that Rudd’s attack on Tony Abbott for “gouging $1 billion out of the health system” is the “rancid turd” revisited – as described to me, it was very much an election campaign tactic and one for the last days of the campaign. In any event the line against Abbott seems more like common or garden variety political argy-bargy.

There the matter may have ended, but for an odd piece of vanity “journalism” by Andrew Fraser in The Weekend Australian in which he claimed responsibility for telling me about the theory. I have no recollection of a conversation with Fraser about it, although we lived in the same neighbourhood and occasionally talked politics when we met on the street. It is possible.

But as a matter of common sense, even if I had that conversation with Fraser, that does not mean I didn’t speak to others about it, unless Fraser makes claim to omniscience as one of his reporting skills, possible since he didn’t contact me to check before writing Saturday’s piece.

Fraser even points to doubts that he was the source because he claims to remember that he said “smelly” rather than “rancid” to describe of offending article. Trust me, even 15 years later, “rancid turd” is a phrase that sticks in the memory. Fraser also points out that as a mere political flack, he was not a “senior campaign figure” as I had described the source.

As for this snarky Fraser line, “Still, Sanderson wouldn’t be the first journalist to paint his sources as being more important than they actually are”, as political reporter for the 7.30 Report I didn’t have to exaggerate my sources – the position itself ensured that anyone and everyone was happy to blab on and off the record simply because of the clout the show had, nothing to do with me.

Wayne Sanderson.