AFP’s failure to investigate Angus Taylor has corrosive consequences for our democracy

Extract from The Guardian

Angus Taylor

Katharine Murphy

People not being held accountable when falsehoods happen is incredibly harmful

@murpharoo

Thu 6 Feb 2020 18.58 AEDT Last modified on Thu 6 Feb 2020 19.05 AEDT

On Thursday the Australian federal police confirmed it had dropped its investigation into a doctored document used by energy minister Angus Taylor to attack Sydney lord mayor Clover Moore’s record on climate change. Photograph: Mike Bowers/The Guardian

Precision matters, so let’s be very precise. The Australian federal police has not conducted a deep dive into what went on in Angus Taylor’s office – how it came to pass that a dodgy document was deployed in a political attack against the Sydney lord mayor, Clover Moore.
The police haven’t investigated. They have declined to investigate.
According to the AFP’s statement issued on Thursday, the New South Wales police handed them “information” about the inquiry they had undertaken last year into the controversy. The AFP perused this information and determined “it is unlikely further investigation will result in obtaining sufficient evidence to substantiate a commonwealth offence”.

Now this is kind of curious, because nobody at any point asked the police to consider whether a commonwealth offence had been committed. The referral was very precise. It asked for an assessment of whether an offence had been committed under NSW law.
Having assessed the NSW investigation – after the NSW police kindly passed the political hot potato on to the constabulary in Canberra – the AFP determined there was “no evidence” to indicate the minister for energy and emissions reduction was involved in falsifying information.

This is a relief of course, but it always seemed highly unlikely Taylor himself would have authored a career-ending dodgy document as a bit of comic relief between cabinet submissions.
So why is the arbitration narrowed to what the minister did or did not do?

  Attorney general responds to AFP dropping Angus Taylor investigation – video

Also, it is entirely unclear how this “no evidence” determination was reached. By speaking to Angus Taylor? By looking at electronic records? The AFP has declined to say whether police interviewed the minister, or staff, or others, as part of this process.
The AFP has justified its decision not to investigate (again being clear what has actually happened here) because of the “low level of harm” associated with the episode, and because Taylor apologised for using false figures when he accused the council of undertaking travel that wasn’t actually undertaken.
Let’s pause here a moment and consider “low level of harm”. Now it’s obvious to say harm is an eye-of-the-beholder concept, but it probably pays at this juncture to recap the central facts of this case.
To explain the otherwise inexplicable, Taylor has always insisted that his office accessed an early version of the Sydney City Council annual report, and that version contained different travel figures than the report that appears on the website currently.
Taylor’s problem is there has never been any concrete evidence, at least in the public domain, to substantiate that claim. Now perhaps the police fared better than the rest of us, but the minister never provided any proof to the parliament or to journalists.

The City of Sydney for its part produced detailed evidence of its metadata and screenshots from the system used to manage its website. That material showed the publicly available documents had not changed since they were first uploaded – with the correct and accurate figures – in November last year.
The evidence supplied by the council suggests the document Taylor’s office used wasn’t ever on the council website. So if that’s correct, where did this false document come from? Who authored it? Why did they do that?
And most importantly, why are there no consequences for doing that?
Sticking with the sliding scale of harm, it is true that nobody is ever going to lose any sleep over an issue as micro as the size of the Sydney City Council travel budget, and whether a commonwealth cabinet minister thinks it’s a good use of his time to pick a student politics fight with a local government official.
But I suspect a number of us do care if documents have been falsified and whether fake documents are being deployed in public debate.
That would seem to me to be quite harmful activity in an age where citizens in democracies don’t know who, or what, to trust in politics and public life, and are suspicious of institutions that once enjoyed significant levels of respect.

Not being able to determine what’s true, and people not being held accountable when falsehoods happen, is incredibly harmful. It’s more than harmful, actually. Corrosive is a better word.
In deciding not to investigate, the AFP also determined that getting to the bottom of the Taylor/Moore imbroglio would require a “significant” level of resources.
Really? Would it require more than the small phalanx of police who sifted through the underwear drawer of News Corp journalist Annika Smethurst last year after she was raided after publishing information that was clearly in the public interest?
More resources than that?
Seems pretty unlikely, doesn’t it.

• Katharine Murphy is Guardian Australia’s political editor