The Prime Minister, the Email and the Ute

A political brouhaha has been blowing through Australia over the past week or so that has got the media in a bit of a tizz here.

They have gone as far as to attach "gate" at the end of it
It's called "Ute-gate".

And like all political scandals carried by the main stream media the "gate" phrase comes from the Pulitzer prize winning scoop of the Washington Post on what is now famously known as Watergate affair.It started out as a break-in at the Democratic Party’s headquarters at the Washington DC Watergate building in 1972 and ended two years later with the forced resignation of Republican Party President Richard Nixon .

Now "Ute-gate" here is nothing near the scale of the Nixon affair and comes nowhere as close as South Africa's own Oilgate scandal and in fact there has been some debate in the media whether the term gate should actually be used.

A little background.

The Australian Ute-gate affair centres around whether Treasurer (Finance Minister) Wayne Swan misled Parliament about representations made on behalf of a car dealer, who happens to be a friend of the Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd. It revolves around whether there was any inappropriate behaviour concerning the administration of the proposed OzCar deal that will enable car dealers in Australia to acquire credit during the global financial crisis.The Opposition Liberal Party, led by one of Australia's richest men, Malcolm Turnbull accuses Swan of misleading parliament and effectively giving the prime minister's pal preferential treatment.In turn, the government accuses the opposition if using a "forged email" to base the scurrilous allegations on.

On the surface, it seems like no corruption has actually taken place and the entire brouhaha stems from whether an email referred to at a hearing by a senior public servant -who may or not be sympathetic to the opposition -real or not.

It so happens that a raid by the Australian Federal police into the said public servant's house did turn up the email and it was indeed a fake.

Juicy indeed but if one has to consider that the OzCar scheme has not yet been implemented and therefore no one has benefited from any alleged impropriety then the whole Ute-gate thing is merely a storm in a political tea cup.

Never-the-less both sides of the political spectrum here are calling resignations and the whole saga it seems will have ample legs until a head or two rolls.

The Aussie media seems so starved for new that they are willing to take a term reserved for the highest form of corruption and attach it to a story about a forged email.

In the meantime I watch in awe.