THE TOILET CLEANER AND THE LEAK.(indigenous affairs and Australian government)(Critical Essay)

ABORIGINAL LEADERS have been given a discreet, mild-mannered but firm warning by the ALP not to treat the possibility of a Beazley Labor government as an invitation to stay their hand on issues now before the Howard government, nor to revisit after the next federal election old demands that have been closed off in negotiations with the Howard government.

Bob McMullan, Labor's federal spokesman on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander affairs, passed that message on to Patrick Dodson when Dodson was lobbying Labor over the Howard government's legislative plans for the protection of the heritage of indigenous Australians.

What McMullan--the former ALP national secretary and West Australian state secretary, and former minister in the Keating Labor government, who is close to Beazley as one of the Labor leader's chief political tacticians--told Dodson was this: first, that Dodson could not afford to act on the assumption that Labor was a shoo-in to win the next election; and second, that he should not think that Aboriginal leaders could do soft deals with Howard now and then return after Labor won to do a tougher deal on behalf of their people.

No one who knows McMullan would accuse him of being hard-hearted on matters of indigenous affairs. But, while he might be soft-hearted, McMullan is hard-head: ed. Indigenous Australians are unlikely to have a more ardent champion who can actually deliver on matters of policy in a Labor government than McMullan. But he cannot afford to be seen--and would not want to be seen--as a patsy.

The McMullan-Dodson meeting that took place in Canberra in early April--and its messages from Labor to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders--encapsulated one of the most sensitive policy dilemmas for Labor: how to conduct itself on indigenous affairs with due regard for the legitimate needs of both sides, Aboriginal leaders and their constituency on the one hand, and a political party with aspirations to government and to social justice on the other. It was a dilemma summed up in media coverage surrounding McMullan's appointment to his current job just six months earlier: the "toilet cleaner on the Titanic" affair.

And, while that particular incident did indeed reflect on Labor's views about the political standing of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander affairs, it also--probably even more intensely--focused attention on an equally important matter for the media itself: How much faith should be placed in a journalist's judgment of the weight he or she attaches to a source?

THAT PARTICULAR ISSUE was highlighted in early September 2000, when ABC radio's AM program broke a story about comments by an unnamed Labor figure about Beazley's search for a replacement for Daryl Melham, the man who had a week earlier resigned in protest from his frontbench position as Labor's spokesman on Aboriginal affairs: