It’s the Canberra whodunnit that has Peter Dutton tongue-tied – who deleted those 13 words?
Neither shadow attorney-general Michaelia Cash nor the only other witness can – or will – answer a question that goes to the heart of Peter Dutton’s political brand.
It began with a simple question from Senator Linda White on Wednesday morning: “How many times had Senator Cash met with a notorious fathers’ rights group, the Men’s Rights Agency (MRA), before she voted against a family law reform package aimed at reducing conflict between separated parents?”
Former women’s minister Senator Cash was not in a position to answer.
MRA, and its founder Sue Price, had initially advertised a May 6 meeting between the pair, which its website said: “had been facilitated by the Leader of the Liberal Party, Peter Dutton”.
A few days later, those words had disappeared.
Mr Dutton could not shed any light either and refused to answer any questions about his links to men’s rights campaigners on the political right, which appear to have been reactivated as the Coalition voted against family law reform aimed at reducing domestic conflicts.
The Queensland-based MRA has developed a notorious reputation since a 1996 case of extreme family violence perpetrated by a separated father who had once been one of the group’s clients.
Ms Price denies ever saying of women fleeing domestic violence: “I hate the bitches that leave.”
Admittedly controversial
But she admits her group, which argues against domestic violence orders, might cause Mr Dutton to get into political trouble.
She denies, though, ever invading victims’ privacy through surveillance, leaking confidential information about their shelters’ locations, encouraging men to surveil their former wives at shelters, or hiring a private detective to follow a Queensland cabinet minister.
“It’s all a bunch of lies, as far as I’m concerned,” Ms Price told The New Daily on Wednesday evening.
Ms Price said she could not recall how those words came to be taken down from her website shortly before the budget.
Nor could she recall how the meeting with Senator Cash had even occurred.
“I’d sent an email to (Mr Dutton) saying: ‘Why don’t you put the fathers back in families?’
“The only thing he did was forward the email to Senator Cash,” Ms Price said.
A staffer denied that anyone in Mr Dutton’s or Ms Cash’s office asked for the website to be edited.
Ms Price first said she had only met Mr Dutton once, briefly, and only while standing in a crowd at a 2006 event.
But she declined to say if that would mean Mr Dutton had arranged for a meeting to be held with Senator Cash after getting an email from someone he did not know.
“He had nothing to do with it,” she said.
“I don’t know how it happened. I can’t recall if it came from Peter Dutton or Senator Cash.”
She later conceded she had known Mr Dutton better than she had let on. In 2004 they appeared together to launch a series of courses pitched at divorced men representing themselves in family law battles in Queensland.
Ms Price wrote approvingly about his contributions to a parliamentary committee in his first term in parliament.
“Committee member MP Peter Dutton pursued the issue of false allegations of domestic violence and child abuse throughout the inquiry,” she wrote in Online Opinion.
Mr Dutton’s office did not respond to questions.
“I removed the reference myself,” Ms Price said later.
She could not say when or if someone had asked.
A charged issue
A spokesman for Senator Cash said that the issue was a desperate Labor Party smear that was also hypocritical.
The spokesman said Labor senators had previously cited the MRA as a reference in a report tabled in Parliament three years ago.
Family law has long been a political issue; Pauline Hanson was charged in the last Parliament’s committees, which were a magnet for the far right.
Reforms by Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus aim to reduce domestic violence and make family law less confrontational and less apt to be used by one parent to harass or aggravate another.
If Liberal Party bosses okayed it, Senator Cash could sink the Family Law Amendment Bill when it reaches the upper house working with crossbenchers, Ms Price claimed in her wrap of their meeting, an unverified, subjective account.
Mr Dutton has been associated with the fathers’ rights movement since he first came on the national political scene in 2004.
He campaigned in Queensland on a plan to do away, not with family law per se, but with family lawyers and to replace the court with a “family tribunal” where legal counsel was excluded by design.
Federal family law was a big draw in his seat of Dickson in 2004 – a crowd of more than 100 gathered to hear former Attorney-General Philip Ruddock and a young Mr Dutton speak about possible reform.
In 2013 while health minister Mr Dutton spoke at a Parliament House function organised by Christian men’s rights activist Warwick Marsh, an event advertised as a chance to get a break from tip-toeing around “feminist minefields”.
