News Corporation might not have set out to install Scott Morrison in the federal parliament in 2007, but Morrison will surely have been grateful for the pivotal role the Murdoch organisation played in ousting Michael Towke, after he had defeated Morrison convincingly in the party’s preselection ballot for the seat of Cook.
The preselection fight, eventually won by Morrison, was covered by most media outlets, but none more so than The Daily Telegraph, which attacked Towke over a series of stories portraying the Lebanese-Australian Maronite Christian as a serial liar and an exaggerator.
Towke’s claim over the weekend that Morrison racially vilified him to destroy his political career has been denied by Morrison. But it was the stories published by News Corporation at the time that devastated Towke’s reputation and made it impossible for him to maintain his preselection.
Towke sued Nationwide News Pty Ltd and won a reported $50,000 settlement, with the Murdoch group unwilling to defend the defamation action in court. News had reportedly made an initial offer of $110,000, with demands for confidentiality. Bitter about the attack and its consequences, though, Towke refused to agree to terms that would stop him from speaking.
After the defamation action was settled, he told The Sydney Morning Herald of the toll the battle had taken.
“These stories sent my mother to hospital,” he said. “They demonised me. I wanted to confront them in court.”
The defamatory stories are no longer available online. The headlines, as reported in the SMH, tell the tale of an escalating attack. The first was “Liberal ballot scandal in Howard’s backyard”. Three days later a second story appeared: “Towke future on hold”. The next day, in The Sunday Telegraph, the third story: “Party split as Liberal candidate faces jail”.
“That was the story that sent my mother to hospital,” Towke told the Herald. Faced with the public shredding of his reputation, Towke had no choice but to resign.
The stories were written by several journalists. One remains online, by the Telegraph’s then-state political editor Simon Benson, now The Australian’s political editor covering Canberra.
Towke’s preselection, the story alleged, was emerging as “a major embarrassment for Mr Howard and the NSW branch of the Liberal Party”, with “mystery now enveloping” the business venture that Mr Towke “boasted to preselectors” would help him win nomination for the safe southern Sydney seat then held by Bruce Baird.
It attacked Towke on the grounds that he did not have a licence to operate a private security company he owned, called Apollo Security, and that Apollo’s phone number “rings out”, “its website is blank” and that its listed email address “is defunct”.
The sources for the Telegraph’s stories have never been revealed.
Morrison was the first candidate defeated — by a margin of 82 to 8 — but he was not the only one. Others were Paul Fletcher, now a Morrison cabinet minister, who went on to win preselection for another Sydney seat. And Mark Speakman, now state member for the seat of Cronulla and NSW attorney-general.
For Morrison, the former state director of the NSW Liberal Party, there was a sense of destiny.
He had come with the endorsement of the retiring member for Cook, Bruce Baird, a fellow Christian who had been Morrison’s patron, chief barracker, sponsor and guardian angel stretching back two decades.
Baird had spotted Morrison as a talent in the 1990s when Morrison worked under Baird at Tourism Australia, and when Baird decided it was time to move on from Cook, he gave Morrison a quiet call alerting him to the possibility that he could take over his seat.
Baird told Christian radio station Hope that Morrison was “a person of faith”.
“It’s also true to say that my wife Judy believed [Morrison] was called by God to replace me. That’s known within our family,” Baird said.
Morrison too had told his local pastor of his belief that God had called him not just to be in Parliament but to be prime minister.
While the Almighty might have had a plan for Morrison, Murdoch’s Daily Telegraph was the power on earth that made it possible for Morrison’s destiny to be realised — setting up a relationship which neither party, surely, has forgotten.
