Kevin Rudd, the leader of the federal Labour opposition, and quite possibly the next Australian Prime Minister has been directly implicated in threats against the Sydney Morning Herald to prevent them from publishing a story.
The article is worth reading in full, but here's some interesting quotes:
And that's just the intro.
With that, he hung up.
Three hours later, about 1pm, Harris phoned Walsh back in "the same feral, belligerent mood". He went through a detailed time line of Rudd's recall after his father's death in February 1969. However, it was non-attributable, "on deep background only". And if the paper decided to publish, knowing what they were being told, "we will regard it is a deliberate malicious assault" on Rudd. If this happened, "we'll have 100 people ready to roll tomorrow morning to trash you and your paper".
The silly thing is that the story itself is not particularly important anyway. A family disputes Rudd's account of his childhood eviction from their own which he had previously talked about publicly. Nothing too serious at all. But the attempt to suppress it has made it much more interesting.
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Towards the end of last year some poor scribe at the Age wrote a colour piece on Rudd which included a quote from a Liberal strategist who labelled Rudd as a bow-tie wearing prat. Rudd responded with an early morning phone call, during which he called the journalist a fat, stinking cunt who wasn't fit to breathe the same air as him. Nice bloke.
He also went up and down News Corp to try and get the guy who ran the fake Dawn Service story fired in much the same way.