Anniversary
Ten years ago, I was married, my wife was pregnant, and I had my dream job - working for Kim Beazley, leader of the Labor Party and Federal Opposition Leader.
My remit in Beazley’s office started out as an assistant in the Media Office - I maintained a database of everything the media said about a whole host of political issues - everything from interest rates and Hansonism to Telstra’s sale and the GST. While working in the Office, I hit on the idea of recruiting uni students as assistants in the office, volunteers who could make us more efficient and help with research etc. This role grew, and I was running my dozen or so volunteer students as a temp agency - loaning them to Shadow Ministerial offices to assist with project work. Education spokesman Mark Latham and Health spokesman Michael Lee were particular beneficiaries of such assistance.
During the winter of 1998, I was asked - because my volunteer students were more cluey about such things than most regular staff in the Parliamentary party - to monitor what the other parties were doing online. I ran an email discussion list for Labor supporters at the time, so we wanted to know what the other teams were up to.
As part of that, I assigned one of my staff to check what the Liberals were up to. He came back shortly afterwards with some interesting news. The Liberals had designed a website for their candidates in the upcoming election to enter their own details, as a way of updating their biographies for the national website. There was no site-security, it was simply a cgi web-form with “secret.html” as the filename.
I mentioned our find to someone high up in a Senator’s office. I was told “when the election is called, and their site goes live, tell your friends all about the web-form”.
The election was called on the last Sunday of August, 1998 for October 3. I did as instructed. I sent an email to a few friends letting them know of the appalling site design by the Liberals.
What I did expect was that the Liberal website was then subject to some humourous amendments. What I didn’t expect was my original email going viral and ending up on the national news and on the front page of several newspapers.
Ten years ago today, and two days after my email was sent, I was sacked. The story had become a scandal and dislodged our agenda from the national media in the opening week of the campaign. My local MP, Bob McMullan called me “a young idiot” on TV. John Howard said of me “What do you expect of our opponents?” Mr Beazley was disrupted from an education announcement in Bendigo by having to respond to the claims his staff had been involved.
The media camped outside my house for two days. The police interviewed me. Caerulia and I split for about three months. For a while, it was the worst time of my life. Now, of course, I’ve surpassed that week. But that’s the kind of achiever I am 
I now suspect the Liberals laid a trap. And stunned themselves when they caught someone in the Opposition Leader’s office. But what happened was the Cyberian equivalent of painting moustaches on electoral posters. That it was the first political hacking* scandal in Australia made it much more than it was.
* I don’t like using the word ‘hacking’ to describe what it was, because it involved no code work at all. It was simply the use of a web-form to submit information to their site. The site was used for its intended purpose, but simply by people for whom it wasn’t intended.
