The Ralph Willis letter was forged correspondence released by Australian Labor Party's Treasurer Ralph Willis in May 1996, in the last week of the 1996 Australian federal election.
It has been blamed for the crushing defeat of Labor Prime Minister Paul Keating and the ascendancy of the Liberals' John Howard. Labor stayed out of power federally until 2007.
Incident
editIn the last week of campaigning, the news was dominated by the "Ralph Willis letter". Willis released two letters purporting to be secret correspondence between Liberal Opposition Leader John Howard and Liberal Premier of Victoria, Jeff Kennett. It dealt with the impact of the Coalition's funding plans for the states. Howard quickly denounced the letter as a forgery, and claims of Labor skullduggery dominated the close of the campaign, drowning out anything Prime Minister Paul Keating said.[1]
Willis acted unilaterally in releasing the correspondence. He suggested that the letters revealed that the Coalition government led by John Howard would cut grants to the states. However, media examination quickly revealed the letter to be a forgery. Labor claimed the forged documents had been foisted on Willis by the Melbourne University Liberal Club students.[2]
Keating's Labor government suffered a severe defeat.[citation needed]
Aftermath
editAfter the election, Willis chose to move to the backbench and announced his retirement from Parliament prior to the 1998 election.
According to legal gossip sheet Justinian in 2002, leftwing writer Bob Ellis in Goodbye Jerusalem: night thoughts of a Labor outsider (1997) claimed that the Ralph Willis letter was the cause of Keating's defeat. An anonymous writer named "Theodora" wrote that Waterfront (2002) by Anne Davies and Helen Trinca had regaled Ellis's "rant".[3]
In 2019, the Saturday Paper reported that the forgery was the work of university students. Nicola Gobbo, later to be known as Lawyer X, first came to public attention during the campaign. Gobbo, then a Young Labor member, publicly claimed that the forger was a then-Liberal staffer and later Senate president Scott Ryan, who had intended for the forgery to pass initial inspection then rebound on Labor.[4][5] Gobbo backed up her story with a statutory declaration, but Ryan denied the claim.[6]
See also
editReferences
edit- ^ Farouqe, Farrah (2 May 1996). "Forged letters author still unknown". The Age. Retrieved 20 December 2011.
- ^ "Crikey.com". Crikey.com. 2002-11-13. Retrieved 2012-05-06.
- ^ https://www.justinian.com.au/archive/old-news.html
- ^ Gobbo, Nicola (13 July 1999). "13 July 1999 – Extracts from document tabled in New South Wales Parliament in July 1999". Australian National News of the Day. Archived from the original on 2 June 2012. Retrieved 13 December 2011.
- ^ "Nicola Gobbo's role revealed in infamous 1996 election eve political hoax". ABC News. Australia. Retrieved 2 March 2019.
- ^ McKenzie-Murray, Martin (6 April 2019). "Police informants inquiry". The Saturday Paper. Australia. Retrieved 25 June 2019.