"The Deadly Newt" meets "The Heckler" ~ Slippergate & The Sunday Age

Over the weekend I received a delightful little surprise, courtesy of The Sunday Age.

Tucked away on page 16 alongside an op-ed written by Annabel Crabb was a column written by The Age's cheeky but lovable analyst of a million faces, The Heckler.  As an international man (or woman) of mystery, The Heckler referenced my previous post about the social media habits of Peter Slipper's former staffer (and current sexual harassment plaintiff), James Ashby, within their weekly column.  While the article itself isn't available online, it is available via The Age's iPad app and the screenshot that I have provided below.

Courtesy of "The Sunday Age" - Screenshot 29th April 2012 - Page 16 (Digital Print Edition)

~~ More after the "Jump" ~~

Dirty, Sexy Politics - The Slipper Saga

If there's one guarantee about Australian politics, it's that there's always a stir going on that the public never sees, or that we refuse to see.

While the sexual harassment allegations made against Speaker Slipper over the weekend are nothing short of astounding, neither are they surprising. Between politicians having affairs with one another, Senators occasionally shoplifting and Party leaders making homophobic remarks while having closeted LGBT family members, things aren't always as clear cut as they may first appear within our nation's capital.

Take for example the situation surrounding James Ashby, who is the staffer who made the allegations against Slipper. Last month Ashby was caught up in a minor scandal, after he grabbed a reporter's iPhone at a news conference and threw it into scrubland. At the time I thought that this was pretty weird behaviour for a political staffer, so I decided to have a look at his online presence in order to get a feel for what the guy was like. Low and behold, I found that he had a modest number of tweets, a LinkedIn page and accounts on Facebook and Youtube, all of which seemed pretty tame at the time.

Due to the way that various politicians and Press Gallery reporters have reacted since the Slipper sex story broke, its pretty obvious that the general thought around Capital Hill is that Slipper has engaged in gay activities in the past. Given that more than a few politicians, journalists and bureaucrats in Canberra are closeted, it isn't surprising that Slipper's supposed sexual orientation has been kept quiet, on the risk that they could be “outted” themselves. For somebody who has been closeted in the workplace and at home for years, if not decades, the thought of being “outted” as being anything other than “normal” would be terrifying.

After the sex scandal allegations broke on Friday, I decided to have another look at Ashby's social media accounts in order to see if there was anything I'd missed about his online and offline personalities. To my immediate surprise, I noticed that somebody had made a considerable effort to make Ashby's online activities as non-controversial as possible. Not only had his Facebook page disappeared, but his LinkedIn profile had been changed and most of his posts on Twitter had been removed. As well as this, all of the cached content from these websites had been either wiped or made in-accessible to the general public. Strangely enough, his predominantly news-focused YouTube account had been left largely untouched.

(Read more after the jump)