Time to bin conspiracy theories
Hedley Thomas | October 12, 2007
ALL the conspiracy theories, inquisitions, cries of "cover-up" and attempts to link a document-shredding fiasco in Queensland in 1990 to the alleged rape of a teenage girl in 1988 and the political aspirations of Kevin Rudd can be consigned to the bin.
The disclosure today of documents, obtained under Freedom of Information laws, should silence the paranoiacs, some of whom have clung for 17 years to a beat-up known as the Heiner Affair/Shreddergate.
Their efforts have redoubled in recent weeks in a bid to make a connection to the Opposition Leader on the eve of a federal election.
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Lindeberg has made hundreds of wild and woolly claims about top-level corruption which, he asserts, motivated the shredding. He and his boosters have shamelessly exploited the girl by claiming, falsely, that the shredding was linked to the alleged rape. They have pretended that the destruction of the documents thwarted her chance for justice.
But as today's disclosures show, the documents relating to the alleged rape were not destroyed. They were not even part of an incompetently constituted inquiry that former magistrate Noel Heiner was asked, in late 1989, to conduct into the staffing problems at the youth centre.
And when the alleged rape occurred, Rudd, who had been a diplomat for the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, was still a month away from starting in a new job as private secretary to the then Labor opposition leader in Queensland, Wayne Goss. Neither Rudd nor Goss had anything to do with a cover-up of the abuse of children.
But if Lindeberg and the assorted conspiracy theorists, among them Liberal and Nationals lightweights such as NSW opposition legal affairs spokesman Greg Smith and Queensland senator Barnaby Joyce, are determined to apportion blame, they could examine the government that was in power in 1988. It was led by a National Party premier in a coalition with the Liberal Party...