Political dirt units are meant to stay in the shadows. This week, they came out

Albanese initially bucked the tradition, opting not to have a dirt unit after being elected in 2022 and vowing to “do politics better”. But that Labor sources said that changed halfway through his term, when Labor’s honeymoon came to an end and it started dropping in the polls.

The Labor government now has a “research unit” that few people will talk about, but several staffers confirm exist. They look up publicly available information about opponents, such as company, real estate and parliamentary records.

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These units have operated under different names over the years. In the Rudd-Gillard era, it was the “Caucus Committee Support and Training Unit”. Howard’s team was the “Government Members’ Secretariat”. Hawke and Keating were less coy; their “National Media Liaison Service” was referred to as the aNiMaLS.

In the later days of the Fraser government, a staffer in every capital city would listen to opposition MPs on radio each day to detect any contradictions in their messaging. This still happens – political staffers will walk around the federal press gallery to hand out printed quotes that highlight, for example, a disagreement over a policy between two senior frontbenchers. But these days, the dirt that has the most impact often comes from trawling MPs’ declarations, political donations, social media histories, and videos or photos taken on smartphones.

Dirt units are not limited to the party in power, although the government of the day has more resources. “It’s a bit of a luxury to have people full-time on that stuff in opposition,” says one former adviser, who worked in opposition research for Labor. “It’s something staff will do across shadow ministers offices. Any full-time people would be in the leader’s office, where there is a bit more flexibility. They usually have vague titles around research, and they’ll probably be doing other things as well.”

Despite being in opposition, former Labor leader Bill Shorten had a renowned research unit. His team’s scalps include former speaker Bronwyn Bishop, who ended up resigning over the Choppergate scandal, and former health minister Sussan Ley, who left the frontbench after purchasing a Gold Coast apartment from a Liberal party donor during a taxpayer-funded work trip. After a time in the wilderness, Ley is back on the front bench.

These operations are turbocharged during an election campaign, when campaign headquarters bring in extra staff. The priority is digging around newly pre-selected candidates. “They’d be doing a deep dive into every single candidate the other side has preselected for any skeletons in the closet,” says the former Labor staffer.

Timing is key. Negative stories about new candidates are usually reserved for the final stages of the campaign, when it’s too late to change course. “The best-case scenario is you force them to bow out, or the party disendorses them, and that will potentially cost a seat,” says the former Labor adviser. A story that drags on for three or four days is “an eternity in an election campaign”. “You’ve lost momentum, it distracts your campaign from what you want to be focusing on.”

MacGowan, whose team helped bring down then-NSW Labor leader Michael Daley in 2019 by surfacing a video where he said “Asians with PhDs” were taking Australians’ jobs, thinks it’s always better to plant stories during the campaign, rather than beforehand, as happened with the story about Dutton’s shares.

“They go out in the morning to a press conference with the message of the day… and if your first question is about a shitty little yarn the dirt unit landed, that’s an enormous problem they’ve got to spend the whole day cleaning up. Time and manpower is all that matters in an election, and you’ve just taken 12 hours and one staffer out of their day,” he says.

But there are also risks for the mud-throwers. They have to be careful not to walk into a trap where they criticise behaviour, only to have an example from their own side thrown back at them. “It’s possible they can snooker themselves by setting a standard,” the former Labor staffer says.

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Such was the case last year, when Albanese came under fire for accepting flight upgrades from Qantas. While that story didn’t come from a dirt unit, Coalition Senator Bridget McKenzie leapt on it to lead the Coalition’s attack, only to realise that she, too, had been lax in declaring flight upgrades. “As soon as a story breaks, the other side is trawling through records to expose they have done it as well,” says the former Labor staffer.

It’s one reason why dirt units want to stay in the shadows – and why this week’s admission by Charlton was rare. But MacGowan doesn’t think the label hurts too much, given the veil is gradually being lifted on these processes anyway. “No one cares where the story comes from, as long as it stands up as true,” he says.