Who dun it?

In the IT and political industries, there is only one topic of conversation. Who leaked the Cabinet Paper to Telecom? I’ve heard around six different “well-sourced” suggestions.

Dr Cullen ruled himself out yesterday making the obvious point that as the announcement was meant to be the highlight of his budget, he should be last on anyone’s lists. He has ruled out his staff, as has David Cunliffe.

The HOS points out Helen Clark has refused to rule out the leak coming from her office. This might possibly be connected to the fact that one of her former senior staff has been working for Telecom as a lobbyist on this issue. Mind you, the person concerned is the last one I would expect to be involved in something like this.

We know it was deliberate, as the leak wasn’t by e-mail – ie an accidental mistyping of a name. We also know MED is ruled out as they did not have the memo from the Minister which was with the paper.

The SSC inquiry needs to identify the leaker quite quickly or pressure will continue to mount for the inquiry to be upgraded to either a select committee or commission of inquiry which has the power to force people to testify etc and subpoena documents.

Juha Saarinen also explains in the article that his blog post predicting a decision next week and that it would include unbundling was based on educated guesswork, not a single specific source. I had been convinced for several months that unbundling was definitely going to happen, and there was general speculation that Cabinet was at the decision making phase so this wasn’t an out of left field guess from Juha.

There is also a big difference between hearing a rumour that an option may be in or out, and the actual leak of the full cabinet paper. The former is common, the latter unheard of.