The Ralph Willis letter was forged correspondence released by

Australian Labor Party The Australian Labor Party (ALP), also known as the Labor Party or simply Labor, is the major Centre-left politics, centre-left List of political parties in Australia, political party in Australia and one of two Major party, major parties in Po ...

Treasurer A treasurer is a person responsible for the financial operations of a government, business, or other organization. Government The treasury of a country is the department responsible for the country's economy, finance and revenue. The treasure ...

Ralph Willis Ralph Willis AO (born 14 April 1938) is an Australian former politician who served as a Cabinet Minister during the entirety of the Hawke-Keating government from 1983 to 1996, most notably as Treasurer of Australia from 1993 to 1996 and brie ...

in May 1996, in the last week of the

1996 Australian federal election The 1996 Australian federal election was held to determine the members of the 38th Parliament of Australia. It was held on 2 March 1996. All 148 seats of the House of Representatives and 40 seats of the 76-seat Senate were up for election. T ...

. It has been blamed for the crushing defeat of Labor Prime Minister

Paul Keating Paul John Keating (born 18 January 1944) is an Australian former politician and trade unionist who served as the 24th prime minister of Australia from 1991 to 1996. He held office as the leader of the Labor Party (ALP), having previously ser ...

and the ascendancy of the Liberals'

John Howard John Winston Howard (born 26 July 1939) is an Australian former politician who served as the 25th prime minister of Australia from 1996 to 2007. He held office as leader of the Liberal Party of Australia. His eleven-year tenure as prime min ...

. Labor stayed out of power federally until 2007.

Incident

In 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

and Liberal Premier of Victoria,

Jeff Kennett Jeffrey Gibb Kennett (born 2 March 1948) is an Australian former politician who served as the 43rd Premier of Victoria between 1992 and 1999, Leader of the Victorian Liberal Party from 1982 to 1989 and from 1991 to 1999, and the Member for ...

. 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

said. Willis acted unilaterally in releasing the correspondence. He suggested that the letters revealed that the

Coalition government A coalition government, or coalition cabinet, is a government by political parties that enter into a power-sharing arrangement of the executive. Coalition governments usually occur when no single party has achieved an absolute majority after an ...

led by

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 The University of Melbourne (colloquially known as Melbourne University) is a public research university located in Melbourne, Australia. Founded in 1853, it is Australia's second oldest university and the oldest in the state of Victoria. Its ...

Liberal Club students. Keating's Labor government suffered a severe defeat.

Aftermath

After the election, Willis chose to move to the

backbench In Westminster and other parliamentary systems, a backbencher is a member of parliament (MP) or a legislator who occupies no governmental office and is not a frontbench spokesperson in the Opposition, being instead simply a member of t ...

and announced his retirement from Parliament prior to the 1998 election. According to legal gossip sheet ''

Justinian Justinian I (, ; 48214 November 565), also known as Justinian the Great, was Roman emperor from 527 to 565. His reign was marked by the ambitious but only partly realized ''renovatio imperii'', or "restoration of the Empire". This ambition was ...

'' in 2002, leftwing writer

Bob Ellis Robert James Ellis (10 May 1942 – 3 April 2016) was an Australian journalist, screenwriter, playwright, filmmaker, and political commentator. He lived in Sydney with author and screenwriter Anne Brooksbank; they had three children. Early ye ...

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". In 2019, the Saturday Paper reported that the forgery was the work of university students.

Nicola Gobbo Nicola Maree Gobbo, sometimes known as Nikki Gobbo, (born 16 November 1972) is an Australian former criminal defence barrister and police informant. Drug charge at law school In 1993, while she was a law student, police raided a house owned b ...

, later to be known as

Lawyer X Nicola Maree Gobbo, sometimes known as Nikki Gobbo, (born 16 November 1972) is an Australian former criminal defence barrister and police informant. Drug charge at law school In 1993, while she was a law student, police raided a house owned b ...

, 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 A senate is a deliberative assembly, often the upper house or chamber of a bicameral legislature. The name comes from the ancient Roman Senate (Latin: ''Senatus''), so-called as an assembly of the senior (Latin: ''senex'' meaning "the el ...

president Scott Ryan, who had intended for the forgery to pass initial inspection then rebound on Labor. Gobbo backed up her story with a

statutory declaration A statutory declaration is a legal document defined under the law of certain Commonwealth nations and in the United States. It is similar to a statement made under oath, but it is not sworn. Statutory declarations are commonly used to allow a per ...

, but Ryan denied the claim.

References

{{reflist Document forgeries March 1996 in Australia History of the Australian Labor Party

Incident

Aftermath

See also

References