OPPOSITION Leader Malcolm Turnbull will not fully cooperate with police investigations into controversial public service leaks.
Mr Turnbull, who earlier promised to assist the police investigation into the fake email at the centre of the OzCar affair, said last night he would co-operate with the probe into the fabrication but not into public service leaking.
"(There) are whole issues of parliamentary privilege here," Mr Turnbull said. "There has never been a case where parliamentarians have assisted governments in trying to trace down leaks from the public service," he told the ABC.
"The only investigation which we've been asked about is the question of the faking or the fabrication of an email. We'll certainly co-operate with that because that is a matter of real concern.
"But if the Government wants to use … the full force of the federal police to silence any public servant from leaking information to the current Opposition, we're not going to be very sympathetic to that".
Cabinet minister Anthony Albanese labelled Mr Turnbull a "reincarnation of Mark Latham" as the Opposition Leader struggles to mount his defence in the row over the fake email.
During a wild question time, Mr Albanese, leader of the House, said a Turnbull Sky TV interview yesterday reminded him of "the ghost of Mark Latham", the former Labor leader now widely on the nose in ALP circles.
"It was all there: the jaw jutting out, all the fake aggression, all the machismo," said Mr Albanese, adding the sting that "cab drivers are nervous", a reference to Mr Latham breaking a taxi driver's arm.
Meanwhile Treasury secretary Ken Henry has sent an email round his stunned departmental staff, to reassure them his thoughts are with them in these extraordinary times, following the discovery of the fake email in the home computer of senior Treasury officer Godwin Grech.
Grech's colleagues have been shocked, first by the fabricated email, purporting to show intervention by a Rudd staffer to help car dealer John Grant, a donor to Mr Rudd, and second by the revelation Mr Grech was a serial leaker to the Liberals.
Mr Turnbull insisted that he had called for Kevin Rudd's resignation on Friday on the basis of Mr Grech's evidence to the Senate inquiry, rather than the fake email.
The Opposition accused the Government of leaking from the Australian Federal Police inquiry into the affair, while the Government rejected Coalition calls for a judicial inquiry.
Mr Turnbull said "one leak after another" had come out about the police investigation.
"Finally, no doubt the federal police were so embarrassed by the way people in Government were leaking it that they put out their own press release. Now I've never heard of a police inquiry being conducted like that."
Liberal frontbencher Tony Abbott said the Government was "using all the agencies of the state as a form of political coercion and intimidation" with moment-to-moment updates of an police investigation.
He accused the Government of "the big lie technique that would (make) Joseph Goebbels proud".
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