It is the oldest PR mistake in the book — and possibly the last thing an already weakened Labor Party ally needs.
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Labor-aligned federal government lobbying firm Hawker Britton has accidentally revealed its contacts database in an email sent on Thursday afternoon.
The message was sent to to more than 1000 email addresses, all visible to anyone who received the message. Among the addresses on the email, titled Occasional Paper at the Australian Labor Party 47th National Conference, are names of prominent Liberal politicians, corporate leaders, journalists and legal heads.
Co-founded by political strategist Bruce Hawker and former Labor staffer Simon Banks, the firm is one of the largest governmental lobbyists, with scores of national and international clients across industry and finance.
Compounding the embarrassing leak, the error was exposed on Twitter by BuzzFeed's Mark Di Stefano, where the tweeted image of the correspondence and its contacts list is legible.
Speaking from the annual Labor conference, Mr Banks said the error was regrettable but that the leaked contacts represented "only a very small part of the overall list that we have".
He added that the firm has had only a "small number" of complaints about the privacy breach.
"We obviously apologise if anyone is in the slightest way upset. It's a human error, we don't want them to occur, but sometimes they do."
In its code of ethics, the firm states that Hawker Britton consultants will "respect the confidence of our clients and not reveal confidential or privileged information obtained during the professional relationship".
Chris Gatford director of Hacklabs IT security company said the common mistake was "never a good look" and that the data was likely to be of value.
"I'm sure it will be useful to somebody. Human weaknesses are always the easiest way for people to gain access to information they don't already have."
