We know this because the Prime Minister told us so on Wednesday.

Tony Abbott, we learn, was pumping out metadata when he was a journalist years before journalists used the internet. Credit:Alex Ellinghausen

"In the days when I was a journalist," he revealed to seekers of truth, "there were no metadata protections for journalists and if any agency, including the RSPCA or the local council, had wanted my metadata, they could have just gone and got it on authorisation. Look, I was perfectly comfortable as a journalist."

Mr Abbott was a journalist in the second half of the 1980s. He quit the craft in 1990.

The first commercially available internet web browser, Netscape Navigator, appeared in 1994. Internet Explorer appeared in 1995. And even then, a computer with access to the internet was scarcer in the Australian news industry than a sober lunch.