Martin Ferguson is proud to describe himself as "an effective representative for the people of Batman" on his website, but there is one constituent issue that has the federal Tourism Minister putting as much distance between himself and the voters involved as possible.

Ferguson has unwittingly been drawn into a scandalous story being peddled about a senior member of the judiciary, which rather awkwardly names him as the source.

The story, which has been running hot on several fathers' rights websites locally and has since been picked up internationally, claims that a senior Australian judge is about to resign over conflict of interest allegations in relation to a case she was presiding over. And with the rumour buzzing around media circles for weeks, Ferguson has finally been forced to write to his errant constituents with a stern reprimand.

"Unless [deleted] issues an immediate retraction of his allegations and this retraction is published on the home page of your website … and circulated to the sites below, I will take legal advice about what recourse I have concerning these matters," he wrote. A frustrated Ferguson told the Diary yesterday he wrote the letter two weeks ago, but has heard nothing back.