New verb: "to verbal"

Both the examples you've given support this definition from Wiktionary

Noun

verballing (uncountable)

1.The putting of damaging remarks into the mouths of suspects during police interrogation

In the Leake case, Dawkins insists that Leake put words into his mouth, i.e. misquoted him greatly.

I wonder if this has originated or is common usage in Australia as you've given an SMH(Sydney Morning Herald) example and another example I find here which states

The next day Labor's John Faulkner takes Costello's words and puts them in Howard's mouth

and more examples here and here from Australian media articles. One of them defines it thus

Here in the free world we have strong laws to protect criminal suspects from confessions which are obtained by ‘verballing‘ that is, off-the-record threats, intimidation or physical violence being used by the police to elicit incriminating statements from a suspect.

I can't recall ever hearing it, but the verb verbal is in the OED:

colloquial transitive To attribute a damaging statement to (an accused or suspected person). Also const. up.

Their first quotation is from The Times (London) of 1963:

Those chaps were about and they won't be able to verbal me.

The three later quotations are all in a police context, and one is from a Brisbane, Australia newspaper.