by Julia Baird
By the end of the night everyone was very drunk, and she stood in the middle and the journos were around her and ended up walking around her in a circle and doing a ritualistic bowing, like a wave. It was a sendup but also a bit weird. The media had loved her — she was open, she was available . . . [the] impression was given that there were no barriers, she saw us as her friends, we were all working for the same great goal, and so on. Anyway, she walked out and I followed her. She went into her office and did not turn on any lights. It was dark, and she turned on the television and watched herself on the late night TV and asked me my thoughts on how she went. She was in love with her image, she had merged with it. It’s one of the dangers of being open, of transcending the roles assigned . . . [Now] she is a pathetic figure. [But] I loved her ideas, I loved the way she expressed them; she was full of really wonderful ideas.1
The public shaming and stoning of Cheryl Kernot, at one time the nation’s most popular and successful female politician, is an extraordinary, tragic story. Many of us watched the disaster unfolding on television from the cracks between our fingers: her sudden changing of political parties, the red dress, the tendency to blame other people for her mistakes, the way the press simultaneously turned on her like sharks chasing a fish. Her career reads like another cautionary tale: do not cry, do not complain, do not pose in raunchy dresses, do not defer blame for your behaviour to colleagues or hormones, and — above all — do not sleep with your political colleagues.
Today she is both pilloried and pitied, but it is important to remember how huge Kernot was, how bright she shone. She was the dream girl of the press gallery for several years. The accolades poured thick and fast, treacle spreading on newsprint. She was the saint; the rational, no-nonsense negotiator; the ‘attractive blonde’ interviewee. As Democrat leader, she was unaccountable in the way government ministers were, but increasingly wielded some power in the Senate and wreaked some significant changes to key legislation: Mabo, workplace reform, and budgets. She was a serious threat to conservative politics — and hugely successful.
Then, on 15 October 1997, she lobbed a grenade when she announced she was resigning from the Democrats and joining the ALP. Her defection to — or ‘seduction by’ — the ALP proved to be a monumental mistake. But the imagery pumped out from television screens and on the front pages of newspapers was powerful: she did look very pleased, wistful almost, as she smiled and looked skyward while the men on either side of her — Kim Beazley and Gareth Evans — spoke to the astonished media throng. The Labor Party was ecstatic. She was the first in the country’s history to rat to Labor; other defectors — Joseph Cook, Billy Hughes, Joe Lyons — had left the ALP and headed to more conservative parties. John Howard immediately said her move was ‘all about personal ambition’, not principles. It was a risk. As she said in her defection statement, ‘Being a creature of one political culture moving into another, there are no guarantees for me. Perhaps this experiment will fail.’
It did. A year later her credibility was tattered, her Labor colleagues wary, her former Democrats colleagues hostile, and her strength in shreds. Once she was heralded as the woman who could win the election for Labor, the media — goaded by her opponents — sank their teeth into her reputation and shook it, which clearly contributed to what was a very public unravelling of a woman once widely respected. At the end of 1999, she was hospitalised with exhaustion. In the process, she blamed everyone but herself: the leader of the Labor party, Kim Beazley; blokey elements of the party; a male-dominated media; unsupportive staff; an affluent and increasingly Liberal electorate; Liberal opponents who did everything in their power to destroy her. Her anger seemed to warp her judgement as she continued to lay herself bare for the journalists she accused of intruding too far into her life. There is no doubt, however, that she was treated differently from the men who lined the benches on either side of the house as the issue became how she performed in the media, not how she performed in the parliament.
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Throughout the 1990s, Kernot was a star. Former ALP pollster Rod Cameron was still rhapsodic when he talked about her years later: ‘The world was hers for the taking. She was absolutely at the pinnacle for quite some time; she was terrific; she was everything you could hope for.’ At the time of her defection, he described her as the perfect leader: ‘If you had to put together an identikit picture of the ideal political leader in Australia, you would come up with a person who is strong — not in the macho sense but in the sense of having inner strength — [who has] conviction; [is] highly credible and believable; someone who is good-looking but not to the extent of being glamorous; [is] articulate and mediawise and comes across well in the media. You get someone like Cheryl Kernot.’
After entering parliament in 1990, Kernot’s political ascension was smooth and uninterrupted. She gained respect after she extracted some key concessions in the superannuation legislation, slowing the introduction of the ‘superannuation guarantee levy’ and reducing its impact on business. She represented reason and commonsense. The Sunday Telegraph, in excitement characteristic of many papers when a political woman was seen to be competent or influential, declared her ‘SUPERWOMAN’.
Shortly afterwards she became leader, deposing environmental scientist John Coulter, who lacked her charisma and media rapport, and insisted he wanted to appeal to people’s minds with thinking, not the quick grab. Kernot was ambitious, credible and likeable. In her leadership campaign, she had played to her media strengths, saying the Democrats had to think about ‘what their public face should be’, and that the leader should be a woman. Most reporters urged the party to support her. She was ‘mumsy’, a ‘non-militant feminist’, ‘a thinking politician’, effective but feminine: a woman who was ‘as mild as milk, [had] the demeanour of a schoolmistress and a voice not known to rise a decibel above its measured pitch’.
Kernot won 81 per cent of the vote and was welcomed by journalists, many of whom had become personal friends. She was widely praised a few months later for her negotiations over the 1993 Budget, particularly for exacting concessions that were revenue neutral. She recognised that the government had been elected to carry out its agenda, and should be allowed to aim for a deficit, and was respected for it. She won almost $500 million in changes. The Sydney Morning Herald declared it ‘the Kernot budget’. Richard Farmer from the Canberra Times wrote that she ‘looked and sounded like sweet reasonableness itself’, and had ‘emerged as a person of substance’: ‘A new force has arrived in Australian politics. She just looks and sounds so refreshing.’ The core of her ‘absolutely beautiful politics’ was that she had accepted ‘governments should be allowed to govern while reserving the right to look after all the little people’.2 By December, Alan Ramsey wrote that while the media was doing handstands around Bronwyn Bishop as a ‘political curiosity who seeks to be Australia’s first woman prime minister’, Bishop was a bizarre caricature compared to Kernot’s substance, discipline, ‘great commonsense and generosity of spirit’. He concluded: ‘Cheryl Kernot has arrived.’3
Soon, the headlines read: ‘Is this woman Australia’s best politician?’ There appeared to be a consensus in the reportage — she had made a name for herself, made the Democrats relevant, and made the big players of the chief parties take notice. She was also commended for the role she played in negotiating the native title legislation at the end of 1993. As Diana Bagnall wrote in the Bulletin, ‘The press gallery, which is notoriously hard to impress, fell about praising her political skill and maturity.’ The Democrats, now a significant minor party, were polling better than they had for years.
The media hype was so prolonged that other MPs began to call her ‘Saint Cheryl’ and laughed at her ‘halo’. But Kernot deliberately sought to represent honesty and credibility, positing herself as someone who would clean up the muck of the political fray.4 For years she pursued the idea of government accountability and a code of conduct for MPs. She was tough on Ros Kelly over the sports rorts affair, and received
some of the credit for Kelly’s scalp.
With the exception of a few financial commentators, Kernot was not seriously criticised by the press until after the 1996 election, which John Howard won.5 The Democrats doubled their vote, jumping to 11 per cent, after a 5 per cent swing towards them. Kernot began to talk of the Democrats having their own mandate — which meant undermining the Coalition’s claim they had a mandate to implement policies like the sale of Telstra because of a 5.4 per cent swing towards them, the third-largest at a federal election since 1949. Most of the quality press urged her to be responsible, and not compromise the government, which John Howard had promised would deliver policies to the Australian people.6 She still played an important part in negotiations over the industrial relations legislation, extracting more than 170 concessions.7 She was widely praised for having ‘mainstream political skills’. She became friends with Howard, but particularly with industrial relations minister Peter Reith — they were described as a courting couple searching for a relationship of mutual convenience. Kernot and Reith were photographed shaking hands and beaming at each other after their deal on the legislation, which saw sweeping changes to the industrial relations law, scrapping Labor’s unfair dismissal laws and giving greater scope to non-union enterprise agreements. Kernot was often described in old-fashioned romantic terms (until she defected to the ALP, when the terms became more sexual). As early as 1991, Kernot was described as someone the government needed to ‘woo’, ‘court’ or ‘seduce’ in order to ensure the passage of their legislation through the Senate.
When Mal Colston defected from the ALP in late August 1996 and moved to the crossbench as an independent senator, the Democrats lost the balance of power and were instantly diminished. Kernot no longer had enough numbers to ensure the passage of legislation and lost some of her status as a major political player.
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The defining day of Kernot’s political life was 15 October 1997, when she left the Democrats to join the Labor Party (the page one headline of the Daily Telegraph the next day was ‘Cheryl goes into Labor’). Greg Turnbull, then Kim Beazley’s senior media adviser, told me he had never seen political journalists in such a frenzy: ‘The barometer of media demand went higher that day — certainly as high as anything I had known in five years with the prime minister [Paul Keating] and five years with the opposition leader. Every magazine in Australia, every television — ‘Burke’s Backyard’ to ‘Harry the Vet’ everybody wanted Cheryl that day, and every day for the next few weeks . . . it was amazing interest. And that did surprise me. She was attracted to the media like a moth and the media were attracted to her like a swarm of bees: it was extraordinary.’
Kernot was crushed at the media’s response. The worst was to come, but the reports of 16 October marked an instant shift in her media fortunes as she was accused of selfish ambition, betrayal of her staff, hypocrisy about keeping the bastards honest, and general selfinterest. It was at this point that the linchpin of her public image — her honesty and the purity of her ideals — was pulled.
Hyperbole was rife. Shaun Carney wrote in the Age that on that day, ‘Australian politics blew apart.’ Many key commentators wrote that Kernot’s credibility would forever be tainted by the fact that she had abandoned her party to join the bastards (especially as she had been critical of the ALP in the past). The newspapers jumped on her in their editorials. Her ambition was her worst sin, compounded by the fact that she had not informed her colleagues or staffers about her decision. The Sydney Morning Herald slammed the move as an act of treachery, saying she had damaged her party, her own credibility, and let down voters for the sake of personal ambition: ‘There is no doubt that the halo of “Saint Cheryl” . . . has been severely tarnished.’ The Australian, which immediately backed Natasha Stott Despoja as her successor, along with the Sydney Morning Herald, suggested her move had more to do with a grab for power than her antagonism towards the Howard government.8 The Daily Telegraph’s Piers Akerman, who was caustic whenever he wrote about the woman he called ‘Senator Moonbeam’, wondered what good she would be to the ALP: ‘Cheryl Kernot is probably best known for silly dancing on a midday television program, not for her contribution to the political debate.’ Labor voters would be asked to ignore her past criticisms of their party and think of her as a ‘vote-pulling celebrity: a Barbie doll of the ballot box’.9
A few individuals cheered. The Australian’s Paul Kelly applauded her ‘for having the courage to seek executive power. She has chosen to become a serious politician instead of wasting her career as a senate spoiler. That decision is a bonus overall for Australian politics.’ Laurie Oakes praised the way the ‘Queen Rat’ had handled her news conference with ‘extraordinary strength and calm’ and credited her with a fundamental switch in Australian politics, and renewal for the ALP. In a sense, he wrote, ‘it was her coming out as a serious politician’. She would do what it took to win.
Kernot herself has always claimed her decision was primarily intellectual. She told me:
My biggest shock was the conservative agenda of John Howard because I had just happily been going along under a Labor agenda, meeting with the Labor Party to hammer out improvements to things I thought basically were okay to start with — Mabo, all of [that] superannuation stuff, the ’93 budget, and I hadn’t been in parliament under a conservative government . . . [I thought] I can’t just sit here playing negotiator compromiser on things I do not fundamentally believe in . . . I was uncomfortable in my own skin . . . There was this big discord again between those who’d heard my words — those who’d wanted a different agenda from what Labor was offering to the conservatives at that stage, who thought I might bring some of my Democrat agenda to Labor — and what the press were saying. There was a huge disjunct, and so, while they were all writing their formulaic stuff, I was getting thousands of faxes and letters from people.
ABC reporter Fran Kelly was one of the few who said she understood the move — Kernot was a driven ambitious woman who was being courted. Kelly thought: people change and develop, why not move from a minor to a major party? It was a ‘logical ambitious career path’. Kernot also maintained her integrity by relinquishing her senate seat.
Whatever the real reasons for the switch, though, from the point of her defection Kernot was accused, in crude terms, of screwing her way to the Labor Party. The sexual innuendo was rife — and unfortunate in retrospect. The lusty parallels poured forth: she was Labor’s bride they had wooed and seduced, a sex-goddess, Boadicea in bed with Beazley and Evans. One caller to a Canberra radio station asked, ‘Why has the Mother Superior of the parliament decided to become a political harlot?’ The Bulletin headline read: ‘Will the marriage last?’ Senior reporter Peter Bowers, then at the Australian Financial Review, wrote that the Coalition’s charge that she had gone from ‘Wunderfrau to whore’ reflected its panic at her boost to the ALP’s electoral appeal. One journalist, Marion Smith, accused her of ‘dickstroking’, or flirting with men to get to the top, in an extraordinary piece for the Courier-Mail. Smith referred to comments Don Chipp had made about Kernot’s ‘coquettishness’, and added: ‘In the circles of women with attitude, it’s called something rather more crude — “dickstroking”. But, by golly, it works for those women prepared to use it as a tool on their way to the top. Anyone who has seen Kernot twinkling beguilingly through interviews with the mostly middle-aged men of the Canberra press gallery would recognise it.’10
Looking back, knowing Kernot was having an affair with Labor cabinet minister Gareth Evans before and after her defection makes the sexual innuendo seem even more blatant, and the continual references to a seduction, sickening. In the Australian, cartoonist Bill Leak depicted her in bed with Beazley and Evans, asking ‘Now . . . who is going to be on top?’ Evans’s name was sprinkled liberally throughout the news reports of her defection, and he was seen to have played a core role in her move: he suggested it, acted as her sounding board, and was effusive when it was successfully executed. Many journa
lists acknowledged their close friendship. Paul Kelly wrote at the time, ‘The personal bond between Gareth Evans and Ms Kernot was fundamental in her decision.’ In hindsight, some of the reporting was creepy. Mike Seccombe wrote that Evans had played the main part in her seduction:
We use the word advisedly, for Evans described their relationship in almost erotic terms on ABC-TV’s ‘Lateline’ . . . He recounted how he slowly wooed her: ‘It started out with a lot of casual, off-the-cuff, almost wistful exchanges,’ he sighed. And it was consummated, he recounted, after he put the rather raffish proposition: ‘What about it, kiddo, any chance of coming across?’11
While journalists were hesitant, the public response was overwhelmingly favourable. The managing director of the media monitoring group Rehame, Peter Maher, said ‘no issue has generated as much concentrated caller comment since the death of Princess Diana’. The Sunday Telegraph Quadrant poll found 60 per cent approved of her decision, 72 per cent said it was good for Labor, 37 per cent were more likely to vote for Labor, and 60 per cent said they would like to see her become the first woman PM. The front-page headline of the Sunday Telegraph cried, ‘Cheryl for PM!’ Similarly, the Sun-Herald yelped, ‘Voters Back Kernot!’, with a Taverner poll which found that, while 44 per cent thought her reputation as a principled politician had been damaged, Kernot was the most popular choice for Labor leader after Beazley, and Australia’s most popular female politician. Pollster Ian McNair said he could not recall, in 25 years of polling, such a huge swing to a federal opposition in such a short time. Brian Toohey wrote that she may have to become leader if the party was going to truly capitalise on her. Finally, a Bulletin–Morgan poll found a 10.5 per cent swing towards Labor, which would bring them victory if an election were held then.12