by Julia Baird
The final decision by the ALP to bring Kernot over to the party was made just after the 1997 South Australian elections, when they had polled poorly and the Democrats’ primary vote had soared, largely, they believed, due to Kernot’s leadership. Their election prospects looked grim. National secretary Gary Gray told me: ‘Ultimately my reason for approaching Cheryl was to destroy her as a potential Democrat. To destroy the essential element that was defining the Democrats, that was such a potential danger to the Labor Party.’ Gray pointed out, however, that there were others who wanted her to join the party because ‘she genuinely represented a major break in the political circuit’.
Kernot was a coup for the Labor Party. She was meant to bring credibility, integrity and a female influence. Many believed she could bring them victory in the 1998 election by attracting women from middle-class backgrounds, whom Beazley described as the ‘soccer mums’. Because of this, from this point she became a target for the Coalition. Paul Daley wrote in the Sunday Age: ‘If she has any skeletons [the Coalition] will exhume them.’ They were already rattling the cupboard door. When the first skeleton was dug out and dangled in the press, its bones were picked over for months.
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On 13 December 1997 — just two months after her defection — the Sydney Morning Herald published a profile written by Paul McGeough headed ‘The other side of Saint Cheryl’. This other side, apparently, was saucy, sexy and ruthless, with a scandalous past, the side ‘where ambition and determination lie’. It would be hard to imagine a profile about a male MP revealing his ‘true side’ to be ambitious and determined. It’s hardly surprising for a politician. But then few men in politics are called saints. The most important revelation was buried halfway down the story: her past relationship with the school captain of St Leo’s College, a school the recently seperated Kernot was teaching at in 1975 in leafy Wahroonga, part of the bible belt of Sydney’s North Shore.13 In 1976, she was living in Queensland with the former school captain: they went on to have a five-year relationship. The man’s mother insisted the relationship started when he left school, even if reporters continued to imply it had not. It had happened over 20 years before. Significantly, the story was published on the day Kernot was due to be preselected by Queensland Labor for the seat of Dickson.
An avalanche of stories was to come. Some of the commentary was vicious, much of it gleefully claiming this was proof she was no saint. Victorian premier Jeff Kennett said she deserved it because she had ‘set herself up as an angel’. Conservative columnist Christopher Pearson, then writing for the Australian Financial Review, implied she was a paedophile. ‘Just imagine the outcry,’ he wrote, ‘if the subject had been a male politician rather than the most sanctimonious woman on Capital Hill.’ He wanted to know more: how old was the boy ‘at the crucial moment’? Was it an isolated incident, he asked, or did she have sex with any other boys? ‘Was it a victimless entanglement, a breach of trust or a criminal matter?’ Even if these questions were answered in a ‘relatively reassuring way’, he continued, he doubted ‘that middle Australian parents will take an especially mellow view. However broadminded in theory, many of them understand how destabilising and potentially disastrous for adolescent boys and their families such affairs with manipulative older women can be.’ Her hopes of becoming leader had been dashed by this scandal, and ‘no amount of confected righteous indignation, simpering or wistful head-on-one-side girlishness will altogether make things right, and penitence is not in her repertoire’.14 But according to polls, people were outraged, not by Kernot’s behaviour but the publication of the story.15 Readers wrote indignant letters to the editor, and rushed indignantly to her defence. Tom Uren, a former minister in the Hawke and Whitlam governments, wrote to the Sydney Morning Herald claiming he had ‘never read such a bucket job on a politician in all my years in politics’, and was sickened by the sexual overtones in the article. Fran Kelly told me she believed the publication of the story was ‘outrageous’: ‘What annoyed these blokes was what they saw as the saintliness, preciousness of this woman; there is something in there but it’s hard to tie down. There was no public crime here if she and he are to be believed. The relationship was finished, it was ongoing and happy. The story was trying to say she is not the saint you think she is, but she was at that point a definite political asset for the ALP and a threat to government. I believe this was part of a campaign to diminish her political potency and it worked.’ Still, the story rolled on for weeks. Kernot claims Sinclair’s youngest child was chased at her pre-school, as was his mother at her home.
There are three important things to note about this story. First, it did not come from the press gallery, but from a Sydney journalist. The convention about private lives had largely been observed until that point by the gallery. Laurie Oakes later said he had ‘strong reservations’ about the publication of this story: ‘I couldn’t see how it was relevant to Cheryl’s political role. It didn’t seem to me to go even to character. Had the relationship been with someone who was still a student, I would have seen it differently.’16 Other reporters were also angered by the decision to run the story. Margo Kingston and McGeough, formerly close friends, fell out over it. McGeough said the story was the ‘very enthusiastic’ suggestion of his then editor and editor-in-chief, who had wanted a story on the political gossip surrounding ‘an incident’ when Kernot was at St Leo’s. While he remembers debating the issue with Kingston, he says, ‘In the same way that I would not let a politician dictate what was going into a piece I was reporting, neither would I allow a colleague to do so.’17
Second, the story had been around for months, as many journalists attested. They had been lobbied by senior Liberal figures, including Tony Abbott, to publish it as a way of undermining Labor’s prize asset. Independent MP Graeme Campbell had been asked to raise the matter in parliament but had refused.
Third is that this story was published only after she went to the ALP.18
The critical question is why Kernot’s affair, which was clearly irrelevant to her political career, was revealed when those of her colleagues were not? And why the vehemence of the response?
The Daily Telegraph’s political editor, Malcolm Farr, was at pains to point out to me that the story was not broken by a tabloid newspaper:
It really shits me when people say what a ghastly intrusion on private life, they say those tabloid journalists — and often they say those Murdoch tabloid journalists — when in fact it came out in a Fairfax broadsheet first . . . I would have found it difficult as a journalist to justify writing that and claiming that the public had the right to know that it was something that affected the public duties of Cheryl Kernot . . . There were all sorts of weird justifications for it; there were all sorts of inferences that she might be a paedophile or something. As far as I know there was lots of gossip and hearsay but no evidence that she was bonking this chap when he was at school. I don’t know. Nor do many of the people who wrote columns and great creeds condemning her for whatever happened. Now they lived together afterwards, it’s not the first time an older woman has fallen for a younger man. Then they broke up and I just think it’s a matter for them . . . if we are going to start imposing standards of public morality, I think we’d better find someone else to do that, rather than journalists; that’s not our job at all.
The Sydney Morning Herald’s political commentator, Alan Ramsey, was long emphatic that publication of the story was wrong:
I always thought if it was a bloke, it would never have been written. Blokes fuck around, you know, in their young life, whatever. If we had gone after Tony Abbott and his extraordinary life in the same way and given it the same sort of treatment, and the same sort of presentation, but it doesn’t happen . . . Journalists usually are the last people in the world who can afford to be holier than thou about their bloody personal life or their morals, for God’s sake. I mean, they really do, most of them, have none. And yet they are throwing the stones — but they don’t throw them at the men.
Kernot was still struggling to find her footing within the ALP, and believes the story established a climate of negativity compounded by judgement from some of her colleagues.
After the publication of this schoolboy story — dissected in detail for weeks — Kernot appeared to start feeling the strain. It was a complex entwining of cause and effect: the media dogged her, provoked her, and then leapt on any sign of discomfort and annoyance as a signal of her inability to cope with pressure. At the same time, Labor staffers said, she became obsessed with her own image. Greg Turnbull says he thought to himself after the McGeough story broke, ‘“You are now a shadow minister in a Labor opposition. You either get on with it or you don’t.” But I think part of her subsequent downfall was she kept wanting to chew on the bone of the issue of her privacy and her relationship with the media. And that just got everyone swarming all over her again and again. And she appeared more interested in that than in her shadow portfolio . . . We had about three good days and they were the first three.’
Kernot’s first public snap at journalists was during the ALP annual conference in Hobart in January 1998. On the first night, she heard her husband had almost been killed by a removal truck that smashed into her new home. She was at the airport at 6.00 the next morning, and faced a throng of reporters, telling them wearily, ‘It’s this kind of thing that makes people really get sick and tired of your intrusions into our lives.’ When a female ABC-TV reporter called out, ‘How come your move was organised during the Labor Party conference?’, she turned and said, ‘Are you serious? That is a disgraceful way . . . to treat me in the circumstances.’ At Brisbane airport, she wondered aloud if it had been worth it: ‘You’ve got to ask yourself if it’s worth the cost. I’ve got to ask my family if it’s worth the cost.’ Senior Labor figures were disgruntled. Her words were widely reported, and regarded as evidence she was not tough enough to make it in the big time of politics.
Her response may not have been textbook, but it was understandable. She pointed out that night on ‘The 7.30 Report’ that it was her first outburst in eight years and she was exhausted. She had also been accused of neglecting her family in order to attend the conference. It was a human response. But journalists wondered if she was cracking.19
At this stage, Kernot still largely had public sympathy.20 But complaints about the media were not taken kindly by journalists who had helped build her million-vote profile. Her next slip-up came at the ALP conference. Many reporters were astonished by a reference to her impact on the party in a draft of her otherwise successful speech. In her draft, she wrote: ‘In a way I didn’t expect it to, the earth moved on October 15. A fault line opened up at Kirribilli and now it’s running all the way to the Prime Minister’s office in Canberra.’ This was changed to: ‘In a way I certainly didn’t expect it to, there did seem to be a shift in Australian politics on October the 15th. Now maybe the entire earth didn’t move, but certainly a fault line opened up at Kirribilli and now thanks to Kim Beazley’s leadership, and his decency and his magnanimous nature, that fault line is running all the way to the Prime Minister’s office in Canberra.’21
After seeing the draft version, Laurie Oakes had called Beazley’s adviser, Greg Turnbull, and said it seemed arrogant. She changed the speech, with the help of Evans and Faulkner, but it was too late, journalists had seen the draft and she was criticised for an apparent ego. Kernot then discussed media management with some of the key party figures and was given Mark Nolan, who had been secretary of West Australian Labor, to work with until the election.
In a matter of months, Kernot’s relationship with the media had soured. She stopped talking to journalists. She was under pressure to contain herself emotionally.22 Any time a crisis arose, her disgruntled former Democrats staffers were available to journalists to explain her behaviour — she was often volatile, they explained; she had a nasty, emotional side, was ‘high-maintenance’, and was prone to furious outbursts signalled by ‘that look’. She also made some fairly public gaffes. When, at the conference, she was given responsibility for a ‘project’ policy development on middle-aged unemployed, she twice suggested she would be shadow minister for baby boomers, with unwelcome yuppie connotations. She was contradicted by Beazley twice, adding to suspicions she was uncomfortable in the ALP hierarchy. The Kernot story was now almost pure personality.
The next body blow came a few days later, on 13 March. In parliament, West Australian MP Don Randall accused her of having the morals of an alley cat on heat and suggested — correctly, we later learned — that she was having an affair with Gareth Evans. He was forced to apologise, and was locked out of the Liberal Party convention, but the damage was done. This time, public sympathy was on her side. She became a martyr, and again gained the support of the press for what was widely considered a low act.
Randall had said he wanted to dispel some myths about her before she visited his electorate the following week. After a string of allegations, he raved, ‘She is about as honest as Christopher Skase and Nick Bolkus. She is about as loyal as Benedict Arnold, and she has the morals of an alley cat on heat. I was a teacher and I can assure you that if I had had an affair with somebody ten years younger than me I would have been in trouble. You might then say, does this affection extend for the Member for Holt [Evans], we often wonder?’ Alan Ramsey called it ‘the shabbiest, most cowardly personal attack under the protection of parliamentary privilege in recent memory’.23 Robert Manne, Fairfax columnist and associate professor of politics at La Trobe University, was similarly disgusted. He said he could not recall a ‘more vicious parliamentary slander’, and Randall should be disendorsed. Manne argued Kernot, as the first woman not only to have a serious chance of becoming PM but who represented ‘an idea of a feminised political sphere’, had something ‘which seems to threaten the identity and cultural self-confidence of a certain kind of traditional male’.24 But Gareth Evans, as we later discovered, while refuting Randall’s allegations had lied to parliament to protect his marriage.25
Kernot had now become the scarlet woman. Which is why her decision to allow herself to be photographed in a fancy red and black dress for the Australian Women’s Weekly, sitting on a red bench with a feather boa draped around her shoulders, was such a disaster. The timing was appalling. The image conjured up a host of seductive female figures, including ‘Mae West meets Tilly Devine’ and ‘vampy showboat queen’. Miranda Devine wrote in the Daily Telegraph that it was ‘more wild-west madam than putative prime minister’.26 Kernot completely underestimated the nature and extent of the public and press reactions, in part because their velocity was unprecedented. Had she known what other ‘cover girl’ MPs had experienced over the previous two decades, however, she may have thought twice.
Kernot blamed the Weekly for not warning her which shot they were going to use. She said she was shocked when she saw the photos, but was also defensive: ‘Don’t you think I dress up? Don’t you think I wear evening dresses? Haven’t you ever seen John Howard in a tuxedo? He is often photographed in a tux . . . I am not going to lose sleep over it.’ After her complaints that the media were intrusive, the photos — along with an interview about her ‘dark and disturbing times’ — were not well received. A perceived hypocrisy was at the core of the criticism.
Still, the reaction did seem excessive. Greg Turnbull said he was amazed by ‘some of the utterly humourless and sanctimonious commentary’, and wondered if there was a law which said female politicians could not wear evening gowns. Many commentators said she looked silly, like a tart. Peter Cole-Adams, political editor of the Canberra Times, argued Kernot wanted it both ways: ‘She denounces the media for trivialising her, even as she trivialises herself. She rightly condemns the stereotyping of women politicians while, in this episode, capitalising on the stereotypes.’27 Brian Toohey asked, ‘Are we to believe that Cheryl Kernot does her best policy work dressed in a red duchess satin gown and feather boa?’28
Michael Gordon from the Age came to her def
ence again, and declared that Kernot had become a target since her defection: ‘Now the stream of critical commentary has become a torrent, suggesting a consensus among elite media opinion that Kernot is not only fair game, but that she is no longer to be taken seriously.’ Her real problem was that she was not able to balance such spreads with policy work, and show substance: ‘Having snared one of the most remarkable political catches in memory, Labor had no coherent strategy to put her to work. It seemed content to wing it.’29
The oracle-polls were again consulted and the general public proved to be far less judgemental then the press gallery. A Bulletin–Morgan poll found 60 per cent believed the ‘red dress’ photographs made no difference to Kernot’s credibility as a politician. Asked if these kinds of photographs were good or bad for female politicians’ images, 55 per cent said they made no difference, and 13 per cent were undecided.
By this time, Kernot was clearly depressed and disillusioned. Her profile was flattened, as she campaigned around the country and refused personal interviews. Journalists were describing her as wary, as she cut herself off from many of them for fear of saying the wrong thing — something she later said she regretted.
Commentators howled when they saw the famous photo that led Cheryl Kernot, the ALP’s prize recruit, to be labelled a hussy and a shameless publicity seeker. Australian Women’s Weekly, April 1998. Australian Women’s Weekly
Kernot attributes her private struggle to her feeling of impotency within the ALP, and the lack of intellectual recognition. ‘What had the biggest impact on me psychologically,’ she says, ‘was the dawning realisation that Labor wasn’t going to do anything constructive with me . . . I became completely depressed about it . . . I thought, “What’s the point?” And I was in a marginal seat, which was killing me. It was a 24-hour a day job in a relentlessly scrutinised local electorate where the local Libs were hostile in the [national] press and the local paper all the time. It was like being in hell 24 hours a day.’