by Julia Baird
The fact that Kernot was struggling was stark on the night of the 1998 election. It was unclear if she had won her seat, and she was tired and angry. Asked in an interview with ABC-TV if she regretted not holding out for a safe seat, Kernot replied bitterly: ‘I’ll just say this: Mary Delahunty is in parliament. I’ll let everybody decode that.’ In other words, a safe seat had been found for another high-profile candidate, former ABC-TV reporter Mary Delahunty, in Victoria, while she was struggling in a marginal seat. Again, the Labor Party collectively groaned. Her constituents were angry, too. Earlier in the interview Kernot had also blamed the possible loss of Dickson on ‘the demographics of the seat and maybe those who chose it for me not fully appreciating that’. Former party secretary Bob Hogg said she had ‘burnt her bridges’ with the ALP, although other senior figures denied this. Journalists were quick to point out she’d said she had insisted on a marginal seat so she could prove herself to the ALP.
Three days later, Kernot apologised for her comments, saying she deeply regretted them.30 Her remarks had been widely condemned as a dummy spit, although there were two men who were also credited with dummy spits on the same night: Gareth Evans, who said he would be resigning if Labor lost, and Mark Latham, who resigned from the front bench because he said he felt excluded from policy development. They were all criticised. After two weeks of counting, Kernot finally claimed victory in her seat — by only 176 votes. She was appointed spokeswoman on regional development, infrastructure, transport and regional services, but she failed to make an impact as a shadow minister. She survived two more years, losing her seat in the 2001 election with a 7.3 per cent swing against her. Kernot said there were many reasons for her defeat, and ‘they’re not all called Cheryl Kernot’. She retired, bruised and exhausted, planning to write a book about her experiences.
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Over time, Kernot lost many supporters, and, because of her erratic behaviour, people now scoff at the suggestion her gender played any part in her bumpy slide to the bottom of the political heap. As Christine Wallace says:
Cheryl was on a suicide mission the minute she went to the Labor Party. Her completely obsessed behaviour and her need, Germaine Greer-like, to play out her internal psychic drama on a public stage were a tragedy to watch unfold . . . once she started spinning out, it was impossible to stop. She was the author of her own downfall despite tremendous efforts behind the scenes to help her, prop her up and make every post a winner. So I just don’t buy the blokes-did-in-Cheryl argument; I think it’s complete bullshit. The fact is, behind the scenes, a lot of the women who were trying to help Cheryl would say candidly to each other ‘she’s a dud’, she used to be great but she’s lost it now, it’s a matter of damage control and trying to paper things together.
The ALP didn’t seem to handle Kernot brilliantly; she needed more staff, minders and sound advice. She also should have had a safe seat, and access to the inner circle. When she defected, someone anonymously sent her a black condom, ‘for use when the Labor Party fucks you over’. But many people in the ALP — politicians, staffers and the executive alike — had worked hard to try to give her the support she needed. The Labor Party spent an estimated $650,000 on ‘Project Cheryl’, largely on salaries, removal costs, a car, and other incidentals in the year after she had resigned from parliament and before the 1998 election. With the enemies she had in the party, however, and her reluctance to network, it was not enough. Former national secretary Gary Gray says, ‘I spent an absolute fortune trying to make it a success and I am convinced that if she hadn’t been undermined by people in the ALP that she would have been a success and we would have won in 1998.’
Kernot was brilliant when she feminised the public sphere in a positive way, when she was on a high and tried to usher in honesty, accountability, transparency, and accessibility. These are not inherently female traits, but by refusing to play to some of the male conventions of closed doors and media spin, her approach was heralded as a refreshing breakthrough. But when she represented meltdown, failure, and loss of control, her defence on the grounds of gender — a male-dominated media — failed because of her own culpability. Even though she was judged harshly, it is simply wrong to blame men — in politics or the media — for bad decisions, churlish behaviour and poorly handled public appearances.
At the same time, Kernot was under pressure most of us can barely imagine, and was right to argue that sometimes the scrutiny on high-profile MPs is unbearable. Mike Seccombe told me he could not remember ‘any politician ever being subject to that sort of thing’. Who would not struggle under that kind of strain? Dennis Shanahan believes ‘it was pretty clear she was cracking up in a psychological way, there’s no doubt about that’. Nor should anyone underestimate how much some parts of the media hated her. As Robert Macklin wrote in the Canberra Times on 24 October 1998, there was ‘a substantial segment of the media who cannot speak her name without fashioning a sneer’. She told one reporter, ‘I can’t guess what motivates some people to froth at the mouth at the thought of my existence.’
It was not that Kernot was grilled, scrutinised and criticised for an ill-considered — but understandable — move to the ALP that was surprising. What was unnerving to observe was the level of hostility towards her. Greg Turnbull attributes it to the ‘wounded antelope’ syndrome: ‘If you are up on the echelon of this political game where you attract attention, you are fair game, and if there’s a wounded one who drops around the back, the lions will get you, and they got her.’ She was loathed and widely dismissed as a whinger. In the Herald’s Sydney office, some people would hiss and boo at the television screens perched high above the news desk when she appeared — particularly when she was perceived to be complaining one time too many. She seemed to inspire a level of hatred or opposition that is rare. Part of the reason was that journalists despise people who depend on good relations with journalists to cultivate a solid and trustworthy profile, then proceed to complain about media attention; or who lay their souls bare, then complain of intrusion. Turnbull, who was on constant damage-control duty for Kernot, said she ‘liked nothing more than talking about and analysing the media and its relationship to her. When you go public demanding privacy from the media, it’s kind of a contradiction in terms. And also, if you don’t want public intrusion into your private life, get out of the game. Get out of the game.’
Eventually Kernot was caught in a cycle she could not control. As the opposition spokeswoman for health, Julia Gillard put it:
I think it was easy for those women to get sucked into the golden girl vortex where the media decide they’re the next big thing, [and] the reporting quickly changes from what they do to who they are. The feminist movement, women in the party for a whole lot of absolutely good-hearted reasons are so happy to see a woman achieving that that they are pretty keen to hold the pedestal aloft and make it even higher. So they are actually adding to the golden girl vortex themselves. And it feeds a cycle where the news becomes not what these professional women politicians do — do they ask good questions in Question Time? Do they release a good policy? — but who they are, and then once you are in that cycle, even though the media has been the driver of the start of the cycle, the media then uses that as a justification for getting into a whole lot of personality-based inquiries, and at the end of the day a whole lot of personality-based criticism. So the issue about Cheryl Kernot became not whether or not she was good at what she did, which should be the test for all of us . . . the test for Cheryl became whether people liked her or not.
While all of this was going on, Kernot was voted the most influential woman in Australia in a NSW Chamber of Commerce poll. This again confirmed Kernot’s belief that there was a strong dissonance between the views of the press gallery and the public. Political analysts believed Kernot added between 5 and 10 per cent to her party’s vote in that year’s election. Sue Williams, writing in the Sun-Herald at the end of November 1998, reported that internal party polling showed Kernot’s approval rat
ing was just as high as when she was leader of the Democrats. But she was avoiding journalists, and speaking to an ever-shrinking group of them. Tony Wright, then at the Age, described her as guarded: ‘It is no longer possible to imagine her leaping on a table at her birthday party, as she did a few years ago for the television cameras, and belting out a version of “It’s My Party (And I’ll Cry If I Want To)”.’31 When it was no longer her party, she was certainly not allowed to cry when she wanted to, if at all.
CHAPTER NINE
Sex and the ‘Stiff-Dick Syndrome’
It was a regrettable fact that disgraced females found ‘their character is utterly gone, may never be retrieved’, whereas disgraced males ‘after many errors, may reform and be admitted into that same society and meet with a cordial reception as before’ — but there it was, nature’s way . . .
— Siân Rees, The Floating Brothel: The Extraordinary Story of the Lady Julian and Its Cargo of Female Convicts Bound for Botany Bay
Australians go for the underdog and now she’s the underbitch, isn’t she?
— John Laws, 4 July 2002
It was 29 June 2002 and Kathy Bail, feminist author and deputy editor of the Bulletin, was driving down the road from Sydney to Canberra. She was carrying with her an advance copy of Cheryl Kernot’s book Speaking for Myself Again, for delivery to the house of Australia’s most influential political reporter, Laurie Oakes. A large man, with a phlegmatic, authoritative style, Oakes was Channel Nine’s political editor and a columnist for the Bulletin and broke some of the biggest stories in our political history. In 1974, one of his stories prompted an election (after he revealed that Gough Whitlam was planning to appoint a Democratic Labor Party senator, Vince Gair, as ambassador to Ireland in order to change the composition of the Senate). In 1980, he had an entire budget leaked to him.
HarperCollins publicist Christine Farmer said Oakes had spent the previous day charming and cajoling her in an attempt to get a copy of the book, which Kernot had insisted all journalists should receive at the same time: on Sunday, the day before the launch. Farmer said he maintained he needed time to read it before writing his column for the Bulletin on Monday. She wavered as Kernot insisted he not receive an early copy. ‘I just didn’t want any journo’s spin in the first 48 hours,’ Kernot said. But Oakes persisted, Bail agreed to sign a confidentiality agreement, and Farmer caved in.1
Bail, who said the first question in their minds was whether Kernot had spilled the details of an extramarital affair in what had been promised to be a ‘tell-all book’, delivered the book to Oakes on Saturday night. Kernot had not. As Oakes read through the book over a cold Canberra weekend, on his mind was the smoking gun in his possession: leaked emails that proved Cheryl Kernot had had a five-year relationship with senior Labor minister Gareth Evans.
On Monday morning, as Baptist minister Tim Costello launched Kernot’s book at the Sofitel in Melbourne, Oakes sat down to write his column at his office in Parliament House. Farmer told me that the launch had a strange vibe in the air; that the publishers felt nervous, and were surprised by some of the hostile questioning from the gathered media throng: ‘We didn’t get that warm fuzzy feeling about a book launch. It was pointed and political, people sizing each other up in the room. There was an air of aggressiveness about it at the time . . . The Beazley launch was warm and fuzzy; the Hayden launch was warm and fuzzy, all matey, even though he had a few paybacks in the book.’ Following the launch, Kernot spent time with her friends after sending her daughter to the airport. In Canberra, Oakes went for lunch with his longstanding friend, Kim Beazley’s former chief of staff, Michael Costello.2
On Tuesday, Kernot was back in Sydney doing a round of interviews on radio and television. That night, fax machines in the major newspaper bureaus in Canberra started whirring as a press release from the Bulletin came through, along with a copy of the Oakes column. Alan Ramsey wrote, ‘Nobody I’m aware of took it up, though they all knew instantly what cat Oakes was belling.’3 Kernot was in the car with Farmer when a HarperCollins staffer called to tell her about Oakes’s column. Kernot said she was genuinely surprised: ‘Having told Gareth that I wouldn’t be referring to it, and having discussed it with others, I had decided not to refer to the relationship in the book, one of the main reasons being that I would have to have exposed Gareth’s lie to parliament to placate his wife. I really didn’t count on Laurie’s demonic zeal.’
On 3 July, as Kernot rose early in her room at the Sydney InterContinental Hotel for another day of interviews, copies of the Bulletin were being delivered to newsstands. Both Kernot and Evans had left politics, and it was more than three years since the affair had ended, but the trigger for the column was the book, which Oakes said should have been called Making Excuses for Myself Again. He slammed her for failing to tell Australia about her extramarital affair in the account of her political demise, writing:
For a long time now, some members of the Fourth Estate have been aware of the biggest secret in Kernot’s life. If made public, it would cause a lot of people to view her defection from the Australian Democrats to the Labor Party in a different light. It helps to explain some of her erratic behaviour. It was a key factor in the erosion of her emotional and physical health that contributed to her political disintegration. It even caused a lie to be told to the parliament — not by Kernot, but by a colleague. But it was also personal, so as far as the media was concerned it was treated as out of bounds.
While it is one thing for journalists to stay away from such a matter, however, it is quite another for Kernot herself to pretend it does not exist when she pens what purports to be the true story of her ill-fated change of party allegiance. An honest book would have included it. If Kernot felt the subject was too private to be broached, there should have been no book, because the secret was pivotal to what happened to her. Had Kim Beazley, John Faulkner and other ALP leading lights been aware of it when then-deputy leader Gareth Evans proposed bringing Kernot into the Labor fold, they would have thought twice about the idea and probably said ‘no’. Without the distraction and distress it caused Kernot at crucial times, she would certainly have been a less flaky and more effective shadow minister. To white out such a major element results in serious distortion.
Oakes wrote that Kernot’s expectations of the role she should have had in the Labor Party were ‘ridiculous’. She had proved to be ‘unable to properly handle the responsibilities she was given. But basically, she couldn’t stand the heat so the voters of Dickson showed her the kitchen door.’ This, for a woman who Oakes said in 1998 had ‘the kind of credibility that most politicians can only dream about’.4 Oakes didn’t say what the ‘secret’ was — something he said he later regretted, as withholding the information seemed too cynical and calculated a move when he revealed it later that night on Channel Nine. He said he had wanted to goad Kernot into baring her secret instead, but she refused to say what it was, making light of it on the ‘Sunrise’ program that morning: ‘There is no big, deep, dark secret. I don’t have any comment on that particular article. [The secret] could be that I’ve got flabby arms.’
Titillated by the fact that the relationship had been hinted at but not fully disclosed, by 11.00 a.m. former political staffer and business journalist Stephen Mayne, operator of the political and media gossip website Crikey.com.au, had leapt into cyberspace. In an email to his then 3600 subscribers, Mayne wrote: ‘Crikey only regarded it as an unsubstantiated rumour but Oakes has come out and effectively said, “Gareth and Cheryl had an affair, which was pivotal to her defection and subsequent political failure.”’ Mayne was the first to refer to the affair, insisting, ‘Oakes should have gone all the way and actually spelled out what it was.’
A few hours later, Oakes led the Nine Network’s 6.00 p.m. news with the claim that Evans and Kernot had had a ‘grand consuming’ affair for five years. He said he had solid evidence of the affair: emails between the two. In one, Evans admitted lying to parliament about having the affair to prot
ect his marriage, saying he could not yet ‘live with the consequences of that revelation’. Then, demonstrating the story was, almost immediately, as much about Oakes as about Kernot and Evans, Oakes was interviewed on ‘A Current Affair’, to discuss the ‘steamy affair’ which he said he had uncovered ‘some years ago’. He told the television cameras he had worried and thought very carefully about it, but could not allow a ‘false version’ of ‘something that was important to political events of this country’ to be out there. Oakes denied it had been calculated for maximum publicity for the Bulletin or Channel Nine, but conceded his staggered disclosure had not been the most appropriate way to handle it. He said he had wrestled, worried and agonised — and that there was no ‘right’ decision. Kernot was still being driven around by Farmer when Farmer’s assistant called and said Oakes had spoken in full about the affair on Channel Nine, and that they had asked for a transcript. Kernot said her reaction was ‘fatalistically calm’: ‘So the bastard’s still pursuing me . . . when I’ve been out of parliament for eight months.’ When opposition leader Simon Crean, then in London, strangely demanded that Evans and Kernot give a full explanation, the story was guaranteed front-page status in every major newspaper.
Throughout Cheryl Kernot’s career, a chasm had yawned between the views of the press and the usually more tolerant public. At no time was this greater. On 4 July, according to media monitor Rehame, 85 per cent of radio talkback calls opposed Oakes’s actions to break the story.5 In the words of the Australian Financial Review’s chief political correspondent, Laura Tingle, ‘Most people were just saying “yuk”.’ SBS, which refused to touch the story, received numerous calls of congratulation.