by Julia Baird
Oakes’s decision to expose the affair was dissected for weeks. Journalists were divided. In newspaper offices outside Canberra, there seemed to be general approval for what he did. Most of the journalists I knew thought Kernot was fair game simply by virtue of having written a book. In the nation’s capital, however, many powerful journalists, especially those who had for decades respected the convention on not writing about politicians’ personal lives, raged. Ramsey called it ‘the cheapest, grubbiest cheap shot of all’. The Australian Financial Review’s political editor, Tony Walker, said the story could not be justified on public interest grounds, and that it was a case of the media manipulating the media: ‘Anyone is entitled to seek to correct a record they believe might be blemished; journalists can hardly argue otherwise. But should a reporter in a privileged position set him or herself up as judge, jury and executioner in such matters? I think not.’ Oakes, who insisted he was not a ‘muckraker’, and that these were exceptional circumstances, did have some support from his colleagues, including the Australian’s political editor, Dennis Shanahan, and conservative commentators Piers Akerman and Andrew Bolt. The argument centred on whether or not a private matter impacted the performance of public duties.
Australian columnist Glenn Milne said both sides of politics agreed the affair had ‘absolutely no effect on contemporary politics’. Laura Tingle wrote, ‘Most in the Labor Party do not believe the fact that Kernot and Evans were involved materially changed the party’s fortunes.’
But Michelle Grattan believed Kernot’s ‘private situation affected her political conduct — her decision to switch parties and why it ended in tears — and she omits this from an account that lashes out at many people’. Grattan told me she had thought at the time Kernot changed parties that her decision must have been driven by a relationship with Evans, because it was so strange, to move from a position of power to an unfamiliar, possibly hostile political culture: ‘I thought at the time . . . that this was the only explanation for one doing this, for this behaviour. I didn’t buy her intellectual justification. I thought the influence brought to bear on her had to be other than the Howard government. If she wanted to be a major player she would have been better to stay the balance of power player . . . It was also the way that she did it, the way that she eloped politically; it was like she was under the sway of someone.’ Who can judge?
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So what exactly is the convention about politicians and their private lives? It had been described in the same way for decades, but occasionally broken for different, often subjective reasons. Historically, it has meant that journalists pride themselves on not reporting the sexual liaisons or ‘indiscretions’ of politicians, including affairs, alcoholism, and broken marriages, in the belief that personal affairs should not spill into the public domain unless there is a significant public interest. The convention has long been used to protect men who cheat on their wives, attempt to seduce journalists, sexually assault or harass women, drink heavily, or take drugs. It appears an underlying assumption has been that when men do these things, the way they think or work is not affected — that politics remains untainted by their personal predilections, the distractions of lust and rejection, the heartache of relationship break-ups, the struggle with addictions. Men can, apparently, separate work and play, their loins disconnected from their brains. Nick Greiner, who was NSW premier from 1988 to 1992, wrote in 1993 that ‘Australian journalists go out of their way to avoid attacking politicians’ personal lives — unlike their counterparts in the US, UK and elsewhere. One can philander, get drunk, gamble to excess and be treated with sensitive ignore.’6 In 2001, Laurie Oakes said private lives were still off limits ‘almost entirely, unless it’s something directly relevant to the way politicians do their job’.7 Which means the onus is on the journalist to prove the revelation or story affected the way that politician did their job. When I spoke to him again in 2004, Oakes told me he would add to his proviso: ‘or to why political events occur’.
The convention is still largely intact, and has been eroded only gradually and with great reluctance on the part of most journalists, who have decried any moves towards a more tabloid, American style of political reporting. Underpinning their reluctance is a fear that once someone throws stones, rocks will be thrown back, and politics will be nastier for it. A belief that on the one hand people are flawed and human, and may make brilliant politicians but lousy husbands or wives, and on the other expecting all politicians to be personally pious and flawless is unrealistic and unrepresentative.
But it is now clear that the group this convention has mostly protected is men.
In the mid-1970s, at the time the press was daily dogging the heels of the Whitlam government, innuendo that emerged in news reports was not to do with female politicians but with glamorous young female staffers, or ‘supergirls’, thought to be turning the heads of the men they worked for. Stories were written ridiculing Liberal prime minister John Gorton when he took a 19-year-old female journalist to top-secret briefings at the US embassy in Canberra after the press gallery’s annual dinner. There was ongoing speculation about his appointment of a woman in her early 20s, Ainslie Gotto, as his principal private secretary, considered to be attractive to reporters. The press also salivated over the relationship of Whitlam minister Jim Cairns and his principal private secretary, Junie Morosi — but not only was that relationship current at the time, both parties spoke of a ‘kind of love’ for each other, fanning the rumours. Many words were written about her ‘exotic’ (read: Asian) looks. After successfully suing newspapers that suggested their relationship was sexual, Cairns admitted many years later in 2002 on ABC Radio that it was true.
The first time the convention was broken for a female politician was in 1976 when Mungo MacCallum alleged in the Nation Review that federal social security minister Margaret Guilfoyle was having an affair with colleague Jim Killen. The front cover read ‘The Romantic Ministers’, and featured a cartoon by Michael Leunig of a man and woman walking hand in hand through the rose garden, as it was alleged Guilfoyle and Killen had done at Parliament House. MacCallum wrote that fears of a divorce had caused Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser to warn them he would not appreciate a public scandal, which in turn provoked a question to be asked in parliament. MacCallum defended his decision to break the story on the grounds of hypocrisy:
No one objects to a little public hypocrisy from politicians, but when you have a Social Security Minister lauding the virtues of the nuclear family for page after page of the women’s magazines, and defending a policy which says that men and women — particularly women — should lose their pension rights if they live in the same house, and then strolling around the parliamentary rose garden hand in hand with one of her colleagues — well it gets a bit much.8
After MacCallum broke ranks, few followed his lead as they were to do years later for Kernot. There was only one article that reported the story, in the tabloid newspaper the Sun, which splashed it on the front page under the headline ‘“Cabinet Ministers’ Romance” Story’, and claimed the government was concerned.9 Guilfoyle refused to comment.
The second was in 1991, when a relationship Democrat leader Janet Powell had with a colleague emerged in the press during a bitter leadership battle. The initial charges against Powell were that she had failed to consult on some policy matters and that she had a low profile. On 20 August, some journalists reported Powell had been ousted in a party room coup amid claims she was a victim of innuendo about her private life.10 Tasmanian Senator Robert Bell implied that some kind of ‘scandal’ was involved, and that Victorian Democrats senator Sid Spindler had become the ‘defacto deputy leader’ of the party. He also referred to a relationship between Powell and Spindler.
Powell then confirmed the relationship. The story was given prominence for several days. Many reporters regretted this, and told readers so. Tony Wright from the Canberra Times wrote that several Democrats senators had told reporters in off-the-record chats that Powell’
s relationship with Spindler had affected her performance. The information was ‘so solid and so persistent’ that some had considered reporting it when the first tensions emerged. ‘But we all decided to abide by the tradition that stories of a politician’s personal relationships were not part of the Australian political reporter’s repertoire. Once you go down that path, many issues would become very clouded indeed. All of us know sexual adventures involving politicians, but the tradition has — by and large — held.’ The Sydney Morning Herald’s Mike Seccombe claimed that because Australian politics was unused to muckraking, ‘the sympathy went all Powell’s way’. But senior political journalist Michelle Grattan believed the same thing would have happened to then prime minister Paul Keating if he’d had an affair with a female member of cabinet: ‘I just think that if you have an affair with someone who is in your party, you’re asking for trouble.’11
Powell defended herself on the grounds that it was not an affair but a long-term relationship that had ended several months previously, and argued that it had not interfered with her leadership. She blamed her colleagues, and pointed out that she had been attacked while Spindler had not.
Press gallery journalists claim Cheryl Kernot was one of the group of women backgrounding them and using the affair to destabilise Powell. Kernot denied it, holding a press conference with Meg Lees to insist they had never publicly discussed Powell’s personal life. However, they produced a press release which listed a ‘range of concerns’ about Powell, including ‘impingements of aspects of private life on party professional judgement’. Powell remained bitter about the incident, telling journalists later that she blamed Kernot for the story, and that Kernot could ask for no sympathy if her own private life were pawed over.
Party politics is grubby and ruthless. Many politicans will use whatever dirt they can against their enemies, including sexual preferences, the presence or absence of children, and custody disputes. Women do not shy from this. These rumours — many of which are grossly exaggerated, unfair and wrong — abound in parliaments and press galleries, and always have. It is then just a case of finding a reporter willing to risk the scorn of his or her colleagues for writing it. Many journalists sympathise with those attacked about their private lives. By the mid-2000s, when one of the tempted media pack broke ranks, he or she was often castigated by opinion leaders — but floods of stories still followed.
Most scandals about male politicians have been brought into the public eye by disgruntled ex-wives or family members, not journalists. One exception occurred in 1995, when journalist Margo Kingston reported that an apprehended violence order had been taken out against West Australian Liberal Noel Crichton-Browne by his wife, Esther, in 1989 after an alleged assault at their home. The order alleged he had beaten her so badly that her eyes were black, an eardrum was perforated, and her neck severely bruised. The court restrained Crichton-Browne from causing ‘personal injury’ to his wife, and behaving ‘in an offensive or provocative manner’ towards her. The AVO was later withdrawn, but the story emerged several years afterwards during a nasty Senate preselection contest in Western Australia, when documents were sent to preselection delegates as well as some Liberal MPs by Crichton-Browne’s enemies.
In the Sunday Age, Michael Bachelard claimed the Perth Daily News had had a copy of the restraining order at the time it was issued, but decided against reporting it. Not so in 1995. Crichton-Browne was forced to resign his position as representative of then opposition leader John Howard on the West Australian Liberal executive, and then as deputy president of the Senate. He was also banned from Liberal Party meetings in Canberra. He said he was deeply ashamed of the incident, then inflamed the story by threatening a female journalist that he would ‘screw [her] tits off’.
There has been one story similar to that of Kernot’s past relationship with a student, involving Tony Abbott, who was a senior Liberal and former trainee Catholic priest. The story was that Abbott impregnated his then girlfriend at university and gave the child up for adoption. The man who first carefully aired this story was a friend of Abbott, and the same columnist who attacked Kernot so viciously for her past relationship: Christopher Pearson. He wrote a story for the Courier-Mail in April 1997 decrying poisonous stories which he said had spread about Abbott: ‘Most concerned a girlfriend with whom he was said to have fathered a child before fleeing the country, denying paternity. In fact . . . there was a longstanding girlfriend in his first year at Sydney University and an unplanned pregnancy. [Abbott] says about it: “We thought of getting married but, in the end, we decided we were too young and the baby was adopted out.”’12 Pearson knew Abbott well, and the story was clearly deliberately released to prevent someone else breaking it as a ‘scoop’, as well as to correct any wilder versions that had been circulating.
Abbott was not criticised for his actions, aside from the odd letter, and there was little follow-up. There were no stories, for example, about journalists trying to hunt down the woman or the child involved, unlike those who tracked down Kernot’s former lover, his mother and even his child at school. However, Labor MP Mark Latham attempted to resuscitate the story several times to damage his political foe. In March 2002, he told the parliament, ‘There is a convention in this place that members shouldn’t drag each other’s families into parliamentary debate. I respect and admire parents like [former deputy PM] Frank Crean . . . they have always raised their children and protected their genes, rather than giving them away.’ Latham brought it up in parliament and at conferences in 2002, but was strongly criticised for the attacks.13 Abbott retaliated the next year, when Latham’s first wife emerged after his leadership win to tell journalists he was a nasty, self-serving narcissist. Abbott called him ‘brutal’ in the house.
The final stretch of this story was genuinely astonishing. The child was identified as an ABC sound recordist, and Abbott was publicly and privately reconciled with him. The plot then twisted, though, when Abbot’s ex-girlfriend’s former flatmate saw the story on the TV news and came forward to confess that in fact he believed he was the true father. DNA tests confirmed this.
Other stories have only come to light because spurned lovers, angry wives or hurt children have handed them to journalists.14 In 1996, for example, former opposition leader Bill Hayden’s ‘lovechild’, Robert Licciardo, outed himself as the secret his father had hidden for almost 40 years. Licciardo, who was given up for adoption at birth, said he’d decided to tell his story when Hayden released an autobiography and did not mention him. The story, which did not spark much interest, was first revealed in the Melbourne Herald Sun. Licciardo, a Victorian restaurateur, then gave an exclusive interview to the Australian Women’s Weekly, which was reported in the Daily Telegraph. He said his mother never recovered from giving him up and did not have any more children, even though she later married. Licciardo was a ward of the state who had moved among foster homes, and wanted his famous father to publicly acknowledge him. Hayden refused to comment. The story died quickly.
Senator Bob Woods was similarly embarrassed when a former lover, Roxanne Cameron, took her story to the media.15 Former Victorian finance minister Ian Smith was forced to resign after his pregnant ex-lover, Cheryl Harris, filed a court action in 1995 alleging he had put pressure on her to abort their child so it would not damage his career, had assaulted her, and had breached her employment contract.16 He denied these claims, retaliated with a defamation action against her and her solicitors, and received a substantial payment from her solicitors in an out-of-court settlement. All legal disputes with Harris were settled without any admissions.
A story about John Hewson’s first marriage was not reported until an interview with his former wife, Margaret, was published in the Australian Women’s Weekly in 1991.17 Mrs Hewson told the magazine her former husband moved out four days before Christmas in 1985, saying, ‘You can’t cope. You won’t be able to cope with being a political wife.’ She admitted she had struggled: ‘I felt very inadequate. I would be seated betw
een two very high-profile men and you could feel that just as soon as they found out you were a housewife looking after three children — dull and boring — you could sense them turning their backs on you.’18
Later that month, Mrs Hewson appeared on ‘60 Minutes’, after celebrity agent Max Markson procured payment for her. The show was heavily criticised because reporter Jeff McMullen also interviewed the Hewson children, then aged 18, 15, and eight. Immediately after the show Hewson’s popularity surged.19 A Herald Saulwick poll taken in Sydney and Melbourne showed 71 per cent of voters thought neither better nor worse of Hewson after his ex-wife’s revelations. Eighty per cent also thought politicians’ private lives should not be a matter for public debate. Pollster Irving Saulwick attributed the surge to ‘visibility, handling and sympathy’. It is difficult to work out what kind of impact this tell-all had on Hewson’s political career, and if it contributed to his failure to win what had been called the unlosable election in 1993. Hewson told me he has no idea but ‘suspect[s] not much’. He said he found it very hard and was called ‘a monster’ by some, but had refused to comment because Margaret was going through a difficult time. After having suffered this humiliation, it seems peculiar that Hewson would later make comments about the childlessness of then NSW opposition leader Bob Carr, for which he was condemned.20
At other times, journalists have refused to report on stories unless they emerge in court, or at trials. When NSW minister Sandra Nori’s affair with Labor colleague Paul Gibson was revealed during an Independent Commission against Corruption inquiry, she was devastated. Again, it was not the media who were responsible, but ICAC commissioner Barry O’Keefe, who declared the affair to be of public interest, and ruled that the media could report on it.21 O’Keefe was not the first to air the affair. Former premier Nick Greiner had alluded to it on 6 March 1992 in parliament. According to the Sunday Telegraph, the reference did not escape politicians, reporters or parliamentary staff. It was, however, not reported on until O’Keefe deemed it could be. A senior political journalist recalled that ‘Everybody knew about it. They didn’t go out of their way to hide it . . . [But] none of the journalists ever wrote about it because, frankly, it wasn’t an issue.’22