by Julia Baird
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So what was different about Kernot? Journalists have often hinted at the active sex lives and affairs of MPs, as though referring to a kind of erotic tension swirling in the insular environment of federal politics, fuelled by the sexual allure of power, which is often incomprehensible to people outside looking in. Fia Cumming wrote in the Sun-Herald in 1997 that ‘sexual dalliances’ had been part of federal political life for decades: ‘With companionship a rare commodity in the vast Parliament House, lonely and bored male MPs often still seek female company . . . For the great majority of MPs who are heterosexual males, there are always plenty of young, intelligent, attractive and ambitious women around Parliament House.’ She listed some indiscretions, including a conservative cabinet minister who ‘made out’ in the toilets or the back of ministerial cars, a married Labor MP who’d had an affair with one of his staff, then her daughter — whom he went on to marry. Another married MP had three mistresses in Canberra.23 How standards have changed. There were many others. In the Australian Financial Review, Lyndall Crisp and Jill Margo wrote that ‘the list of dalliances goes forever; it would be easier to name those who didn’t stray’.24 When National Party leader John Anderson said politicians who could not keep their marriage vows should not be in parliament, Mungo MacCallum responded that if these standards were applied vigorously ‘he’d be a mighty lonely politician in the cabinet room, the party room and indeed the entire building.’ Of the 11 prime ministers since World War II, he wrote, he would ‘confidently back just two’ to pass the Anderson test.25 There are many men who could be charged with hypocrisy, because they have mouthed rhetoric about family values while cheating on their wives. As Michael Bachelard wrote in the Sunday Age:
Some political observers refer to a ‘stiff-dick syndrome’, which causes men in politics, infatuated with their own professional and personal potency, to become serial propositioners and adulterers. But until they cross that line and do something either illegal or impossible to ignore, their colleagues, political opponents and the media usually pretend not to notice. Or show no sign of being concerned.26
How many cases of harassment and assult were explained away by the ‘stiff-dick syndrome’?
In 1984, then Democrat leader Janine Haines threatened to break some conventions herself by talking about a sexual double standard in politics. Her comments, made to 5DN Adelaide radio announcer Jeremy Cordeaux, about the alleged infidelity of her parliamentary colleagues sparked headlines across the country in what was called the ‘bed-hopping row’.27 The straight-shooting Haines said most of her colleagues had ‘a friend on the side’, or at least ‘casual or regular alternative partners’, and blamed it on a double standard which meant ‘being away from a spouse for whatever period of time is a jolly good reason for playing around’. She also said she had been propositioned herself. In a statement that was prophetic in light of what later happened to her successors, Janet Powell and Cheryl Kernot, she said this behaviour was considered acceptable in male MPs but ‘a woman who plays around gets thoroughly derided — women MPs would be drummed out of the service if they tried it’. Not surprisingly, her remarks were greeted coolly by her colleagues.
When the story about the Evans–Kernot relationship was aired, then, many of their colleagues would have squirmed. The reason the convention is in place is not just about a moral integrity, a desire to keep politics clean, as argued earlier, but because no one wants to be under that kind of personal scrutiny. As Robert Manne argued, ‘The instinct to leave the private lives of our politicians alone is, in the end, grounded in something deep, an understanding that a certain kind of social logic governs our collective life. This logic can be summarised swiftly thus: one thing leads to another.’28 Those who throw stones will be quickly bruised themselves. When Hewson spoke about Carr’s childlessness, for example, Ramsey wondered if he wanted journalists to write about the fact that his own wife was having problems conceiving. And, in 2002, it was not long before nasty gossip about Oakes started circulating around newsrooms, which some journalists were eager to confirm and report on. News Limited columnist Glenn Milne wrote that some politicians ‘were muttering that Laurie might have a few dark secrets of his own’. Kernot told me people contacted HarperCollins with their own unconfirmed rumours:
My publishers started getting all these calls from people saying that they knew about Laurie Oakes’s own sexual peccadilloes. The first time they laughed. By the tenth time they said, ‘Oh we’ll tell you this, it’s amazing how the Australian people react when they think someone is being treated unfairly; they come out of the woodwork.’
In 2004, Kernot hinted she was longing to tell stories about Oakes: ‘My eyes are twinkling as I say this, but I think I might write an unauthorised biography about him.’29 Asked for his reaction to this innuendo, Oakes hinted that his critics had motivations of their own and shrugged it off: ‘I put my head above the parapet, a lot of people took shots at it. It sort of goes with the territory, doesn’t it? . . . I haven’t set out to be prurient about anyone’s private lives, that wasn’t my motivation.’
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Millions lapped up the Kernot and Evans stories thirstily, gripped by the unfolding saga of the reckless, powerful lovers: the woman, alone, unemployed yet unabashed; the man, still married, still employed, but caught out. But there was still a feeling of unease for some about the fact that again this woman, who had held significant power, was being sexually scrutinised. And this was evident in the letters that choked the fax machines and flooded the inboxes of letters editors.
Malcolm Farr says he would not have written the story himself, but once it had been reported it was worthy of dissection and comment:
With profound moral cowardice, I have a bob each way. If I had the emails, it is quite likely I would not have published them. It would have been an absolute agony, the sort of agony I don’t think Laurie went through. I saw no evidence of that; it was quite a deliberate, structured thing, the release. But — and this is where my moral consistency disappears — having become public knowledge, it was a valid thing to be debated, if you know what I mean; it did have a significance. And part of that significance was that Kernot had not been honest in the book.
Alan Ramsey was livid. While their offices were just metres away from each other in the hindquarters of Parliament House, and they had been friends for 25 years, he told me he and Oakes have not spoken since.30 He still blazes when he talks about it:
I thought he was so fucking unctuous, this business about, oh I agonised, I had to tell the truth, poor old Beazley — I mean that was just appalling. Just appalling. There can be no justification for it. I mean why didn’t he do it to his mate . . . [a Labor politician] who was one of the great pokers around the place, and was known as such? . . . But most people thought, it’s his private life, for God’s sake.31
Let’s examine the key justifications Oakes used: first, that if someone writes a biography, or book about a recent experience, they must ‘tell-all’. This demand has been made rarely, and it seems odd to suggest that when someone writes a book about their own life they will, or even must, put in all the information we would like to read, particularly about their sex lives, health problems, or flirtations with drugs or various addictions. An autobiography is a voluntary act, from a private citizen. Even biographers sometimes protect their subjects by omitting details that might embarrass them, especially if the subject or their family are still alive. We might want to know more about what drives and influences our public figures, but who has the right to reveal — or demand — the information?
Three years before Kernot’s book was published, in October 1999, Allen & Unwin published a biography of Gareth Evans, written by former staffer Keith Scott. If Oakes was right, this was just as the affair was ending, yet no mention was made of it. The publishers described the book as ‘a comprehensive and engaging exploration of the public and private life of one of Australia’s most substantial politicians and accomplished foreign ministers�
�. Scott even wrote about Kernot’s defection, arguing: ‘Evans played a central role in convincing Kernot to make the switch, and in helping engineer the move once she’d made her decision, over a plunger of coffee, with Evans, Beazley and Labor senator John Faulkner in Faulkner’s office.’ Oakes said, in a column written a week after the story exploded into print, that he had become convinced the pair were having a relationship in the second half of 1999. When I asked him why he did not write the story then, Oakes said he did not have the emails and did not read the book: ‘At that stage I had no particular interest in Gareth’s personal life.’
The story could have been run when Evans publicly lied about the affair, on the grounds that he was misleading the parliament. It could have been run when Kernot defected, if there was solid proof that Evans was the major reason for her move. It could have been run when she was struggling to gain a foothold on the edifice of the ALP and make a substantial contribution to her portfolio — again if there was empirical evidence of a causal link. But Oakes decided to run the story after he read Kernot’s book — and, critically, once he had the emails that confirmed the affair. He said the book was the prompt because in it she did not reveal everything, and blamed everyone but herself: the ALP, Kim Beazley, the media.
To the second justification. The fact that Oakes was in part writing the story to protect Beazley, who was heavily criticised in Kernot’s book, is a troubling one. On 4 July, on the ABC’s ‘World Today’ program, he justified his decision by saying: ‘If I’d done nothing, in my view I was allowing a particularly false version of what happened to be accepted and a lot of people getting the blame for things that I don’t believe they should have been blamed for. I am thinking particularly of Kim Beazley.’ Wouldn’t the protection of a politician be the last concern of a journalist?
Third, Oakes claimed the affair was significant in the defection. There are two factors to consider: the mindset of the Labor powerbrokers, and the mindset of Kernot. Oakes believed the ALP would not have recruited the popular Democrats leader if they had known she was in love with one of their senior ministers. In a letter to the ABC’s ‘Media Watch’, Oakes wrote:
Did I have evidence the affair was a significant factor in the defection? What I said was that knowledge of it would change many people’s view of the defection. That was certainly true. I knew that John Faulkner had told colleagues that if he had known of the affair at the time of the defection he would have vetoed it. I had been told by very good sources that Beazley would almost certainly have taken a similar view. That, to me, made the affair relevant to the defection.
To the behaviour of some key figures in the ALP, perhaps, but not to Kernot. And it is all very well in hindsight — could others have convinced them otherwise, that it would be for the good of the party that they still brought her over; that the press would continue to observe the convention, if they knew? One of the key players, the national secretary of the ALP, Gary Gray, told me he did not know if knowledge of the affair would have affected his decision.32 He said the ALP powerbrokers did not work it out until three weeks after Kernot had switched camp. Kim Beazley’s chief of staff at the time of the defection, David Epstein, wrote in the Australian that he also did not know if they would have spurned Kernot if they had known earlier, but they would have ‘paused for thought’.33
Kernot said Evans’s advice formed 1 per cent of her reason to jump ship. If it were 30 per cent, or 49 per cent, would that justify the story?
The fourth, and related, justification is Oakes’s claim that the affair made Kernot a flaky, less effective shadow minister. As mentioned earlier, journalists have long concurred that the only excuse for writing about someone’s private life is when it affects their public duties, so this is probably the most critical test. Oakes claimed the affair began when Kernot was Democrats leader and Evans the foreign affairs minister. He said it ended in November 1999, after a ‘long period of recrimination’. He then added: ‘Within days, Ms Kernot entered hospital suffering from what she describes in the book as immune-system breakdown as a result of emotional and physical exhaustion.’ He argued in the Bulletin that the affair was instrumental in ‘the erosion of her emotional and physical health that contributed to her political disintegration’.34 He also said that it was relevant because the ‘gradual break-up’ had an impact on Kernot’s behaviour ‘and therefore on Labor’s election prospects’. David Epstein backed him up, saying, ‘The intensity of the relationship befuddled the political judgement of those involved and, in turn, made it virtually impossible for the ALP leadership to engage in rational dialogue with them.’35 It appeared that he believed Evans’s behaviour was affected too.
What this claim lacked was proof of a causal connection between a love affair’s bloom and decline, and Kernot’s poor performance as a shadow minister or her obvious depression. If Oakes’s rationale were applied universally, anyone in a prominent position — say a minister — could have their political judgement or acumen eroded by engaging in an affair. Surely the sex lives of prime ministers should be on the public record if this is the case — we deserve to know which bad policy decision can be attributed to a night on the tiles, or between the sheets. Prime ministers have often admitted retrospective affairs, many of them to sustained and numerous ones. In 1989, after Prime Minister Bob Hawke tearfully admitted he had cheated on his wife, 80 per cent of respondents to a Herald Saulwick poll said it made no difference to the way they thought about him.36 The last person to see Harold Holt before he was swept out to sea at Portsea in 1967 was his mistress, Marjorie Gillespie. Zara Holt later said he had lovers in Portsea, Melbourne, Canberra, Sydney, and Hong Kong. Ben Chifley’s personal secretary was also his mistress, according to his biographer, David Day. This did not become public knowledge until after his death.
This part of Oakes’s reasoning is crucial, because if the affair was not the key reason, or even a substantial reason, for Kernot’s inability to be an effective shadow minister, then it unnecessarily lends weight to archaic views about the intemperance of women; their instability; being ruled by their hearts; and that their heads are clouded by emotion, especially desire. If there was evidence of this — an email perhaps, of Kernot saying she could not work or think properly, or was making mistakes when the affair soured — it was certainly not made public, so conjecture and assumption took the place of fact. According to Oakes, the emails provided the proof that the affair caused her breakdown but he chose not to reveal them:
LO: No one could say I raked over her personal life. I used hardly anything . . . I had a lot of material which illustrated what had happened to Cheryl, and the dates that it had happened — who had said what to whom and so on. There was no way that I would have written what I wrote without being sure of those things.
JB: But she appeared to be unravelling on a number of fronts: her bad decision, being in the Labor Party, and I guess what it is difficult for an observer, without having the material you’ve got, is to ascertain how significant a contribution it was — if the breakdown of the relationship was one factor or the defining factor.
LO: Without going into detail — and I haven’t gone into detail over it and I don’t want to, I don’t think it’s fair to either of them — all I can tell you is that it is an important factor.37
Gerard Henderson asked, ‘If Kernot was so knocked off course by her ongoing romance with a senior ALP politician, why did she negotiate an important deal with the Coalition on industrial relations in the lead-up to the 1996 election?’
If it did have a profound impact on her, can anyone seriously argue no other Australian politician in the past two centuries has not been affected by an affair, relationship breakdown or marital problems? Where were the stories about how Evans’s foreign policy announcements were coloured by his nocturnal activities? Who drew up a timeline with the dates of Bob Hawke’s proclivities next to the major decisions his government made? And are we to assume that having sex with a third party is more likely to affect your j
udgement than having sex with a spouse; or indeed than not having sex at all? That breaking up with a lover is more emotionally or professionally damaging than a divorce? Many politicians have split up with their wives with only a flicker of media interest, if any. And it is just as easy to argue that an affair can sustain you, as it is to argue it can distract you.
Kernot, in her attempt, however clumsy, to explain her behaviour, said there were three major reasons for the debilitating depression she experienced while a Labor politician. By far the greatest, she said, was the ALP: enemies who undermined her; a problematic relationship with the leader, Kim Beazley; and the fact that she felt sidelined. She told me, ‘The biggest stress on me was the dawning — which came pretty early on — that there was going to be no role for me. And what had I done, and could I ride it out?’ The next was the media — ‘oh, she’s gaffe prone, she’s not performing’ — and last was a strong Liberal campaign against her in the parliament and the electorate. I then asked her about the break-up of the relationship: how much that had contributed to her stress.
It was there but I was hoping that by throwing myself into the policy [I would cope] . . . I was in therapy, Gavin and I were in counselling, I mean I was dealing with that. My therapist thought the biggest stress on me was the detribalisation I suffered as a result of leaving the Democrats and going to Labor, as a result of what happened. He thought that was a huge, huge stress. I would be silly to say it wasn’t there . . . But if you are looking for a thesis which supports Laurie Oakes’s view, it’s wrong. That was part of the depression I was already feeling. But I was feeling that when Gareth was there. He knew that I was just quite desperate . . . I knew that what affected my performance as a shadow minister was Labor’s unwillingness to include me in anything that mattered . . . I considered myself an ideas person, I went into politics for ideas, and as soon as I went to the Labor Party I had no intellectual respect . . . and that damaged me a great deal . . . I think what happened to me was incredibly complex and it would be too trite to say it was my relationship with Gareth and it was my being a woman who took a risk. It was a much more subtle and complex interrelationship of all these things which I don’t think we’ll ever know.