by Julia Baird
Kernot told the ABC’s Monica Attard that Oakes never came to her with the story, and had never asked her what impact the affair had had on her, or what was causing her decline. So who do we believe? The woman or the observer? Kernot claims that because Oakes did not check facts with her, he made some errors. When I asked her if she had thought her relationship with Gareth would last forever, for example, she said, ‘Not forever but it had potential to continue . . . it was very, very special. Even after Gareth left we had made plans to meet up and see each other and see how things worked out away — with one of us away — with him away from parliament. But of course it didn’t happen that way.’
Laurie Oakes was initially very reluctant to be interviewed for this book, insisting that if he had any more information he would reveal it himself, and that it was too long ago (18 months) to remember details. When we eventually spoke he was defensive, partly because, as he told me at the end of the interview, he had ‘reason to be wary’ after the abuse he’d copped at the time of publication. He maintained his decision was correct:
The key thing that made me decide to write it was what Cheryl wrote in the book about why her period in the Labor Party was so difficult, how the media drove her to a breakdown. And I knew all of that was untrue. I knew what had caused the problems and I knew what had caused her . . . even those emotional problems that she had. I had the knowledge. Also in there was the statement by Gareth Evans saying Kim Beazley had done the wrong thing by Cheryl, and I had the background to that. So I am in the position of fact. Which conflicts with important strands in her book. That was the kind of thing I was thinking about.
I don’t think Laurie Oakes had a particular bias against Kernot. He often praised Kernot in his columns. Many found his rationale compelling. But his action played into a lot of sexist assumptions that observers were unable to properly evaluate without being given the evidence.
*
The significance of this story should not be underestimated. Laurie Oakes is an enormously respected, powerful press gallery leader. This was not an inexperienced reporter trying to be controversial, it was the heaviest of the heavyweights making a calculated and considered decision about a long-held convention. The final irony is that in writing a book that attacked the media as sexist, unethical and untrustworthy, Kernot was placing trust in a group of gallery reporters to protect her, to contain her open secret within the confines of Parliament House. Her mistake was to believe that the media would treat her as they treated the men — while writing a book to prove the opposite. But it would be wrong to blame Kernot simply for writing a book, as many did. It was not a great book; it was hastily written, often jumbled and contradictory, and basically amounted to a long, drawn-out self-justification, blaming instead the Labor Party, the leader, the press, and men everywhere — running newsrooms, taking photos, doing backroom ALP deals. Underpinning it all is a great sense of loss and grief.
Despite this, it’s hard not to have a human response to Kernot; to the woman who broke down then was stoned in public. She made a bad decision, she was somehow diminished as the years passed, but she was certainly sorely judged for it. She left politics without a husband (their marriage fell apart after the 2001 election), a lover, the loyalty of either the Democrats or the ALP, the friendship of her former staffers, and with faint prospects of a future career in Australia.
While the media were not to blame for what happened to Kernot, they were critical in her downfall. It was not just the scrutiny, it was the level of scrutiny; it was not just the attack, it was the intensity of the attack. And it was not just the fact that the conventions were broken for her — it was the velocity with which they were followed up, and the scale and vehemence of the coverage. The media did not break Cheryl Kernot, but they exacerbated the pressure a thousand-fold, and effectively destroyed her reputation. And fierce debates about gender, power, privacy, sexual behaviour, and ethics all sprang from public discussion of who she had slept with and when.
What was it about her that sparked such fervent admiration then such unforgiving hostility in the press? Many politicians are hated, but few at that level. HarperCollins publicist Christine Farmer said she went from amazement at the number of attacks to disgust at the salaciousness in the media reports: ‘It was like she was Princess Diana and had done something wrong.’ Monica Attard, who procured an exclusive radio interview with Kernot in which she spoke of her relationship with Evans, said she was stunned by the emotion Kernot stirred in other journalists. She took more than 70 phone calls the day after she interviewed Kernot — a few days before the program was aired — from reporters wanting to know what she’d said, what she looked like: ‘“Is she going to break down? Is she going to kill herself?” A lot of the feedback from women were saying good on you, but a lot of the men were very, very hostile towards her, and that translated into media reaction as well . . . There is something about Cheryl that seems to rile the media but it was pretty amazing to be there in the eye of the storm when it was happening with her.’
What was most surprising, according to Attard, was ‘the ferociousness with which some of my journalist colleagues approached the whole thing’. She found it difficult to distinguish between the professional desire to get information about what Kernot had told her before the program went to air, and just sheer hostility towards Kernot because ‘she was such a despised person at the time . . . I found it quite shocking and a bit disturbing because we all know that there’s no such thing as absolute objectivity but I expected a bit of deference to the idea. I found none in relation to the Kernot story; there was just anger and pissed-offedness.’ When I asked Mike Seccombe about the vitriol, he replied, ‘I don’t quite understand the psychology but there’s a pigeon coop mentality, once someone falls to the bottom of the cage with a spot of blood on them, everyone picks them to death.’
*
It’s 1.30 p.m. and I am sitting in my car with Cheryl Kernot, stuck in traffic in Cleveland Street, heading for Sydney airport. She has a flight to Brisbane at 2.00 p.m., and is, understandably, starting to panic. I realise I have miscalculated how long it will take to drive her from Newtown to the airport. A strained note appears in her voice, and she calls her friend — who is waiting at the terminal with her luggage — who advises her to hop across the cement road barrier and catch a cab in the other direction. I fall silent, embarrassed. Then a gap appears in the traffic and I slam my foot down, veering into the right lane. A prolonged horn blast comes from the truck behind us as I sneak a sideways look at her. A second, longer blast follows. ‘I bet it’s a man,’ mutters Kernot. A glance in my rear-vision mirror proves it is. We both laugh, a little anxiously, as I continue to veer in and out of the traffic as quickly as I can.
Eight minutes later we are at the airport. I am still driving way too fast, and almost don’t see a man walking across a median strip, daydreaming. I brake, and gesture apologetically. He stops and glares, stepping around the bumper bar and pointing to his eyes. ‘LOOK!’ he shouts, angrily. ‘Yep, yep, I’m really sorry,’ I mouth back. His mouth then curls and he brings his hand up in the air, waving it like a talking puppet, shouting, ‘Yap, yap, yap.’ We both groan at his assumption: two women in the car; it’s not bad driving, it’s that we are talking too much. ‘Now that’s rude,’ Kernot says. ‘Very male.’ She shakes my hand then hurries off in her bright red jacket, disappearing into the crowds at the Qantas terminal.
I drove off wondering if that was the way the world was — or seemed — for Cheryl Kernot: men sounding horns, gesturing rudely, misreading her. Throughout our interview she had often referred to men, a masculine media, blokey parliament, a male way of operating, a rigid wall of testosterone in political parties, a culture that had deified then derided her — saint to scarlet women. As Democrats leader, Kernot was a highly respected politician and effective negotiator. She promised to try to change politics. When she changed parties instead, in order to better access power, she lost the respect of much of the gallery, who
claimed her political purity had been key to her success. And that ambition was an ugly trait in a woman. From then it was open slather — her past sex life, a host of transgressions, her current sex life. It went on, month after month.
Kernot was living in London at the time of writing this book, working as a consultant and thriving, she says, on being regarded for her intellect once again. When I first contacted her, she told me to read Siân Rees’s book The Floating Brothel, about the voyage to Australia of female convicts, many of whom had been convicted of trifling crimes, who eventually served as prostitutes in the new colony. She reminded me of the book several times, and when I finally read the tales of these women, caught between poverty and penury, it became clear why. ‘It was a regrettable fact,’ Rees wrote, ‘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, God’s will, human nature. Female crime was like terminal illness, terribly sad, sometimes brought on by circumstances outside the victims’ control, but irreversible.’
Postscript, 2021
It was only in the first few months of 2021, thanks to the courage of Brittany Higgins and others, that people began to speak openly about the sleazier aspects of political culture in Canberra, and how toxic and obnoxious it can be for women. It is patently clear that lack of reporting on, or truthful discussion of, this environment has protected not women but primarily predatory men.
A short time after becoming an MP in 2004 Labor’s Kate Ellis was approached in a bar by a Liberal staffer (later a senator) who said to her: ‘The only thing anyone really wants to know about you, Kate, is how many blokes you had to fuck to get into parliament.’38 As she wrote in her book, Sex, Lies and Question Time, that was just the everyday ‘run-of-the-mill sleaze and innuendo’ in federal politics: rumours about women having sex with drivers, staffers and colleagues. She demonstrates beautifully how sexual gossip is primarily targeted at women, and weaponised against them. Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young had to deny rumors she had been ‘busted having sex in the prayer room’ to her then leader, Bob Brown, while Ellis found herself on the phone to a newspaper editor denying she was entangled in a love triangle in her office, vowing: ‘I’ve never even kissed him.’ The rumour, she says, came from her own colleagues.39 Ellis even discovered it had been widely rumoured that she had ‘vajazzled’ — or decorated her pubic area with little fake jewels — in preparation for the Midwinter Ball, where the media mingles with politicians and powerbrokers.
Far from dying out, slut-shaming is now common practice for some in federal parliament. When women get to their feet to speak, they are sledged by opponents who call out the names of men they are supposed to have had sex with. Amanda Rishworth told Ellis that people have yelled at her across the chamber: ‘We all know you effed such and such!’ In the case of Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young, this went on for months, until it made her so anxious she began to avoid going to parliament. Then, when David Leyonhjelm, a senator for the Liberal Democratic Party, shouted out while she was debating the protection of women against sexual assault that she should ‘stop shagging men’, she accused him of ‘slut-shaming’, took him to court and successfully sued for defamation. Justice White agreed that Leyonhjelm was aiming to ‘shame her publicly’ by later saying ‘the rumours about her in Parliament House are well-known’, that ‘Sarah is known for liking men’, and Sarah ‘is known for having lots of relationships with men’ were ‘calculated to embarrass, and done with malice’.40
Throughout the case, Hanson-Young told the court she had to endure abuse, phone calls and emails from people calling her a ‘hypocrite and misandrist’, because, they said, she was a ‘slut who had sex with men’. Her daughter’s classmates asked her daughter repeatedly: ‘How many boyfriends has your mum had?’ On 3 July 2018, her chief of staff told her: ‘[Your media advisor] just received a call and the caller said, “If you do not stop saying that all men are rapists, there is a group of us who will rape you. Many men are angry at [you] and . . . we will punish [you] by raping [you].”’
It is worth remembering that Brittany Higgins was raped not long afterwards, in Parliament House.
And instead of trying to prevent sexual assault, parties and even pre-selectors continue to sexualise the women in their midst, or on their peripheries. Wanting to avoid an avoidable scandal is one thing, and discriminatory prurience is another. As Ben Smee revealed in the Guardian in July 2020, nine former Queensland LNP candidates had been asked intimate questions when being vetted by male party officials. One was asked to write down the name of her former sexual partners on a piece of paper, and asked if she also slept with women. Another woman was asked, ‘What is your favourite sexual position?’
This prurience can be hugely damaging — even fatal — to a political career. In July 2018, Labor MP Emma Husar found herself the subject of an internal party review into staff complaints — at least half of which were from a single employee who had been fired — including bullying, inappropriate behaviour and sexual harassment. Then Buzzfeed published an unsubstantiated allegation from the review that Husar, a single mother and survivor of domestic violence, had exposed her nether regions to a colleague, Jason Clare, in her office. Husar says the relevant staffer was not even with her on that day, or in Canberra at all, and Clare had denied the allegation, but Buzzfeed reported the story without calling either Husar or Clare. The headlines accused her of ‘doing a Sharon Stone’, referencing an iconic scene in Basic Instinct where a character — a bisexual, murderous novelist — uncrosses and crosses her legs while being interrogated in what appears to be a deliberately provocative move. The policemen stare and sweat. (It is only now that we know that Sharon Stone claims she was manipulated into doing this scene: she says she was asked to remove her white underwear on the grounds that they were reflecting the light. She writes in her book, The Beauty of Living Twice, that when she first saw the ‘up-the-skirt shot’, she was in ‘a room full of strangers’ and that ‘it was humiliating and upsetting’.)
Husar says that after this, she was effectively forced to quit politics. Even before the ALP review had been completed, she says she was asked by senior party operatives to ‘fall on her sword’ or face consequences. Husar, who had won her seat in Sydney’s west with a swing of 4.1 per cent in 2016, did not stand at the next election.
While the ALP review had found she had behaved unreasonably towards staff, a report by lawyer John Whelan found there had been no basis for her to resign from parliament and that allegations of sexual harassment and lewd conduct were not supported. To date, the Whelan report has not been released, and Husar has not sighted a copy.
Almost three years on, Husar is considering her legal options and seeking advice on suing the ALP on the grounds of unlawful sex discrimination and sexual harassment. In July 2019 she had settled a defamation action against Buzzfeed, forcing them to apologise for not seeking comment from her, and to retract the story.
So how should MPs be treated after the airing of untested allegations?
In comparison to Husar, after the ABC published a story that an unnamed cabinet minister was alleged to have raped a woman in 1988, the attorney-general Christian Porter held a press conference in which he identified himself as the subject of the story. Again, Porter forcefully denied the allegations and pursued the ABC for defamation before dropping the case after mediation. He was moved from his position of attorney-general to minister for industry, innovation and science during the legal process — but has, significantly, remained in cabinet. But the question of what consequences there are for women, and for men, in political life, remains a burning one.
CHAPTER TEN
Saint Carmen: canonisation and crucifixion
Below and beyond all this is the question, banal but insistent — why? How did this happen? What weakness, what action on my part put me
here? At one level this invites analysis of the sequence of events, the roads not taken, the choices wrongly made, the careless words, the inattention, rip-tides not discerned . . . Yet it also invites the . . . question ‘Why me?’ Even if the worst possible construction is placed on my actions, they amount to so much less than is said and done daily in public life . . . It raises the question of what I represent that makes me a target for such action.
— Carmen Lawrence, personal diaries, 19971
All week, Carmen Lawrence has played the part of cool woman. Reasonable, logical, understanding rather than angry towards the man who is accusing her, censorious of muckraking, and with just a touch of suggesting that she is being put upon because she’s female. It’s the Lawrence style. She’s all about control. Not cracking. Being highly organised. And, above all, appearing to conduct her politics a good deal more attractively than those macho boys do.