by Julia Baird
— Michelle Grattan, the Age2
When Carmen Lawrence moved to federal politics in 1994, four years after becoming Australia’s first female premier, the hype was extraordinary. Prime Minister Paul Keating lured her with the promise of a cabinet position, recognising her potential as a symbol of progression and regeneration. She was dubbed ‘Saint Carmen’ and depicted by cartoonists with halos and wings, as a woman who would sweep into Canberra and clean up the grubbiness, bringing the ethical ambiguities of federal politics into sharp relief. A close-up of her face was put on the front cover of the Bulletin on 15 November 1994 with the headline: ‘Carmen Lawrence: Is she Labor’s Next Prime Minister?’ Greg Turnbull, then senior adviser to Prime Minister Paul Keating, said it was like Elvis coming to Canberra.
A decade later, when I went to interview her, she was a backbencher. Since she had gone to Canberra she had been blamed for a woman’s suicide, and called a murderer. She had endured a royal commission in 1995, which found that when she was premier of West Australia she had misled the parliament regarding her role in the airing of a family court dispute. This finding was later overturned by a court, but the scrutiny by the press was acute and protracted.
The central question was whether she, as premier, had previous knowledge of a petition tabled in the WA Upper House claiming that the opposition leader had improperly provided information about a public servant’s finances to his wife, Penny Easton. A few days later, Easton committed suicide. Liberal MP Wilson Tuckey declared Lawrence ‘had blood on her hands’. After the royal commission handed down its findings, she was then charged with perjury. Lawrence was finally exonerated when a District Court jury found she had in fact not lied.
She had survived, but many predicted her career would be irreparably damaged. Throughout the commission and the court case, journalists wondered at her resolve, her toughness, and her ability to somehow distance herself from the viciousness of the attacks. She did not crack, break down or get angry in public. While she was acquitted by the court, her credibility had been severely battered. When she resigned from the front bench in December 2002 out of anger at Labor’s refusal to differentiate itself from the Coalition’s policy of keeping asylum seekers in detention centres, she was mocked — a liar claiming to be morally superior? At the end of the following year she was voted in as the president of the Labor Party in the first ballot open to grassroots membership. Political enemies had attacked her for ten years, journalists doubted her, but the party faithful still believed in her. It was not just that she acted as a lightning conductor for Labor dissidents. Somehow she represented something they craved.
*
I found myself, at six o’clock on a Thursday night in May 2003, sitting in Lawrence’s tidy Canberra office, interviewing her over a glass of white wine. It was the end of an uneventful parliamentary sitting week. We talked about the press, politics, the court case, and the royal commission. I asked her, ‘Do you think it all — the Easton affair — had an impact on you that it wouldn’t have had on others?’ To my surprise, she blinked, and her mouth started to tremble.
She paused, then said quietly, ‘I don’t know. What it played into for me were a couple of things I suppose, which are me rather than somebody else. One is the fact that I think I am careful of other people’s feelings, most of the time.’ She apologised as she began to cry.
Destroying other people’s reputations or saying harmful things about them, I don’t do that. So it played into that view of myself . . . Some of them were quite keen to point out the inconsistency between my expressed values and the claims that were being made about my knowledge and the notion that I had somehow contrived a set of circumstances which produced this outcome [Penny Easton’s suicide] knowingly, callously — so they pushed that hard. So I am not unique in that but that is one of the characteristics that I have that I suppose they perceived as a potential weakness. The other thing, I suppose, as a psychologist I saw the situation as much more complex than other people would, knowing about the circumstances in which people commit suicide. And you know, feeling that — if there was anything I could have done to prevent . . . [starts to cry harder] — poor woman — obviously I would.
I turned the tape-recorder off but again she kept talking, still composed as the tears dripped down her cheeks. I switched it on again.
I suppose they are the things that are particular about me that might have made it harder . . . And why should [journalists care], they see death and destruction every day. I mean [former foreign correspondent] Paul McGeough sees people blown up; why would he care about the sensitive feelings of a politician [laughs]? I understood that and I didn’t ever in a sense blame the media either. I mean I don’t like the way a lot of the media operate. I think it is superficial and tabloid and destructive. But I have seen other people really destroyed, other people really put through the wringer. I survived.
I then asked if it was actually her sense of self, her identity, that her enemies had got to: ‘Who you said you were and who you were believed to be?’ She answered:
CL: Yes, yes it was. The thing about who I was believed to be mattered less to me frankly. Because ultimately you have got to look at yourself in the mirror in the morning, because no one else is looking for you. And to that extent it was a very carefully targeted . . . [blows nose] but who knows how conscious that was on the part of the people who did it.
JB: To target you?
CL: To target in that way.
JB: Your sense of self?
CL: Yeah. I’m not saying they were sophisticated about it but they would have seen it as pricking some inflated idea of my own rectitude. I am not straight laced, I don’t think I am pompous about the values that I hold. But you could see it and hear it in some of the things they said. Howard in particular was good on that. He obviously felt that I had somehow put myself above the political fray, that I [was saying I] wasn’t some kind of dirty operator, and this was illustration of the fact that I was, really. I was no different to the rest of them. [There was a] kind of sneering: ‘Who the hell do you think you are? We know what you’re really like, you’re a hypocrite.’
JB: The saint stuff doesn’t do anyone any favours.
CL: No, it doesn’t. And that was the exaggeration I suppose that put me in a position where that was likely to happen one way or another.
JB: When you are seen to be acting like just another politician?
CL: Yes. Just another politician, or just another bloody politician, and in a sense I had already been blooded in that I had been the premier of a state at a very difficult time, and it wasn’t as if I claimed purity. I had admitted making mistakes, very public mistakes . . . So it was not as if I was wandering around the place saying look at me, I’m wonderful, but that was what they said in a way. Underneath that, what they got to was the core belief in my own compassion I suppose [starts to cry again].
JB: They say that’s what you believe about yourself, but that’s also what the public believed. That was your greatest asset, and being a woman is —
CL: Is part of it. It is unsexing you in a way [blowing nose], it is. But I am not saying they wouldn’t have done it to a bloke. Different style maybe, different target in terms of the characteristics they might choose to focus on [tears].
JB: So what do you attribute your survival to?
CL: [Still teary] Not doing this too often [laughs]. Just let me compose myself.
She disappeared into the bathroom for several minutes. I sat in her office, staring at her bookshelves, waiting. I was taken aback, after having read all the press reports praising her composure, and toughness in the face of fierce attack — and those accusing her of being cold and aloof as a minister and premier. When I ended the interview 20 minutes later, we both apologised. She responded: ‘Well you didn’t know. I didn’t know. A small Krakatoa happened [blows nose]. In a sense it’s good for me to know that I am still not quite there. Maybe I never will be.’
This was in fact the ultimate triumph of those who succ
essfully — and unfairly — linked Lawrence with Penny Easton’s suicide. They got to her. Inside her. At the time, she was admired for her resolve. Eight years later, her suffering was still apparent, although she was clearly vulnerable for other reasons — her mother was very ill and one of her closest friends had just died. I walked back to the press gallery, remembering that the day before a bureau chief had laughed and told me, ‘I never feel sorry for politicians. Never.’
After what happened to Carmen, one senior political columnist told me, women gave up. If she could not make it, who could? Why bother trying to change the system? The disquieting part of her story is that her appeal, her immense popularity, was largely due to the fact that she was a woman. It was not just that she was an articulate, charismatic politician. She was perceived to be different from the men — who then expended considerable amounts of energy and millions of dollars to prove that she was not. She was just like them, they argued — she lied. And worse — she was a murderer.
*
In 1990 Rod Cameron famously predicted that we were about to witness the ‘feminisation’ of Australian politics. Other things being equal, women were 2 or 3 per cent more likely to vote for a female candidate and men were split close to 50–50. It was an unstoppable trend. This was because, he said:
The increasing community cynicism, the eventual realisation of the gravity of national economic problems, and the growth of division over consensus in social issues will reinvigorate the search for a new style of political, corporate and community leadership, and a new order of political values in which Australians will have faith. Increasing divisiveness in our society will result in a different approach to resolving complex debates. The old macho ways of proving leadership credentials will decline and the community will respond to a commonsense, managerial style which is in touch, honest and direct. This new basis I have called the feminisation of the social agenda — a move away from the masculine aggression and confrontation formula of the old order.3
Leaders would need to show a human side, and would be valued more for intelligence, honesty and creativity than for brute strength. Except that instead of bringing on or elevating women to feminise politics, the threat of highly electable women led to the feminisation of the men instead. The consensus style of Steve Bracks took over from the remote authoritarian approach of Joh Bjelke-Petersen, for example.
It was not just Cameron. Many reporters hailed the early 1990s as the time when a small group of women were transforming politics. Senior political correspondent Geoff Kitney wrote in 1994 that in national politics, ‘women are increasingly setting the pace, setting the agenda and setting the standards’, even if their numbers were small: ‘Never in Australia have women had the influence, or the opportunity, that they now have.’ Bishop, Lawrence and Kernot were ‘approaching crucial tests which will determine which of them plays the most influential role in Australian political life through the balance of the ’90s . . . Where these three women go from here will be one of the great political stories of our time.’4
Yet each of them flamed then faded.
For many, Lawrence provided hope that politics could be done differently. She had a disarming effect on people. One journalist described it as a ‘magnetic pull’, another as a ‘crusading aura’, and others as a charisma that made people warm to her immediately. Jane Cadzow wrote in March 1995 that ‘Lawrence can’t venture into a public place without well-wishers urging her to go all the way to The Lodge. Mal Holmes, her Commonwealth car driver in Perth, says he hasn’t seen this much excitement about a politician since he chauffeured former prime minister Bob Hawke at the height of his folk-heroism . . . While other parliamentarians compete with varying success for media attention, Lawrence gives the impression she has only to clear her throat to attract a crush of camera and microphone.’5
It was not just voters. Paul McGeough, originally from Perth, described her as ‘a truly remarkable politician’ who was ‘held in awe by many in the national press gallery . . . [and] treated with a reverence that has blessed few Australian politicians’.6 Political columnist Matt Price — who was the Australian’s bureau chief in Perth between 1997 and 2000, and state political reporter for Channel Nine between 1991 and 1996 — said he observed an ‘incredible suspension of normal cynicism and scepticism towards Carmen’ in many political journalists. When he came to Canberra covering Richard Court at a premiers’ conference in 1995, and told a group of gallery reporters that he thought Lawrence had always known about the Penny Easton petition, they were visibly taken aback: ‘She was treated completely differently. I hadn’t seen anyone treated like this before. She was held up as a great hope. I didn’t get into an argument, but it was pretty uncomfortable. It was a peculiar reaction for journalists; it was like I’d insulted them.’
The uncommon faith Lawrence inspired in many journalists appeared to be particularly evident in some of the women in the press gallery, who were bitterly disappointed when she came under serious attack. Eventually their disappointment turned to her. ABC political reporter Fran Kelly says she was ‘heartbroken to see such a high-calibre politician be ruined like this’, and sickened by the political pursuit of Lawrence to the point of a royal commission and perjury trial. Margo Kingston says she and Kelly ‘went through agony’ trying to understand it, but that she finally confronted Lawrence and told her she had decided she did not believe her: ‘It was very powerful. There was a real emotional connection with her. I was just devastated; I was a true believer, I thought she was wonderful, but after [I told her I did not believe her] we didn’t talk for six years . . . It took me a long time to get over Carmen . . .’
When Carmen Lawrence was made Australia’s first female premier, The Australian pulled out an old photograph of her in a kitchen to splash on the front page. Ernie McLintock/Newspix
Kelly says, ‘While everyone else was pursuing her I was holding back — still doing tough interviews, I think, but allowing her answers and her denials to stand. Other politicians have been caught out or not believed and haven’t been pursued to royal commissions. It was a political exercise purely and simply. The level of attention it attracted and the vehemence of the comment were much greater because the expectation of her was so high. I was offended by the way it happened.’
Lawrence says she was aware that some reporters were keenly disappointed by the findings of the Marks Royal Commission: ‘There was a certain sense of them having been betrayed, as if I had personally gone out of my way to do something to harm them. That was a bit odd.’
Most journalists I spoke to described the pursuit of Lawrence as purely political, and the punishment excessive. When she came to Canberra, held aloft on the shoulders of the prime minister and touted as a possible deputy or even successor, the Liberals sized her up and were waiting. At the same time, almost all journalists thought she’d lied about the Easton affair — although few were prepared to say that on the record. Geoff Kitney attributes her ‘immense appeal’ to the fact that she was incredibly articulate, and had original ideas. But male or female, he continues, ‘I think a fallen politician really cops it. Really really cops it.’ What happened to Lawrence has also happened to some men: gruelling public trials; sustained, vitriolic attack; undermining from their own party as well as their opponents. Many leave politics feeling bitter, unappreciated and keenly aware that they have suffered in a way their colleagues have not. Many feel that were it not for timing, cruel fate, a certain story, a particular colleague, they would have been leaders. But Lawrence was the only woman who could have led the country if things had been different.
*
This is what we know about the Easton affair. On 8 April 1995 Paul McGeough broke a story in the Sydney Morning Herald — bizarrely tucked away on page eight — in which Keith Wilson, formerly the health minister in the Lawrence government, said Lawrence had lied about the tabling of a petition in parliament before the suicide of Penny Easton in 1992. McGeough told me he had always suspected that she lied, ‘for
the simple reason that the issue at the time was too big to have been left in the hands of backbenchers or party aides’. Lawrence had said she knew of the petition, and the ‘general thrust’ of it, when it was tabled, but claimed she had been briefed ‘only just before it was tabled and then only in the broadest of terms’. But, almost three years later, Wilson challenged her recall and suggested she was not telling the truth. He claimed the petition had been discussed at cabinet, and that some ministers had warned against its tabling, but she had gone ahead because she wanted to damage the opposition leader, Richard Court. He also said she had promised to come back to cabinet before anything further happened. Lawrence, then health minister in the Keating government, denied his claims.
The Easton petition was the latest manoeuvre in a messy personal dispute over a divorce settlement between Brian and Penny Easton. It should never have ended up in parliament. Political point-scoring with a family break-up isn’t particularly decent, let alone feminist, behaviour. It was grubby, although not particularly unusual, politics, and both sides of the house were guilty of allowing themselves to be used as pawns in an acrimonious private battle.7
In 1992, Brian Easton used the support of ALP backbencher John Halden to present a petition in parliament accusing his former wife, Penny Easton, of perjury. The petition also claimed opposition leader Richard Court had supplied Penny Easton — who was falsely rumoured to be his lover — with sensitive and confidential material. The petition was immediately declared to be unfair and incorrect, as the perjury charge had been thrown out of the Family Court. Still, the media eagerly pursued the story and front-page headlines blared daily. The day after the petition was tabled, Channel Seven reporter Geoff Parry chased Penny Easton into her garage, and shot footage of her standing, silent, in her nightgown, with her back to the camera, trying to shield her face with her hand. According to a letter sent by Channel Seven to the ABC’s ‘Media Watch’, the crew ‘taped Mrs Easton in her garage at the rear of her home unit from a right-of-way and as she was driven away in a car’.