Media Tarts

by Julia Baird

  Four days later Penny Easton was found in her car in the hills that surround the coastal city of Perth. She had committed suicide. She left a note which began: ‘No one committed perjury in my family . . . I have been set up so well that I have no way out but this. I cannot live with the hurt that is being done to my family. I know it’s all political.’ Angry and grieving, Easton’s family demanded to know if Lawrence knew about the petition. Many believe that what went on to be a destructive, protracted saga could have been stopped at this point if Lawrence had taken responsibility for the petition but not the suicide, apologised to the family and called an inquiry. But she insisted she was telling the truth. She did not say she never knew about the petition, but that a staffer, Ed Russell, only told her about it the night before it was tabled, and Halden spoke to her about it on that morning. It became a question of how many days in advance she was told.

  Months after the story broke in 1995, Lawrence’s star was still bright. There was speculation that she would become deputy to Keating when Brian Howe retired. Then, as the federal Labor Party was preparing for an election, Richard Court, then the Liberal premier of Western Australia, called for a royal commission. Headed by Kenneth Marks, the commission’s task was to examine ‘the circumstances and events preceding and following the presentation of a petition’ to the upper house of the West Australian parliament on 5 November 1992. The key question was whether the tabling of the petition was a premeditated move which Lawrence had been planning for some weeks in order to distract from other problems the government was facing, or something she had only been told about briefly the day before it was taken to parliament.

  Eight cabinet ministers testified that Lawrence had brought it up at a cabinet meeting on Monday, 2 November 1992. There were six ministers, including Lawrence, who either did not recall or said no such discussion had occurred. Paul Keating lent his full weight to support Lawrence, attacking the veracity and process of the commission, insisting it was a politically motivated ‘very nasty extension’ of executive power.8 Penny Easton’s parents attended the entire trial.

  The commission concluded Lawrence had lied about what she had known, and had ‘supported the use of Easton’s grievances and allegations for her own political interests — and at the expense of the parties to the Easton matrimonial dispute and their families’. Commissioner Marks also found that ‘there was no need for her, as Premier, to intervene in the Easton matter, which was an essentially private grievance.’ The next day, the front page of the West Australian shouted: ‘SHE LIED’.

  Not everyone was crowing. On 16 November, Milton Cockburn in the Sydney Morning Herald argued that it was an extraordinary and dangerous precedent: ‘A politician, who has not acted illegally, has been found to have acted improperly because she sought to gain a political advantage over her parliamentary opponent. Only a very naive person could come to such a conclusion.’ What riled her supporters most of all was that the subtext of much of the comment, and dirt throwing, was that she was guilty of murder; that there was a simple causal connection between the petition and Penny Easton’s suicide, and there were no other factors — like nasty family disputes, a vindictive former husband, media harassment, and depression, for example.9 Many saw it simply as a witch-hunt. It was known Lawrence had some enemies in the West Australian ALP. Much of the hostility followed her decision to establish a royal commission into WA Inc., which resulted in the jailing of Brian Burke — the former premier — and David Parker, former deputy premier. Her refusal to give character evidence at Burke’s fraud trial caused further resentment.

  Paul Keating dismissed the findings of the Marks royal commission as blatantly political, and Lawrence remained health minister until the government lost the election in 1996. She was still a shadow minister when she was charged on 21 April 1997 by the West Australian police with having given false evidence to the commission. She faced a maximum penalty of five years imprisonment. She was charged on three counts, and she pleaded not guilty to all of them. After a three-week trial she was acquitted by a District Court jury. The West Australian’s headline proclaimed: ‘SHE’S BACK’. In the 1998 federal election, she substantially increased her majority in her Fremantle seat.

  In an article written for the Eye in December 1999, senior gallery journalist Christine Wallace argued the media had repeatedly and effectively drawn a connection between the suicide and the petition: ‘In almost every one of the hundreds of news stories for four years about Carmen Lawrence and the Easton petition, is a sentence like, “Four days after presentation of the petition, Penny Easton committed suicide.” It created a Pavlovian connection in people’s minds between the two events. Alternative possibilities like “. . . after realising what an unremitting bastard her husband was”, “. . . after being hounded by the press”, or “. . . being cumulatively depressed to the point of hopelessness” never appeared.’10

  The pursuit of Lawrence was clearly politically motivated. Was it worse because she was a woman? Of course. Who else, apart from Cheryl Kernot, has been so powerfully and lethally dubbed a saint? It is only natural that over-hyped expectations lead to disappointment. It is rare for politicians to see journalists personally wounded by their demise. But was she targeted because she was a woman? No. Her uniqueness and perceived virtuosity added to her profile and popularity, but she was also targeted because she was potentially capable of leading her party and helping Keating win government again. And while she was acquitted of any charges of perjury, the stain remained.

  Lawrence says it was her political opponents, in both the Labor and Liberal parties, who did the most damage. She believes the media generally have taken her seriously: ‘Whatever other things have happened I don’t feel that my views have been discounted or set aside because I am a woman of a particular kind. Quite the reverse if anything.’ Meanwhile, journalists justified their scrutiny of her by saying she had claimed to be different but was found not to be, and must be held to account. Michelle Grattan wrote in 1995 that ‘Lawrence is a classy politician. There is no reason to believe she is any worse than her peers when it comes to standards and ethics. But when she talks about wanting “to conduct politics in a different way”, without the male characteristics of aggression and strutting, as she did in a Canberra Times interview recently, she invites us to scrutinise her approach carefully. The main thing that seems to be different about Lawrence is the method she brings to doing things, and her public presentation, rather than the substance of what she does.’11

  The ghost of the Penny Easton case trailed Lawrence for the rest of her political career. After the court case was over, she returned to the front bench. In 2002 she resigned from the shadow ministry over the party’s position on the war in Iraq and support for mandatory detention of asylum seekers. She was condemned by commentators who saw her drift to the Left as piety, and disloyalty to the party that had stuck by her during the Easton years. But her resignation served as a beacon for Labor voters who were dissatisfied with the leadership’s failure to counter the Howard government’s hard-line views on asylum seekers. This, along with her own strength and ability, is why Carmen Lawrence survived. Her election as Labor Party president — another first for women — proved her grassroots support remained. Matt Price believes voters forgive her because they like her, and believe her when she speaks:

  Carmen has made a lot of mistakes over a long career but people just like her, and it really frustrates some of her more strident critics. She has some enormous critics in the West Australian Labor Party, but she pops up and says what she thinks and people like her . . . She is an impressive woman with a hide of a rhino . . . But it’s not all image. The reality is, when she talks about issues, she talks pretty good common sense about it. She’s an extraordinary politician, and like other extraordinary politicians, there is substance behind it. There’s still a feeling out there that it’s a shame what happened to Carmen Lawrence.

  *

  Were the 1990s a mere blip on the landscape, when
an unfortunate group of women just made too many mistakes or didn’t have enough talent to make it? Rod Cameron thinks so. When I interviewed him, he said his thesis still held up: ‘The general point is that sheilas are going to be generally better viewed, and a good female candidate will these days, generally speaking, beat a good male candidate.’

  Cameron argues that the feminisation thesis means male leaders are becoming more accessible and human, while women are having more success at a community level. And while, he said, Labor was still placing factional hurdles in front of many women, the Liberals were putting more women in marginal seats: ‘The Libs realised it’s not the high-fliers we are searching for, with some exceptions, but a community-minded, strong but ordinary woman in marginal seats, like Dana Vale and Jackie Kelly — they are not much as ministers, but are wonderful local members . . . What lies at the heart of their electability is that the community-type people, strong and dynamic but ordinary — I don’t mean to be offensive, but natural for their community — usually go very well.’

  The grassroots is well and good, but what is stopping women from becoming leaders?

  The female meteor syndrome — where women flame then fade to black — has demonstrated a clear gap between the expectations and judgements of the press and the public. It has long been established that there are many advantages to being a woman in politics. An ANOP poll commissioned by Susan Ryan as far back as 1982 found good female candidates appealed more to swinging voters than men did because they appeared more human, more honest than the men.

  The canonisation of female MPs has been fuelled by a public distrust of politicians in general, and a desire for difference, integrity and honesty. As James Oram put it in the Sun-Herald, ‘The public would rather trust a junkyard dog with rabies than a politician howling at election time.’12 Former NSW community services minister Carmel Tebbutt believes there is a lot of pressure on women to be ‘the humanising force in politics . . . Women do tend to be more consensual, focus more on outcomes, and are put off by the rough and tumble of politics . . . but I am not convinced that’s not the product of the way women are brought up . . . and over time that will change.’

  With the notable exception of Carmen Lawrence, who initially held sway over the press gallery, voters are frequently more receptive to women in politics than journalists are. Reporters are astonished when they travel with politicians who are swarmed and embraced by people on the street, possibly reflecting a conflation of politics and celebrity. Even Margaret Guilfoyle, who was not a celebrity, was likened to the Queen. Reporters stood by as Pauline Hanson was mobbed in shopping malls, people asked Natasha Stott Despoja for her autograph at airports, and cricket fans shouted out to Bronwyn Bishop. Polls regularly defied pundits: Bishop was shown to have popular support (at least ahead of Hewson), Hanson had surprising success, and Stott Despoja at one point polled as Australia’s most popular politician, even though political journalists thought each of them lacked depth and substance. The reason for the popularity of so many of these women is precisely that they were seen to be different from conventional politicians. They spoke openly, wore different — and often feminine — clothes, did not snub mainstream television shows or women’s magazines, and they cried and got angry with the media. Each in turn seemed vulnerable. But while their humanity endeared them to voters, in many guises it turned journalists against them — they should be stronger and not look good, or enjoy looking good; they should turn photographers away and insist journalists only ever write about policy. If they’ll listen.

  Stott Despoja was keenly conscious that the views of journalists did not reflect those of the community:

  For a while there we just read the letters [page] because we thought, we just want to know what you guys are thinking. We don’t want to know what the opinion makers are thinking. And obviously focus groups and things like that are fascinating too . . . And for a while there I was thinking, what am I going to do? Everyone thinks I am stupid. And you go out into the community and people say, ‘Oh I can’t believe it, oh you are so articulate, thanks for standing up for . . .’ and you just think ‘You do? What are you reading?’ . . . As I’ve always said it’s about the community, it could never afford to be about the press gallery because if it was [I would be in trouble].

  What was most lethal for many female politicians in the 2000s was not the disdain of the press but the excitement about possible female leaders, and women who have the potential to penetrate or change in some way the blokey political culture so many voters are tired of witnessing. There was, however, still a bias underlying much coverage, demonstrated in sideswipes at good-looking women, a distaste for celebrity, almost a hatred of those seen to complain about their treatment at the hands of the media. The standards of behaviour are higher, and therefore the attacks more vicious for those who transgress them. At the same time, in the 2000s, many women MPs struggled to get any coverage at all.

  Julia Gillard believes there was an intensity about the experience of Carmen Lawrence as ‘the woman most likely’ that was unprecedented in Australian politics:

  And I think whilst Carmen endured and survived it, the black motive that drove the Libs on that occasion, you’d have to say they actually got a bit of what they wanted. They did have a fair bit of success with taking her out of what she could have been doing and shoving her talents into an ongoing defensive struggle over many years . . . I think probably the lesson for everybody and probably the lesson a bit more acutely for women, because women are still a bit unusual in politics, is you don’t want to underestimate the ferocity of what the political system is about.

  Lawrence says her advice to the next generation of young women, would be ‘not so much to try and hide but to repudiate exaggerated perceptions. What I should have done more often than not was say “don’t be ridiculous”, and I didn’t do that often enough I suspect.’

  *

  I do not know if Carmen Lawrence lied, but I do know that Australians have witnessed numerous political fictions in recent times. It is as though we expect politicians to fib. Spin, fudge, duck, weave, cover-up. Children overboard, Tampa, intelligence about weapons of mass destruction, threats of terror within our region. We were told that a group of asylum seekers arriving by boat threw their children overboard, which was false.13 We were told Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction, which was false.14 We were told Australians knew nothing of the abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, which was false. But while these were exposed as lies, they had negligible impact on the politicians responsible for them. As for driving people to kill themselves, there have been at least a dozen suicide attempts in our detention centres by desperate asylum seekers, and we have sat by and watched. Who is responsible for those? Will we hold a royal commission into conditions in detention, and the psychological deterioration of children we left behind razor fences in the desert for years?

  Two days after I interviewed Lawrence, former governor-general Sir William Deane, in a speech given at the University of Queensland, criticised the Howard government’s lack of truth in incidents such as the children overboard inquiry, and the lack of justice in mandatory detention, and said the greatest challenge for future leaders was to be just and truthful.15 In November 2003, Richard Woolcott, a former secretary of the Department of Foreign Affairs, concluded in an opinion piece in the Age that ‘many Australians no longer believe their government’. In the public imagination, political rhetoric is conflated with fudging, with half-truths and quarter-truths, with blatant lies. The most recent have been protested, ironically, by Lawrence herself. Her survival is due to the fact that to many she still represents integrity, a new kind of politics.

  When I dropped into her office, a couple of weeks after she had burst into tears while talking about Penny Easton, I asked how she was feeling. ‘Oh,’ she laughed, ‘I recovered pretty quickly.’

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  How to Succeed in Politics Without a Penis

  I am not going to change my hairstyle,
I’m not going to clip my eyebrows, I’m not going to change the clothes that I feel comfortable in and I’m certainly not going to start working out whether I’m going to offend somebody if I say something.1

  — Janine Haines

  You need to have a cardinal rule, and I think the one is, always opt for never playing the victim. If it happens, just wear it. Because . . . when you use the victim card, no matter how many times you use it, that will be the end. Some misdemeanour, bad deed, misjudgement or whatever, that’s unfairly used against you, you will survive that. Each one of those individual ones you will survive. But if you get typecast as a victim, you won’t. So it doesn’t matter how bad it is, just remember this too will pass, but labelling the victim won’t.2

  — Amanda Vanstone

  In 1994, the former premier of Victoria, Joan Kirner, donned leather pants and gelled her hair for an appearance on ‘The Late Show’ singing Joan Jett’s raunchy rock classic, ‘I Love Rock and Roll’. It was a visual treat: she howled, rocked and strutted her way through the performance, camping it up in a way that endeared her to thousands. It was not just the abandon and apparent lack of self-consciousness that was so appealing, but the fact that it is so unusual to see politicians goofing around happily in public. Years later, she told me it was her most successful media appearance: people still wanted to come up and shake the hand of the feisty politician who for a moment looked like any of us up onstage at a corny karaoke night, with a few lagers under our straining belts. Many female politicians have gained the media’s respect through competence and talent. Others have done it simply by appearing human.