Samantha Maiden: Brought down by ICAC, but Gladys Berejiklian played the media like a fiddle

SA’s tap water cops a bad rap but it’s the convict state next door with the long history of crooked claims in politics, writes Samantha Maiden.

NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian has departed the top job in an ICAC-shaped box.

It was a farewell performance that involved the surprising spectacle of supporters laying flowers at her door this week.

Call me a contrarian, but it’s a funny old business where a politician who is the subject of an anti-corruption watchdog probe is hailed as some sort of feminist hero.

How did she manage to land in this golden space? For one thing people like and respect her.

She’s an incredible migrant success story, the daughter of an Armenian migrant family who didn’t speak English until she was five years old.

And she hasn’t been found guilty of anything. She denies any wrongdoing.

That’s what’s so terribly unfair according to her supporters, because now she’s being lumped in with all the baddies.

She’s also played the media like a fiddle.

The entire “bad boyfriend” narrative surrounding her relationship with disgraced ex-MP Daryl Maguire was a brilliant piece of political strategy executed by her minders.

How do we know? Well, they privately boasted about it for starters.

Why else submit herself to a humiliating round of interviews where she revealed she was “romantically inexperienced” and had never had a relationship with a man until she was in her 40s?

“I loved him but I’ll never speak to him again,’’ she said.

Messages and flowers are seen outside the electoral office of Gladys Berejiklian in Sydney. Picture: NCA NewsWire/Flavio Brancaleones

It was real pass-the-sick-bucket stuff, but it worked. Oh, it really worked. So much so that her approval ratings rocketed to new levels.

“I can formally say to people I’ve given up on love,’’ she added.

That was in October last year. But now she’s dating her original ICAC lawyer Arthur Moses. Life moves fast.

A self-described “goodie”, she has always enjoyed a reputation that was somewhere between Mother Teresa and the Virgin Mary.

But now, Berejiklian has gone the same way as two of her Liberal predecessors, brought down by the anti-corruption watchdog that former Liberal premier Nick Greiner established in the wake of Labor corruption allegations.

For his troubles Greiner got caught in its tentacles too, found to be “technically corrupt” over a decision to give a job to a former education minister.

That was later overturned on appeal, but only after Greiner was forced to resign in 1992.

Then came Barry O’Farrell, a mentor of Berejiklian who resigned after a “massive memory fail” in 2014 when he denied receiving a $3000 bottle of Grange from a businessman.

There’s been a good deal of nonsense written this week to suggest that ICAC has forced three premiers to resign when there’s no findings against them.

While there’s legitimate questions about the operation of the NSW corruption watchdog, the three premiers it has brought down are not as similar as they first appear.

Gladys Berejiklian resigns after ICAC investigation announcement. Picture: NCA NewsWire/ Jeremy Piper

Greiner had a finding against him. And while it’s true it was later overturned on appeal, he certainly toughed it out for a while.

In fact, he was keen to continue even after he was found to be “technically corrupt” but was forced to resign in 1992 by the crossbench.

As for O’Farrell, there’s probably an argument he never should have resigned given he wasn’t accused of anything and in his more private moments he’s said to regret it.

Berejiklian didn’t have to resign. She chose to do so because she is now the subject of an ICAC investigation into whether she “was liable to allow or encourage the occurrence of corrupt conduct by Mr Maguire’’.

By way of background, she chose never to disclose she was in a secret relationship with Maguire, to her colleagues and even to ICAC when they started investigating him.

When her chief of staff told her office to report anything troubling they knew to ICAC after the investigation into him went public years ago, two of her staff did but she didn’t think the relationship was relevant.

It only emerged after ICAC got her in the witness box last year and played tapes where her boyfriend spoke about various schemes and she insisted she “didn’t need to know about that”.

It’s true she never personally benefited from his various schemes, many of which failed to get off the ground. What is being probed is whether she turned a blind eye despite Section 11 of the ICAC act that requires politicians to disclose any reasonable suspicion of corruption.

But what is it about NSW that seems to involve more than their fair share of these types of scandals?

South Australia might get a bad rap for the taste of its tap water, but you would have to say it is the convict state of NSW where politicians seem to be carted off to the slammer at an alarming rate.

Not to suggest there’s never been a political crook in the history of SA, but you really have to rack your brains to think of them.

Even the recent allegations of MPs fiddling with travel expenses seem like petty crime compared to the industrial scale of the conga line of NSW MPs before the courts.

Are the NSW politicians dumber and just get caught more? It’s hard to know, but it does make you wonder if some of them are just more enthusiastic about doing crimes.

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