High-profile Australian political figures driven by power and vanity fall for staffers time after time
HIGH-profile Australian political figures driven by power and vanity have fallen for their staffers time after time.
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HIGH-profile Australian political figures driven by power and vanity have fallen for their staffers time after time.
Former federal treasurer Jim Cairns’ affair with his private secretary Junie Morosi generated whispering campaigns and rocked the Whitlam government in the 1970s.
He denied it and even sued for defamation, but in 2002 he finally came clean and admitted to a sexual relationship.
Former foreign minister and deputy Labor leader Gareth Evans’ five-year affair with his star recruit Cheryl Kernot generated frenzied media interest in the late-1990s and early-2000s.
Former Australian Democrat leader Ms Kernot had moved to the ALP in 1997, a defection that rocked Australian politics and later shone the spotlight on their affair.
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Mr Evans lied to parliament about what he later described in an email as a “grand consuming passion” in an email, and the affair ended with Ms Kernot leaving politics, saying her priority would be recovering from the vitriol heaped on her.
Liberal MP Bob Woods was slapped with an 18-month suspended jail sentence in 1999 after claiming $140-a-night allowances for 23 nights spent at the Sydney apartment of a young female Liberal staffer with whom he was having an affair. Woods pleaded guilty and much of the detail did not emerge.
Labor frontbencher Tony Burke came under fire for charging taxpayers $48,000 in 2009 to take first-class flights to Spain and Italy with his staffer Skye Laris, who is now his partner.
Mr Burke separated from his wife Cathy Bresnan-Burke in 2012 and two years later Mr Burke and Ms Laris went public with their relationship.
And widely reported at the time was the illicit romance in 1951 between former PM Ben Chifley and his secretary. He suffered a heart attack and died in her company at the Canberra hotel where he lived.