Andrew Bolt: If Gladys Berejiklian was a man she’d already be gone
Poor Gladys. Another good woman done wrong by her shady lover and left broken hearted. But no one would boo-hoo if a male politician was such a fool for love, writes Andrew Bolt.
Andrew Bolt
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If Gladys Berejiklian was “Gary” Berejiklian she’d be gone already.
No one would boo-hoo over a male politician who was such a fool for love that they never noticed their secret squeeze was a sleaze.
But the NSW Premier — poor Gladys! — says she’s “overwhelmed” by the public’s support. The Prime Minister, no less, clucks how this very “private” woman just made a very “human” mistake.
Some mistake.
Somehow Berejiklian was so blind that she didn’t see that her lover, then MP Daryl Maguire, had turned his parliamentary office into a private business, as he admitted yesterday to the Independent Commission Against Corruption.
Somehow she was so deaf that she didn’t hear him in one bugged conversation after another tell her about his money troubles and the property deals he was trying to broker on the side, using his influence.
Somehow none of that registered, even after Berejiklian was forced to sack Maguire in 2018, saying how “shocked” and “disappointed” she was that he’d been accused in an earlier anti-corruption hearing of using his influence for cash.
In fact, on Wednesday, Maguire admitted he’d tried to sell his influence “to the very highest levels of government”, and also got many cash payments in his office for his “scam” of selling visas to foreign students.
But Berejiklian said she saw nothing, and certainly never helped Maguire in his schemes.
Instead, she kept Maguire as her lover until last August, when ICAC finally told her of the couple’s conversations it had bugged.
She was just blinded by love, we’re supposed to believe.
Another good woman done wrong, and now — broken hearted — will devote herself to the public service of her state.
But what did ICAC privately tell her in August that Maguire himself hadn’t already told her in their bugged conversations?
Did she end their affair only because what was secret was now public?
And if Berejiklian had not kept her affair with Maguire secret, would she have seemed so principled in sacking him in 2018?
If she can be so easily blinded to apparent corruption, how can she be trusted to run her state?
For a man, such questions would be fatal. But for a woman, they seem heartless.
Women always demanded — rightly — an equal shot at leadership.
Yet they’re still judged differently — as ever the weak victim of wicked men.