Shaun Carney: Robert Doyle failed to deal with a changing world

ROBERT Doyle is at heart an old-fashioned man who failed to see the modern focus is on individuals rather than institutions, writes Shaun Carney.

ONCE Tessa Sullivan resigned spectacularly as a Melbourne city councillor just before Christmas, Robert Doyle was always going to have to quit as lord mayor. Almost certainly his chairmanship of Melbourne Health would come to a premature end, too.

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The question was: would Doyle be able to leave with his head held high, cleared of the sexual misconduct allegations made by Sullivan, or would he find himself departing before the matter was resolved?

On Sunday, we got the answer. There would be no dignified, face-saving exit. Doyle would not be able to say, as he had hoped, that while he was relieved that the charges that he had always denied had been found to be false, it would be in the best interests of the council, the health network and the people of Melbourne that he move on.

But it was not to be.

Robert Doyle stepped down from Town Hall this week. Picture: AAP

Instead, shattered psychologically and emotionally to the point of being so ill that he had to be hospitalised, Doyle resigned from both posts before the inquiry process was concluded.

Worse, with the inquiry into Sullivan’s allegations having widened after more women came forward, the former lord mayor’s behaviour will continue to be a focus of public attention.

This thing is far from over.

The findings by Ian Freckleton, QC, are yet to be made public. Whichever way they go, they are bound to be sensational. His draft report has been given to Doyle, and its contents appear to have plunged the former lord mayor deeper into despair, culminating in Sunday night’s resignation.

Doyle has protested his innocence from the first moment and he is backed vigorously by his wife, Emma Page Campbell, who says her husband has been “brought to the brink of being broken” after being denied natural justice. They believe the Freckleton inquiry has not operated on the presumption of innocence.

Emma Page Campbell has rigorously defended her husband, Robert Doyle. Picture: Nicole Garmston

Doyle’s downfall provides a timely and invaluable demonstration of how swiftly public opinion on what is acceptable or tolerable in workplaces and social situations is changing.

It will frustrate, even enrage, a lot of men and women, especially in the older age group, that this change is afoot — but it’s undeniable.

Once there is a trigger, there is, seemingly, an avalanche, and those who find themselves accused could well be conning themselves if they think they can somehow manage these things. It is an issue that looks to be beyond professional crisis managers.

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By all accounts, Doyle felt genuinely ambushed and blindsided by Sullivan’s accusations and by the allegations that followed from another councillor, Cathy Oke. Further allegations followed, from a female doctor who was seated next to him at a function — the subject of a separate investigation ordered by the state government — and a woman who had visited his electorate office when he was the state member for Malvern in 1997.

We do not know the veracity of these allegations, at least not yet. But in these stories, there is more than enough hurt, humiliation and confusion to go around for all involved, especially those who are telling them.

Robert Doyle’s public life has come to a swift end.

The end of Doyle’s public life extinguishes what was, for him, the role of a lifetime as lord mayor.

If you view his professional trajectory in three acts, the first sees him as a boy from a broken home, raised in Myrtleford by his mother and grandparents until he’s sent off to board at Geelong College.

Ambitious but without focus, he drops out of law studies at university and ends up as a teacher at elite private schools.

The second act finds him joining the Liberal Party and becoming a state MP in 1992.

Ten years later, he leads the party to possibly the worst election defeat in Victorian politics.

Act three begins with him coming back from the political dead as the city’s longest-serving lord mayor, a job in which he displayed a bent for genuine policy acumen and old-fashioned hucksterism.

It ends with his resignation from a hospital bed, too shattered to cope.

In literature — and Doyle would appreciate this as a former English teacher and a lover of the written word — it would be classified as a tragedy.

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Doyle has long been regarded as a bon vivant who enjoyed both his work and his social life, which included having a drink.

He operated under conventions that prevailed for a long time and by the look of it, he loved the life he was living.

It was going along very well until, suddenly, it wasn’t.

The thing is, society isn’t what it used to be. It never is.

Soon after Doyle became Liberal leader in 2002, I interviewed him for The Age with my colleague, Ewin Hannan.

In our profile, we wrote this: “Doyle is an institutions man, a believer in what he calls ‘the rule of law’.

“If there is a way in which something has always been done, then Doyle is more than likely a believer in it.

“He is, by his own lights, a process man, who constantly refers in conversation to the need for respect to be shown in society — respect for the courts, the parliament and media, and for property and for different points of view.”

Doyle was an old-fashioned man. The focus today is on individuals ahead of institutions. In a fast-changing, disrupted society, the old ways can’t all be sustained.

SHAUN CARNEY IS A HERALD SUN COLUMNIST