Breaking up with Premier Gladys Berejiklian would be tragic
After Gladys Berejiklian’s closest friends had picked themselves up off the floor, wiped away the dribble or the tears, re-hinged their jaws and swapped bad-taste jokes to relieve the tension as they literally spun out, they began trying to process what they had just heard about her secret love.
It wasn’t just the what, it was the who. It was incomprehensible, it was shocking, it was inexplicable, injudicious, even reckless.
It was so unlike the straitlaced, workaholic woman they knew and so admired.
Ultimately, after weighing up everything they had heard on Monday and Tuesday, using their legal brain as well as their political brain, they had concluded it should not spell the end for her.
It was not a conclusion they had come to lightly. That could change, and not from the testimony of a spurned lover, but only if substantive contradictory information emerges or if the NSW Independent Commission Against Corruption makes damaging findings against her.
Based on her track record and her conduct over many years, it would be a tragedy if Berejiklian were forced to resign as premier over this. The NSW Liberals would survive, but they would be in pieces. The loss nationally at such a time also would be felt keenly. Australia right now is not so blessed with competent leaders that it can afford to let one go because of a lapse of judgment that, as far as is now known, did not benefit her financially.
There has to be a sense of proportion, with an emphasis on investigating rather than hyperventilating. Ask any sensible Melburnian today, or any Londoner or New Yorker, how they would feel if they had Gladys running their cities and there were suggestions she should be sacked over what has transpired so far.
Ask which other leader anywhere has accomplished what she has through the pandemic.
A careful trawl through her testimony before ICAC — combined with knowledge of Berejiklian’s character (her flaws as well as strengths) and her strong performance at a press conference to admit her monumental stuff up while insisting she would not resign — convinced friends and colleagues she could survive until the next election. If she can make it through the next few days. They agree wholeheartedly with her about what a costly mistake it was to hook up with an alleged shyster, but if it’s a crime choosing a bloke on the make to have an affair with, then millions of people would be incarcerated.
Summing up the views of many, former Supreme Court judge Anthony Whealy on Wednesday morning urged calm, saying people should not to rush to judgment.
Her closest political friends knew nothing of the five-year long relationship. She has sworn she did not even tell her family.
People who have known her for decades, who tried without success to play matchmaker, who lined her up with dates, who watched her at parties nursing one glass of champagne for close to an hour before putting it down untouched, to whom she confessed what a lonely life it was, did not have a clue she was entangled with disgraced former Liberal MP Daryl Maguire. Nor were they aware of any other long-term relationship in all the years they had known her. They cited her inexperience in matters of the heart to explain her behaviour. You have to grow up the daughter of migrants in a strict environment to understand this.
They said if they had known about Maguire, they would not have hesitated to warn her off him. On top of everything else, they found him rude, arrogant and condescending — everything she was not — which made her choice even more dumbfounding.
They could only surmise the obsessively private woman had felt comfortable, or safe, becoming involved with Maguire because she had known him for such a long time, that he was a close friend of a close friend — former premier Barry O’Farrell — and that as an older man he would be dependable and trustworthy.
They found it more difficult to explain why she continued the relationship with Maguire, in whatever form, after sacking him and forcing him to resign his seat in 2018. But they accept that one factor was her concern for his mental health.
They read her responses to his talk of deals as a brush-off from a woman with more important things on her mind, tired of hearing the same old stuff that he was set to strike it big. Voters punish politicians who play around if they use public money to fund their romances, or if they are distracted from the job they are paid to do. There is no evidence of any of that. Still, she has been hurt personally and politically by the revelations.
As noted here before, Berejiklian has been the best leader, bar none, state or federal, this year thanks to her exemplary handling of the response to COVID-19 and before that the bushfires. That realisation, and the acceptance that without her, winning the next election would be so much more difficult, could save her, barring more damaging disclosures. She has told colleagues she intends to lead the government to the next election. According to one colleague, there is her, “then there is daylight”.
The NSW Liberal Right formally decided to stick with her. Her deputy and other ministers lined up to defend her. There was near universal support at a virtual party meeting, with the only concern — expressed by Matthew Mason-Cox — being the threats from Mark Latham to block legislation in the upper house. Yes, the same Latham who laughed about breaking a taxi driver’s arm; who went from Labor leader to flirting with the Liberals, to Liberal Democrat, to now One Nation; and who, you would think, would be close to the last, if not the last, person to lecture anyone on appropriate behaviour.
Initially slow to support her, slower even than Labor figures including Anthony Albanese to express sympathy, Scott Morrison became more effusive in his praise of her as days went by, as it became clearer there could be less to this than meets the eye, that public sentiment was on her side and as the party coalesced around her.
We have heard such declarations before, from members of all factions, all parties, state and federal, on a succession of leaders and by a succession of leaders, then watched them all unravel.
Maybe that won’t happen this time. Maybe they will stick. But it remains a highly volatile situation.
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