The Mocker: Four Corners Canberra Bubble episode all soap, no substance

The ABC’s Four Corners program has come under fire over its Canberra Bubble report.

Should Four Corners be renamed “The Fornicators”? It is a catchy name, and given the human weakness for succumbing to carnal lusting, there is no shortage of subject matter. Whether it is in the public interest to expose the peccadillos of toey politicians is another matter.

Certainly government frontbenchers Alan Tudge and Christian Porter would have a strong opinion on that issue following the program’s ‘Canberra Bubble’ episode last week. As a result we learned Tudge had an affair with then media adviser Rachelle Miller in 2017, and that during the same year Porter allegedly kissed a young female staffer at a Canberra bar, a claim he strenuously denies. Both men were married at the time.

As we know, ABC journalists even went back a quarter of century to Porter’s university days to portray the Attorney-General as a long-term misogynist. Some of the observations: “He joked about his drinking and his rowdy behaviour”, “He gained a reputation as a hard-drinking party boy and womaniser,” and was seen “vomiting over himself”.

Four Corners raked over Attorney-General Christian Porter’s university days. Picture: AAP

In other words, he would hardly have stood out at university. He was “a private schoolboy from Perth,” and as such he “had that assuredness that’s perhaps born of privilege”. Maybe he was just self-confident by nature, but the narrative dictated this information be delivered pejoratively.

Seemingly of frightful concern is Porter’s mixing of business with pleasure, as evident by the ABC footage of him (and other guests) dancing at a Lawyers Weekly function last year. “Minister Porter has maintained his party boy reputation,” presenter and journalist Louise Milligan proclaimed disapprovingly. It brought to mind the words of the fictional Reverend Shaw Moore, played by John Lithgow in the film Footloose. “If our Lord wasn’t testing us, how would you account for the proliferation, these days, of this obscene rock and roll music, with its gospel of easy sexuality and relaxed morality?”

It was almost as lengthy as a prosecution brief in a Puritan court. When asked in 1999 as Cleo’s magazine’s Bachelor of the Year what song he would choose to serenade a woman, Porter nominated Queen’s “Another One Bites the Dust”. This is outrage piffle. Don’t tell the shrieking sisters, but the first record I bought featured the Ted Mulry Gang and their number one hit “Jump in My Car”.

I am only half-joking to say I expected to hear next “Four Corners has found an old University of Western Australia library lawbook that refers to the landmark contact law case of Carlill v Carbolic Smoke Ball Company, and we discovered someone has written anonymously on the case report in red pen ‘Serves the silly cow right for believing this gimmick would ward off influenza’, a reference to the female plaintiff. And on the page referring to the historic negligence case of Donoghue v Stevenson you can see in what appears to be the same handwriting ‘This case illustrates the dangers of women drinking non-alcoholic beverages on a date’. We spoke to a retired UWA lecturer who is convinced these entries are identical to Christian Porter’s handwriting.”

Federal Liberal MP Alan Tudge. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Sarah Matray

Tudge does not dispute he committed adultery, and his response was predictable. “There is nothing that justifies what I did and I will regret my actions for the rest of my life,” he wrote on Facebook. “To my community, the Knox locals who have repeatedly put their confidence in me as their representative, I have also let you down and I am sorry.”

It is difficult to stomach the cant that followed the exposé of a philandering politician for having had sexual relations with another consenting adult. Take for example the prissy sentiments of former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull, who ironically prides himself on being a small ‘l’ liberal. Many would prefer the reaction of former British prime minister Winston Churchill, a conservative, when he was informed one of the Crown’s junior ministers, Ian Harvey, had been discovered in the bushes of St James’s Park having sex with a Coldstream Guardsman. “On the coldest night of the year? It makes one proud to be British.”

At least Tudge did not blame the nation’s capital for his moral failings. Former Labor MP Cheryl Kernot did exactly that when Nine’s Laurie Oakes revealed in 2002 that she and then ALP deputy leader Gareth Evans were secretly in a relationship when he oversaw her defection from the Democrats in 1997. The affair began, claimed Kernot, because she found Canberra to be “very artificial” and “very lonely”.

Despite that story being in the public interest (former Labor leader Kim Beazley said in 2002 words to the effect the party would not have accepted Kernot as a candidate had he known about the affair), Oakes was criticised for his scoop and accused of sexism. Then Democrats leader Natasha Stott-Despoja tartly told reporters “It’s none of my business and it’s none of yours,” claiming media coverage would “discourage people, particularly women, from entering public life”.

But conservative men who stray are another matter. The Project host Lisa Wilkinson, who last week strongly defended Four Corners’ reporting, tweeted self-righteously “If those who seek to represent us totally misrepresent who they really are …. then we bloody well deserve to know about it”.

Paul Kelly said tonight’s @4corners redefined what’s in the public interest.

About bloody time.

If those who seek to represent us totally misrepresent who they really are, and it’s all kept hidden in the “Canberra bubble”, then we bloody well deserve to know about it.#qanda

— Lisa Wilkinson (@Lisa_Wilkinson) November 9, 2020

No problem. Parliament already has a Register of Members’ Interests. But on a serious note, demands such as these are reactionary and simplistic. For example, imagine a situation where a female minister is married to a man but is secretly in a relationship with a woman. If she had declared that upfront to her prime minister, is it really in the public interest to expose her?

Contrast this with the reaction of commentators when it was when it was revealed in 1998 that US President Bill Clinton had sexual interactions on nine occasions in the Oval Office with White House intern Monica Lewinsky, who was only 21 when they began. Not only was Clinton 27 years her senior, he also lied on oath by denying they had occurred.

“I now believe Clinton should hold his head high and resist this sleazy effort to shame him out of office,” wrote feminist and author Anne Summers in the Sydney Morning Herald in 1998. Instead she directed her wrath at special prosecutor Kenneth Starr, whom she described as “another hustler of pornography” and “the Larry Flynt of the legal profession”. In the understatement of the year, she reluctantly conceded that Clinton “infringed at least the spirit of his country’s sexual harassment laws by conducting this relationship in the workplace”. You reckon?

On the evening the Four Corners program in question screened, Summers retweeted sentiments from another commentator that the Morrison government had “acted with total impunity in relation to women for too long”. Former Sydney Morning Herald columnist and ABC journalist Mike Carlton was also cheering on the exposé – at last count he had compiled/retweeted 40 promotional tweets referring to that episode.

Joe, for your own sake, just stop it. You are starting to sound very silly.

— Mike Carlton (@MikeCarlton01) November 10, 2020

But in 1998, Carlton, then writing for the SMH about the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal, could only be described as sanguine and full of mirth. “What is the point of being the most powerful man in the world, etc, if you cannot get your own way occasionally?” he joked, saying that “Bill and his bimbos have recreated the magic of Kennedy’s Camelot…” It gets even better. “The Monica Lewinsky affair is puzzling in one aspect,” he quipped. “How can you ask a woman for oral sex and demand that she keep her mouth shut?” Maybe Carlton should sit this one out.

CNN footage of Monica Lewinsky and then president Bill Clinton in 1996.

There is also the issue of journalistic impartiality. Milligan has acknowledged Four Corners does not maintain that it is only Liberal parliamentarians who engage in this conduct but justified the program’s selective focus on the fact that “the Liberal Party is in government”. This is partisan reasoning. If the ABC believes Australians are entitled to know about the sexual exploits of ministers, then surely the national broadcaster has a similar obligation to report the same about members of the alternative government.

Unlike Clinton, neither Tudge nor Porter is alleged to have broken the law. The acts alleged preceded Turnbull’s infamous “bonk ban” which prohibits ministers from having sexual relations with staffers. In the absence of any harassment complaints being upheld against the ministers, or of either being compromised, the Four Corners Canberra Bubble episode was aptly named. It was all soap and no substance.

After @4corners I'm reflecting on the fact this government sought to silence pesky female voices like mine after the budget. They've acted with total impunity in relation to women for too long. May #CredibleWomen & #CredibleMen - like the #4corners team - challenge & change it.

— Georgie Dent (@georgiedent) November 9, 2020