Why Berejiklian should stand firm in this sad ICAC affair

It’s a lonely life for a cautious woman. In a wasteland of mediocrity, it would be obscene to end a career of this calibre.

Premier Gladys Berejiklian: It’s an especially lonely life for a very cautious woman. Picture: NCA NewsWire / James Gourley

We call her Gladys in NSW because we came to know her so well. The working-class migrant story, Armenian parents carving out a new life for their family in Australia. As a kid with little ­English, her mum told her not to worry if she didn’t understand the teacher. Just put your hand up, ask questions. She did that, and more. Then it was head down, bum up again as a hardworking politician. Polite, decent, private Gladys. Not a whiff of the narcissism that we have wearily grown accustomed to from politicians.

Last year, Gladys Berejiklian led the NSW Liberal government to a third-term victory. Without playing the girl card, she became the first female Liberal leader to win a state election. No husband, no kids, no pretty family pics to woo voters. Also, she put to bed nonsense from disgruntled female Liberals that the Liberal Party had a problem with women because Julie Bishop didn’t become prime minister. The NSW Premier has led a competent, unified state government while the federal Liberals spent years fighting among themselves.

After a bumpy start and lots of learning from the Ruby Princess debacle, Berejiklian has managed COVID-19 with the sort of national vision that no other premier or state leader has replicated. While premiers in South Australia, Western Australia, Tasmania, and Queensland locked up their states, in NSW borders remained open, except to Victoria. Businesses reopened as soon as numbers fell. Hear that, Daniel Andrews?

Compared to Victoria’s nightmare, NSW has been a dream. Berejiklian has overseen a decentralised, grassroots nimble health system, a transparent and fast testing regime and effective contact tracing so that every day, every citizen of NSW knows where outbreaks happen.

Lucky for Berejiklian, context is everything, after the Premier was dragged into a sordid corruption investigation into her former lover and former MP, Daryl ­Maguire.

As an added bonus, the Victorian Premier might become ­Berejiklian’s saviour. While COVID should be the end of Andrews, COVID should be enough to save Gladys. It would, quite frankly, be obscene if Berejiklian departed the political stage over what unfolded this week at NSW’s Independent Commission Against Corruption, but Andrews remains in his job.

Daryl Maguire was punching above his weight.

The Victorian Premier has been guilty of incompetent and tricky leadership during COVID-19, and flat-out cruelty towards Victorians. The Andrews government couldn’t manage the hotel quarantine system, or effective contact tracing, or fast testing regimes. These multiple failures unleashed thousands of COV­ID-19 cases, killed more than 700 Victorians so far, and is causing untold damage to millions of lives. Yet the Victorian Premier expects us to believe that he, and his ministers, have no clue who made the decision to use private contractors in hotel quarantine. To repeat, it would be indecent for Andrews to stay but for Berejiklian to go.

That said, the halo has slipped, and we will look at Gladys differently after this week. The head girl, goody two-shoes, who didn’t seem to have time for a private life, is human after all. If women across the country feel some of Gladys’s pain, that’s because she’s not Robinson Crusoe when it comes to falling for a bloke who was bad for her.

Would we feel the same sympathy if a male premier was duped by a spivvy woman?

We should, because human fragility is not the same as a shifty character.

Most of us get the bad boys — or girls — out of our system much earlier in our dating lives. But maybe it was later for Gladys. Why should we be surprised that a canny political leader can be personally vulnerable. She fell for a man who was beneath her, who this week admitted to nefariously using his public office for private gain. Maguire has confessed to a host of allegations levelled against him by counsel assisting the ICAC, Scott Robertson, including dishonest cash-for-visa schemes using his parliamentary office to secure deals through a private company, and a land deal at Badgerys Creek that would have given him a $1.5m cut.

Berejiklian has not been accused of any wrongdoing by ICAC. Nor is there any evidence of that. Nothing. Nada. And yet some are calling for her to step aside, or even resign. Political bloviater Mark Latham, who has joined three political parties, is banging on about the pub test. Listening to Latham on Sky on Thursday night, that must be the pub for grumpy sods who prefer their own conclusions to the evidence so far.

That’s not a pub test. It’s Latham’s political agenda, one shared by the NSW Labor Opposition leader. Some Liberal colleagues want Berejiklian’s job. And, it’s hardly news that some journalists would love to claim a political scalp of her calibre.

Former NSW prosecutor Nicholas Cowdery, who says the NSW Premier should stand aside until ICAC has completed its report, says two matters cause him, and presumably others, unease. First, the fact that Berejiklian said to her loquacious loser boyfriend that she “didn’t need to know” about some matters he raised about his budding business deals, his debts and his finances.

Critics have jumped to the conclusion that Gladys was trying to dodge knowledge of wrongdoing. But there is no evidence of that. Many successful people in intimate relationships try to build Chinese Walls around professional lives. Not for any sneaky reason except to maintain sensible barriers. Or maybe, like many women, Gladys was just bored of listening to a blowhard boyfriend talking incessantly about himself. In any case, it is not a sign of corrupt behaviour to utter “Woohoo” when your boyfriend says he’s made a few bucks. Berejik­lian says she assumed that ­Maguire had made all the necessary disclosures about work he discussed with her. There is not a skerrick of evidence that she is lying about that either.

Maybe Gladys should have known better. Maybe she was head over heels in love for the first time with the man she started a secret tryst with in 2015. Maybe she found it hard to extricate herself from a relationship that finally ended in August this year. None of us know, or need to know that. Berejiklian has told voters plenty already.

This sad, secret relationship that Berejiklian chose not to share with friends or family is a reminder that dating is not easy when you have a high-profile political career. It’s an especially lonely life for a very cautious woman. Every woman knows that a great girlfriend is worth her weight in gold because she will tell you gently that he’s not good enough for you. Now everyone is saying it, even Bill Shorten says she was punching below her weight with the Wagga Wagga tosser.

The other claim is that Berejiklian should have cut Maguire loose from their private relationship when she, as Premier, sacked him in 2018 following an earlier ICAC probe. Is it so hard for her critics to imagine that Berejiklian did the right thing by sacking him, and maintained a relationship with a man she cared about during a dark time in his life?

Calls for her to step aside are rash. And, we have seen this all before. ICAC has a long history of besmirching good people, damaging their reputations through show trials beamed into our living rooms. ICAC hearings kick off a frenzy that others turn into a bigger, more public witch hunt, leaving innocent people damaged, the subject of gossip and innuendo, hounded by those with their own agenda.

The incessant search for political scalps is damaging, not just to people who are forced out for no good reason. It harms democracy. Barry O’Farrell forgot to declare a bottle of Grange and NSW lost a good and decent leader. The state lost another competent leader after Nick Greiner was brought down by ICAC for a brute act of politics, not corruption.

And now, apparently, Berejiklian should go? Only when there is clear evidence of wrongdoing that warrants removal. The frenzy so far hasn’t turned that up.

I say, “stand firm, Gladys”. It is hard enough finding good, decent, hardworking people to enter state politics. The place is a wasteland of mediocrity.

If Berejiklian is forced to resign despite no allegations against her, let alone evidence of wrongdoing, you would have to be mad, or have few other options, to choose a political career.

Can we really afford more of those kinds of people in parliament?