Kate Ellis, Sarah Hanson Young and Julie Bishop talk about sex
Kate Ellis knows gossip about her sex life went around Canberra when she was an MP. And somehow, she’s not angry. But we should be furious for her.
Kate Ellis has never used the prayer room at Parliament House for indecent liaisons.
She did not adorn her nether regions with jewels to prepare for Canberra’s Midwinter Ball.
She did not spend the night having sex with Labor colleague Tony Burke either.
There were never any threesomes with other members of her staff.
Ellis knows gossip about her sex life went around Canberra when she was MP for Adelaide. She writes about all of it in her book Sex, Lies and Question Time (Hardie Grant Books).
And somehow, she’s not angry. But let’s be absolutely furious for her, shall we? Because it really is quite disgusting that Ellis had to put up with this kind of garbage during her 14 years as a member of the House of Representatives.
Imagine something similar being said about John Howard, even sotto voce: you know he puts pearls down there, don’t you, before he heads out for a night on a town? It would never happen. It happens only to women, and it is designed to humiliate them, to make them feel vulnerable, as women, in the nation’s capital.
Ellis, who was 27 when she won her seat in 2004, tells The Australian she didn’t feel she could say anything because the “don’t complain” mentality in Canberra worked against it.
“You’re meant to be strong enough to brush it off,” she says.
She has watched, delighted, as a new generation has risen up, marching on Parliament House to say: Enough!
“But I should also say that I feel a bit guilty,” she says.
“I’ve been watching women come forward these past few weeks and I have been shocked.
“I always knew that the culture was disrespectful, and gossipy but I didn’t know it was so dangerous.
“So I have a real sense of guilt. I don’t want to complain about rumours being spread about me when far, far worse has obviously been happening.”
Ellis says she no longer believes in “staying silent, hoping behaviour will change. It clearly won’t.”
In her book, Ellis writes that she had “only been a politician for a few weeks when I was approached in a Canberra bar and told, ‘The only thing anyone really wants to know about you, Kate, is how many blokes you had to f..k to get into parliament’ ”.
This was after she had won a marginal seat from the incumbent Liberal MP.
“Soon after my arrival in parliament, a rumour started that the member for Watson, Tony Burke, and I were sleeping together,” she continues.
“Years later, when my husband (David Penberthy) told one of his mates that we were dating, his mate responded: ‘Is she still having sex with Tony Burke though?’
“For what it’s worth, we never were. But while interviewing women for this book, I learnt of rumours that had been spread about my sex life that I was completely unaware of until this point.”
The vajazzling is a case in point. “When Tanya Plibersek and I were discussing some of the various rumours that had been spread about us, she brought a new one to my attention (when she said): ‘You had that whole vajazzling thing to deal with.’
“I had no idea what she was talking about. Absolutely none,” writes Ellis. “She went on to explain that there had been a little piece in one of the papers about how one female minister had taken preparations for the annual Midwinter Ball so seriously that she had been seen earlier that day checking in to a local beauty clinic to be vajazzled.
“For the uninitiated — and the unvajazzled — the practice of vajazzling apparently involves having pretty gemstones and sparkly rhinestones adorned to your pubic mound, to jazz yourself up downstairs. ‘The whole parliament was talking about how it was you!’ Tanya informed me.”
You can tell from the way Ellis has written about it that she tried hard to see the funny side.
Only now can she see that nobody should have to tolerate such low-rent nastiness while going about their job.
The people spreading this stuff, are they 12? No, but they were intent on derailing Ellis’s career.
For example, Ellis uses the time she was confronted by a newspaper journalist with gossip about a “sordid threesome” that had apparently destabilised her office. “They said I was having sex with the same man as my adviser,” she says. “And according to the gossip, we had to sit him down and ask him to choose.”
Apparently, the then-PM — Kevin Rudd — had to intervene to “get us all to put our pants back on and get back to work”.
“There was not a single element of truth in any of this,” Ellis writes, yet when she heard the story was going to be printed “I believed with every ounce of my being that my credibility would never survive.
“So there I was, an Australian federal minister, pleading on the phone to an editor I had never spoken to before, and I will always cringe as I remember the exact words I said: ‘Honestly, I promise. I’ve never even kissed him.’ How pathetic.”
It’s nobody’s business but she in fact had two long-term relationships over the course of her time as a politician.
“I wasn’t sleeping with half of Australia’s politicians or Australia’s political staff members or Australia’s men, but none of this is really about facts,” she writes.
Nor is it about natural enemies. In fact, Ellis is careful not to point the finger at the “other side” because “the reality is that there are also plenty of examples coming from inside your own party”.
“Proving that I was frivolous, unprofessional, stupid or lacking commitment would go a long way towards delivering a vacancy in the (Labor) ministry for those who felt more deserving of it,” she writes.
“Outlandish sexual rumours would be a great way to start.”
Besides Plibersek, Ellis also interviewed Sarah Hanson-Young for the book because she, too, has spent time as a young, single woman in Canberra.
“There was a very quick change from the moment people discovered I wasn’t married anymore,” Hanson-Young tells Ellis.
A rumour went around that “she was sleeping with journalist Tony Wright”.
She denied it absolutely, saying he was “old enough to be her grandfather”.
Another piece of gossip claimed that Hanson-Young had been “busted having sex in the prayer room”.
“And of course I’d never even put foot in that prayer room. “I don’t even f..king know where it is,” she says.
But it does seem to be one of the rumours that gets spread about anyone who is young and attractive. “Being caught having sex with a Comcar driver is another popular one,” says Ellis.
She is most upset about rumours that make it into print, lashing BuzzFeed for publishing “one of the most salacious stories ever written about an Australian politician.
“It was also total garbage.”
Labor MP Emma Husar was accused of performing a “Sharon Stone move” (uncrossing her legs to reveal her vagina) to fellow MP Jason Clare as he was sitting on his office floor playing with his toddler son. Husar sued and the case was eventually settled.
Ellis also writes about what happened to Pauline Hanson: “Imagine waking one morning, casually opening the newspaper and finding (fake) nude or semi-nude pornographic photos of yourself splashed across the front page claiming to be long-lost images from a secret R-rated photo shoot. “She was mortified saying: ‘I have always acted like a lady … to see that photo was humiliating.’ ”
Reflecting on her own time at the centre of the rumour mill, Ellis says: “It’s designed to make you feel uncomfortable, and, of course, it does. And it’s easy to attack women about their sex lives.”
She acknowledges that Tony Abbott was also the subject of gossip but says: “I suspect that was an attempt to undermine the authority and influence of his chief of staff, Peta Credlin.
“In the majority of cases, sexual gossip is saved for use on women.
“For me, the key was to always think I have more important things to worry about than what people are saying about my sex life. It’s such a privilege and you want to grab it with both hands.
“Only after you leave and you get a bit of distance do you start to think, ‘This is not actually OK’.”
Ellis says many of the recent stories have shown Canberra to be less bush capital and more outrageous bacchanal. “It’s part because everyone is coming and going. The politicians and their staff often don’t live there. They travel without their family and it feels like a school camp, everyone catching up, and making the most of every moment,” she says.
“You don’t have anywhere to go, except out. It’s not where you live. So there is a lot of drinking and partying.
“And that is one part of the solution: make the place more family-friendly. When I was first elected, you rarely saw a baby for the whole week you were in parliament, and now you are seeing politicians as parents with children, and the place does seem more human.”
She says Parliament House is in fact better than most workplaces for women since it has a childcare centre on site.
“Towards the end, I had my baby with me all the time,” she says. “I wasn’t going out. I was racing home to put my baby to bed. And that creates another problem for women because the culture is, if you don’t go out and drink with people, you’re vacating the space where networking happens. And networking is so important.”
Despite all this — the demoralising, destabilising treatment — she still believes she had “the best job in the world”.
She quit not in a world of hurt and frustration but because she had married and started a family.
“I think I made the right call,” she says. “My eldest was due to start school and I couldn’t bear the idea of being away from my children for 20 weeks of the year.
“I had misgivings because the last thing I wanted was to send a message to women that Canberra isn’t for them.
“In fact, I believe that a huge part of the solution is to get more women in parliament. I didn’t want to put anyone off. But things have to change. It doesn’t do anyone any good to scare half the population away.”
