One of the most important transformations of our times is in the boundary between the private and the political.
This week’s ABCs Four Corners program, about the toxic environment in parliament house, hit hard because it was both an exemplar of the change and likely to spur further transformation.
Not surprisingly, it has left many feeling intensely uncomfortable, and raised important questions about the public interest and journalistic ethics.
The discomfort and the controversy shouldn’t surprise us. This is part of a paradigm shift in power relations.
Only now is the 1970s slogan of the feminist movement – the personal is political – being made a reality in public and corporate life. The #metoo movement has demonstrated that the private experiences of women are rooted in their political situation, and in gender inequality.
But what does this mean for journalists? Is it now a ‘free for all’? How should the new line be drawn?
I want to examine this by looking at the history of the shift, and some exemplars.
Settle in. This will take a while.
The Four Corners program alleged a toxic atmosphere for women in Parliament House, including attitudes and practices that would be unacceptable in the private sector.
The acid was in the particulars. It was revealed that then Human Services Minister Alan Tudge had an affair with political staffer, Rachelle Miller. She said on the program that the affair was consensual, but she regretted it and felt powerless and used. She said Tudge had been hypocritical in the difference between his private life and his public stance on the sanctity of marriage. She tied all this to the broader issue of toxic culture and unequal power relationships. Since the program aired, she has broadened her statements to include allegations of bullying by Tudge.
The second and more serious set of allegations concerned Attorney General Christian Porter, who was accused of a longstanding pattern of misogynistic behaviour. He was alleged to have cuddled and kissed a young female staffer in a public bar, when he had a wife and toddler at home. Greens Senator Sarah Hanson-Young said she had a conversation with this woman who was distressed about her relationship with Porter, and “in a situation she didn’t want to be in”.
Word of the incident in the bar made its way to then Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, who took Porter to task. This was a previously unrevealed part of the reason for Turnbull prohibiting sex between ministers and their staff in 2018.
Porter, meanwhile, has said the Four Corners account of the bar incident is inaccurate.
So much for the recap.
Australia has rarely seen the prurient combing through sexual peccadilloes and invasions of family privacy that has been fodder for tabloid media in the United Kingdom and the USA.
Australian journalists have been rightly proud of a healthy respect for the private lives of politicians. But in the era of #MeToo, we have to ask if the reluctance to report the personal has also hidden and perpetuated abuses of power.
I don’t think you can apply a cookie cutter to deciding whether sexual relationships should be made public. Each case has to be judged individually. As the Journalists Code of Ethics puts it: “Ethical journalism requires conscientious decision-making in context.”
During the Hawke-Keating government, one of the most senior and influential ministers was having an affair with a News Limited journalist. The minister – a man - was married. Many politicians and journalists knew about the affair, but it has never been made public. The journalist continued to report on politics and even wrote a book which, it is generally believed, was aided by her access to the senior levels of government.
A public matter, or private?
If this happened now, I hope the conflict of interest would be recognised, and either the minister would resign or the journalist would leave the press gallery.
Sadly, given most ministers are men, that would likely mean the woman’s career would suffer – as is so often the way.
But if the conflict of interest issue was resolved, I think this would be properly kept private - the concern of the minister, his wife and the journalist.
Also during the Hawke Keating Government, Attorney General Gareth Evans and Democrats Leader Cheryl Kernot had an affair. Both were married. Their relationship was widely suspected in Canberra at the time, but journalists didn’t report it until 2002, when both Kernot and Evans were out of politics.
This was prompted by the publication of Kernot’s memoir – which did not mention the relationship. Senior press gallery journalist Laurie Oakes thought this omission sufficiently dishonest to justify him breaking the story.
Eighteen years ago, this was the equivalent of the controversy over Four Corners today. Oakes had shifted the line. Everyone had a view on whether he had done the right thing.
I argued at the time that Oakes or others should have broken the news AT THE TIME of the affair, and not waited.
This wasn’t because of an abuse of power – Kernot and Evans were on roughly equal footing. It was because of the public consequences.
Kernot defected to the Labor Party during the affair. Her switch was negotiated with Evans. Before that, she and Evans had been key figures in conveying important legislation through the Senate. That that they were lovers was surely relevant to a proper understanding of their political actions.
I wrote at the time:
“Why were the rumours not investigated, and the story exposed, back then? The answer, I suspect, is that when the gallery reports politics, it is reporting office gossip. Like any office, there are subtle and largely unconscious conventions that govern what is permissible behaviour, and what is not acceptable. To have published the details at the time would have been a very rude thing to do. Not at all nice. And the reporter who did it would have to carry on living and working alongside the other denizens of the office.”
This is relevant to the Four Corners revelations. Journalists allegedly witnessed Porter’s canoodling with the staffer, but the conduct was not revealed until now. None of the Four Corners team who broke Monday’s story are part of the Canberra Press Gallery.
It takes outsiders to upset the accepted order.
Moving forward, Labor’s Mark Latham had an affair with Liberal Party staffer, Janine Lacy, whom he later married. The Labor Party did not consider this reason to deny him the leadership.
Later, there were allegations of “risqué racy and rude” phone calls from him to female staffers and his first wife accused him of abusive behaviour. Labor kept him as leader until after the 2004 election, when he resigned in a famous melt down.
The allegations against Latham were reported. By then the line for journalists had begun to shift. But tolerance for misogyny within the Labor Party had not shifted, or not enough to make Latham’s position untenable.
More recently there was Barnaby Joyce. His affair with staffer Vikki Campion was revealed by the Daily Telegraph’s Sharri Markson, against the wishes of all involved. Several other media outlets were sniffing around the yarn and would have broken it if they had verified it first. Again, the line had shifted. In this case, I think it shifted too far.
I argued at the time that Markson and the other journalists had strayed too far into the personal.
The affair was consensual and the power imbalance not great.
There were two things, in my view, that might have made reporting the affair legitimately in the public interest. First, allegations that Joyce was a hypocrite because of his opposition to same sex marriage. I argued that it was perfectly possible to have a view of a certain form of marriage and also have made a mess of your own. This was not hypocrisy.
Indeed this was Joyce’s own argument. He said during the same sex marriage debate in 2017 “I'm currently separated so that's on the record. I don't come to this debate pretending to be a saint.”
The other possible justification was if there had been any nepotism or improper use of public money. Despite many journalists trying, nothing of this kind has ever been proven.
I was then, and remain, very much on my own in these views. Markson won a Walkley award for her scoop.
And, hours after I went public with my views, Joyce started over-disclosing on multiple media outlets. Later, there was Turnbull’s ban on sexual relations between ministers and their staff, which brought the whole matter clearly into the public realm.
So very quickly the argument became of only academic interest. But I still think I was right on principle.
So what about Four Corners?
I think the case for disclosure is weakest in the case of Tudge. The essence of the allegation against him is that he had an affair, that he was prepared to be dishonest about it and that the woman felt powerless and used.
What pushes this one over the public interest line in my view, is that one half of the affair - Rachelle Miller – wanted to go public.
If Four Corners had decided not to air what she said – had effectively denied her a voice – then that would have been ethically questionable. Inaction also carries an ethical and moral load.
Miller also firmly tied her story to broader issues. “What I’m trying to do by speaking to you is stand up for myself and say ‘This isn’t okay. The behaviour wasn’t okay. And the culture is not okay. And there should be something done about it’” she said. This was courageous.
The case concerning Porter is much clearer – again, if we assume that Four Corners has its facts right.
Porter’s alleged conduct resulted in action by Turnbull and was part of the context for Porter being made Attorney General a couple of weeks later - despite Turnbull’s concern that he might be compromised. Turnbull’s judgement is called into question.
As well, Porter as Attorney General is responsible for actions on sexual harassment – including investigations into former High Court judge Dyson Heydon.
I felt a bit queasy about the trawling through Porter’s time at university. Which of us could withstand such scrutiny? But on the other hand, some of this concerned his actions in his mid to late 20s, when he was not a gormless undergraduate.
Prime Minister Scott Morrison has said he is concerned that the program focussed exclusively on the Liberal Party.
We know, from Minister Michaelia Cash’s 2018 bungled threats to reveal rumours about Labor female staffers that the government reckons it has dirt on the other side.
There are also repeated allegations about misogyny within the Greens.
So there are plenty of glass houses in the Canberra bubble, and not many of its residents – including some journalists - will welcome this new willingness to throw stones.
But the Liberal Party is in government. That is sufficient justification for looking here first.
Finally, a word for the most powerless, voiceless people in this story – the children and the wives. For them, Monday’s program must have been truly awful.
Sadly, there is no such thing as investigative journalism that does no harm.
Yesterday Prime Minister Scott Morrison responded to the Four Corners program by suggesting that the Australian public understood “human failings”.
The allegations go far beyond that.
It is for the journalists to decide when the voters should know about these kinds of allegations
It is for the voters to decide how much it matters.
I suspect the 2004 election and Mark Latham’s defeat should serve as a warning to the government and other political parties.
Character matters. Power matters, including power exercised in private.
Margaret Simons is an award-winning freelance journalist and the author of many books and numerous articles and essays. She is also a journalism academic and Honorary Principal Fellow at the Centre for Advancing Journalism, University of Melbourne. She has won the Walkley Award for Social Equity Journalism, a Foreign Press Association Award and a number of Quill Awards, including for her reporting from the Philippines with photojournalist Dave Tacon.
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