To wrap up Webdiary’s coverage of The Affair, some Webdiarist statistics. Then my column this week for The Echo newspaper in Lismore and a piece by its editor Simon Thomsen, who thoroughly disapproves of Laurie’s decision to publish. To end, former executive member of the WA Democrats Brian Jenkins replies to Senator Andrew Bartlett’s version of the coup against Janet Powell (see Rights of reply).

Of the emails published, regular Webdiarists split 50/50 on whether it was right to publish, while irregulars and newcomers voted NTP 16 to 12. Female Webdiarists were heavily skewed to the NTP case, 11 to 3.

The closeness of the result does not mean Webdiarists don’t reflect the mainstream. When people got the news last Wednesday night on TV and Thursday morning in the papers, only those outraged by the disclosure would have rushed to their computers or the phone to comment. The next day, once people read that initial public opinion was overwhelmingly against publication, those who supported it would rush to their computers and phones. Still, my guess is that like Webdiarists, the Not For Publication people are in the majority. Here’s the Webdiary list, and the main arguments on both sides.

DON’T PUBLISH

Regulars: John Wojdylo, Brian Bahnisch, Peter Woodforde, Sean O’Donohue, George Ooi, Susan Metcalfe, Simon Thomsen,

Others: Bernadette Neubecker, Jim McKenna, Debbie Jeffrey, Richard Hand, Jenny Forster, Paul Kilborn, Laura Taylor, Fergus Hancock, Kylie Ann Scott, Felix Davis, Sue Corrigan, Harry Lawrence, Hannah Maria, Libby Werthein, Rosemary Cuthbert, Gloria, .

Main points:

* affair revealed only because Kernot’s a woman/sexist assumption she was influenced to change parties by the affair.

* thin end of the wedge/crosses the rubicon/ the beginning of big brother journalism

* it’s not relevant

* no causality to public affairs proved

* it’s history – neither are still in politics

* Laurie was motivated by revenge

* don’t want to know

* Kernot betrayed Labor – she deserves what she gets

* the focus on private lives means less focus on important matters

* disclosure damage to the families, especially children

* why should the media play God – we all live in glass houses

* the media should have disclosed it when it WAS relevant.

PUBLISH

Regulars: Robert Lawton, Cathy Bannister, David Davis, Jozef Imrich, Hugh Bingham, Noel Hadjimichael, Greg Weilo

Others: John Carson, Cynthia Harris, Peter Hannemann, Sue Deane, Stuart Mackenzie, Dominic Puiu, Craig Schwarze, Marcus Bosch, Julian Harlow, Ron Jones, Rob Reeves, Ben Furby,

Main points:

* writing a memoir invites scrutiny

*attack others and you risk counter-attack

* it’s a relevant fact in the story of the defection/ both were influential public figures.

* clear conflict of interest while Cheryl Democrats leader and Gareth Labor Senate leader.

* Cheryl’s hypocrisy re former Dems leader Janet Powell

* clearly had an impact on the course of political history

* Gareth turned the affair into a matter of public interest by lying to Parliament about it.

* Cheryl denied she had a big secret, a lie.

* sexist claims are rubbish – Gareth has lost the most since disclosure.

***

What if…

Would I have exposed The Affair? Like many journalists, I’ve been soul-searching since Laurie Oakes did, and my answers are all over the place.

The first time Kernot provoked consideration of the convention against disclosure of private lives was just after her defection, when rumours of an affair with a youth at a school she had taught at jumped back to life. Everyone in the Canberra bureau of the Herald and elsewhere in the press gallery refused requests by head-offices to chase the yarn. It broke when Herald writer Paul McGeough in Sydney got the job from editor-in-chief John Alexander.

The next big test came in March 1998 after a Parliamentary attack on Kernot by Liberal Don Randall. She had “the morals of an alley cat on heat” and “we often wonder” whether her affections extend to Gareth Evans.

Kernot, who to my knowledge was not asked about the truth of the allegation, said of Randall, “Australians will reject personal viciousness as a substitute for policy”. Evans, also not asked, denied the affair in Parliament.

As a member of the press gallery, I knew of speculation that the pair were lovers. But even if Evans had not issued a denial, I think the gallery would still have taken the angle it did – to focus on what Howard would do. He ordered Randall to apologise, saying: “I have never approved of attacks being made on people’s lives – it has no place in public life in this country.”

At the time I did not consider whether it was in the public interest to disclose an affair between the pair. I assumed that the public interest was in not discussing such topics publicly.

There is another factor here. Say I’d wanted to make the affair public. I had no evidence, and would get denials or no comment if I questioned the alleged lovers. To get proof I’d have had to act as private detective, perhaps following one or the other. This is distasteful, not within the job description of a political journalist, and not a good use of time compared to other issues I could be chasing.

The debate about whether Laurie – or any of us – should have published earlier overlooks the fact that no-one had evidence.No responsible media group would publish on rumour, and no-one did when Laurie referred to Cheryl’s big secret in The Bulletin. Only crikey.com rushed to reveal the secret before Laurie produced his evidence on Nine’s 6 o’clock news. (Crikey’s editor Stephen Mayne can wax lyrical about the purity of his motives all he likes, but he did it for commercial reasons – to get noticed and get more subscribers. The emergence of such sites, which specialise in anonymous pieces alleging scurrilous activities, will make it harder in future to observe the privacy convention.)

Without evidence of the affair I wasn’t going to chase it. But what if I had evidence before the defection? I wrote in Webdiary that I would not have published unless I also had evidence that the affair had effected the judgement of Cheryl or Gareth in Senate negotiations, and was roundly scorned by several Webdiarists. Their point: it is for the public to decide whether the affair has effected public policy, as the affair itself is a relevant fact for the public to know. And as Brian Toohey has pointed out, the fact that both participants were married with children and both kept the affair from their families, meant Evans in particular, as foreign minister, was ripe for blackmail.

I’ve changed my mind on this one. In future, if I have evidence that two powerful political figures not in the same party were having an affair, I would publish without proof of causality. But if I had no evidence I would still not chase it.

Similarly, if I had the evidence of the affair I would have immediately published on Cheryl’s defection, published without hesitation when Gareth lied to Parliament, and published after Cheryl’s book, which in my view is amounts to a blatant lie by omission.

I support Laurie’s decision to publish, but like him, persist with the view that private lives should be off-limits unless they impinge or could be perceived to impinge on the performance of public duty. This is what I wrote when John Anderson opined a couple of years ago that “I’ve never understood the difference between private and public: If a man’s family can’t trust him, why should the nation?”

“The rule is part self-interest – who among political journalists can afford to cast the first stone? A general ban on private life stories also gives politicians more confidence to relax with reporters off duty, allowing a smoother flow of background information. It also allows reporter and politician to be human with each other.”

“But the rule serves a public interest too. It’s use has avoided the domination of politics with sex scandals, as in the US and Britain. And everyone knows wowsers who make terrible politicians and miscreants who are brilliant at the job.”

We haven’t crossed the Rubicon. We’ve just had a big conversation about the boundary and where it is and why it’s there. The public has forced us journos to examine our assumptions, and told us where they stand – like us, on both sides of the Kernot/Evans fence. But by overwhelming majority we agree there should be a a fence somewhere.

***

From the editor

By Simon Thomsen

I agree that many people say “That’s disgusting, now tell me more…’, but to me that’s the point. This isn’t about some deep truth as a public interest story, it’s simply an exercise in salaciousness. The Sun Herald’s‘love nest’ yarn is the natural distillation of what is basically a tabloid/women’s mag yarn.

But suddenly the high brow journos like David Marr are going ‘tut tut’. Hasn’t anyone learnt what happens after you open Pandora’s box?

Otherwise, how do you explain the anomaly between the minimal media interest in the launch of a big long whinge few people were going to pay any attention to – the key rationale to Laurie’s bean-spilling – followed by three days of front page, plus a special news page with endless analysis (well, speculation really, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing…).

And most of the debate turns into an exercise in naval gazing – should we/shouldn’t we – so that shagging is reduced to nothing more than a chance for the media to contemplate its news values. (Margo: That’s better than chasing down the salacious details of the affair – which very few in the media have done.)

Some tried to get caught up in the lying thing, but if the Coalition tried to capitalise on that, you can bet Latham would be in there next session putting bonking questions to members in an effort to get them to lie – and thus be forced to resign as ministers.

Now that would be almost as much fun as making Bill Harrigan the Speaker!

Given that the national capital is home to the porn industry and a shagfest for those around the parliament, perhaps the most pertinent contribution the columnists who’ve waffled on looking for meaning could offer would be an understanding of how and why you end up screwing the most inappropriate people.

PS: Don’t think I’m not sitting here giggling at my own double-standards in hoping for a Cheryl piece from you. Perhaps I should drag out the photo I took of her holding a Feral Cheryl doll (I still remember her acceding to my request while complaining, “I’ll probably regret this”. I didn’t publish the shot).

Margo: How about publishing the Feral Cheryl shot next to my column?

***

Debating history…

By Brian Jenkins

Senator Andrew Bartlett wrote: “The decision to initiate the petition of members [to depose Janet Powell] was made by the party’s [Qld] State Council, not by the Management Committee. This body had around 20 members at the time. It was chaired by the then-President John Woodley (who was not a Senator at the time). State Council was not made aware of any relationship between Janet and Senator Sid Spindler. Neither the Management Committee or State Council ‘conspired to get rid of Janet and get Cheryl in as Leader’. This is self-evident as Cheryl didn’t get in as Leader after the Leadership ballot.”

The petition originated in South Australia, not Queensland. I learned about it and was urged to promote it in WA by a male member of John Coulter’s staff. (SA Senator John Coulter later beat Powell for the leadership.) I immediately phoned Janet and warned her, after which the action was apparently laid to rest for a few months.

Later, it resurfaced in a letter from the former SA preacher and party apparatchik Rev John Woodley, who had moved to Brisbane and was writing to all divisions in his new capacity of Queensland divisional president. The letter advised that the Queensland State Council had endorsed the petition and asked me (as WA divisional secretary) to initiate commensurate action by my own State Council.

In my view, this was an unprecedented and improper way to advance a members’ petition, and I merely reported it as an item of correspondence. The WA State Council decided to take no action on Woodley’s request. It is a great pity that Bartlett and his Council did not act in the same way, though the pressures in and upon them were very different. WA had no Senators, relatives or staffers on its State Council.

Senator Bartlett is correct that Janet’s private life was not at issue in the original petition. Nor, for that matter, was the question of excessive overtime by a staff member. The sole explicit basis of complaint lay in an assertion that Janet’s public image and performance in media polls were poor. The other issues were dredged up later, presumably to incite a better flow of signatories and to bring the (reluctant) tabloid press into the fray.

The overtime issue was publicly disclosed by Coulter in an appalling Senate speech which shocked even hardened Labor senators and precipitated the immediate and sudden resignation of NSW Democrats Senator Paul McLean.

The liaison between Janet and Senator Sid Spindler (who were both morally free to conduct it in public and did so openly) was selected as a useful cause by a cabal of hostile Senators and national officers who deployed the late Robert Bell (a Quaker, then Senator for Tasmania) as the first media mouthpiece for that purpose.

Witnesses recall Cheryl Kernot, Meg Lees, national president Heather Southcott and national secretary Sam Hudson as being central figures in the lobbying for Janet’s removal.

Senator Bartlett is also correct that the goal of the conspiracy was not to get Kernot immediately elected as leader. That would have been ridiculous, since Kernot had been a senator for only one year when the petition was first initiated in 1991. In fact, Cheryl hoped (and in fact negotiated, as reported by Paul McGeough) to become deputy leader under Paul McLean as a stepping stone to the leadership.

Bartlett wrote: “I did not sign the petition, despite a lot of pressure to do so. My refusal to do so was the cause of my first major dispute with Cheryl and her key staff.”

This is a pretty conclusive acknowledgement of Bartlett’s awareness that Kernot and her staff were actively lobbying for Janet Powell’s removal.

Bartlett: “. . .it was Powell and Spindler who chose to make their relationship public through the media.”

Indeed, but only after its being harmfully speculated on by media. We might equally say: “It was Gareth Evans who chose to make his past relationship public through the media.”