Mr Crocodile
gets his
monkeys

L'Affaire Who Cares
Harold Hark
12 July 2002

I wasn't going to be drawn into this, but Cheryl Kernot has a way of stopping the nation. Remember the defection? ABC to Parliament House live for a couple of hours? I even slung a cassette into the vintage ghetto blaster to record the event. Couple of years later the ephemerality of newsworthy politics sunk in when I erased it for Jeff Kennett's final press conference. Thereafter a Phillip Adams interview with John Pilger replaced Kennett. Then the Pilger was replaced by Adams interviewing Noam Chomsky. Should have kept them all, I suppose, but the tape now hosts a public library copy of Arvo Pärt's Te Deum.

So the five year long, five-year-old Biggles-Cheryl affair has hit the fan, courtesy of renowned chump channel reporter, Laurie Oakes. It's a nowhere affair on every conceivable level (except for the families involved), but one that forces opinions. Let's face it, when you live in small country, these things gain import. Natasha Stott-Despoja can refuse to comment, but there are too many facets for the rest of us chatterboxes to keep silent.

Oakes appears to have had a perfect alibi in releasing the information when he did. Cheryl's book was released a few days earlier. It understandably failed to mention the affair but simultaneously aired all sorts of political grievances, many of which were directed at Laurie Oakes himself.

Did he pull her covers in revenge? As a reporter for Kerry Packer's Chump Nine, was Oakes trying to divert attention from the ethical beating John Howard was taking in Germany?

Doesn't much matter, because the root of the problem lies with Cheryl Kernot herself. Her life seems to be strewn with poor judgments. Her naivety borders on that of a personality disorder. A few who knew of the affair with Evans tried to point out to her that releasing a memoir full of payback but failing to mention this vulnerable point would likely backfire. Didn't Cheryl comprehend this?

Nevertheless, as Rosemary Neill points out (The Australian 5/7/02), the affairs of John Gorton and Bob Hawke went discreetly unreported, while this one "is a disturbing departure from the culture in which politicians' affairs have been left as sins of omission, provided they didn't affect public policy." Neill goes on to say of the book, "Had she revealed their affair, she would have been accused of cheap sensationalism; of seeking to gain commercially from an adulterous affair she had previously kept secret; of going out of her way to damage Evans."

And she sites the reason why the American public continued to back Bill Clinton into the darkest, lying days of the Monica Lewinsky affair as the same reason Gareth Evans lied to Parliament: "Because in [Bill or Gareth's] position they would have done the same thing; they would have covered up the truth to protect themselves and their families from further public humiliation."

Jamie Walker, also in The Australian, refers to comment by Tony Coady, of the University of Melbourne's Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics. "Coady," Walker says, "believes the former foreign minister deserves some latitude. The question should never have been asked of him (by Don Randall in March, 1998) and, with hindsight, he perhaps should have batted it away, refusing to dignify it with an answer."

Walker then quotes Coady directly: "'If Evans did mislead parliament, it was a relatively minor offence involving no issue of public policy, and I would argue that's in stark contrast to...what went on with the children-overboard affair.'"

By contrast, Ray Cassin (The Sunday Age, 7/7/02) says: "The relationship between Kernot and Evans began during the Keating government, when Evans was still government leader in the Senate and Kernot was leading the party holding the balance of power in that chamber. That meant he was negotiating the passage of legislation and other government business with someone who happened to be his lover. In other words, the issue is not so much whether reporting this improperly allows public scrutiny of what should have remained private; it is whether a private relationship may have influenced the course of public events. At the very least, this means that the history of that time must now be written differently."

Every side of this affair has been defended or condemned by dozens of commentators. The media is the media and these things get reported. The only wonder is that it took so long.

What a pity they couldn't have simultaneously thrown their efforts into the truly shameful Howard Government policy towards asylum seekers, whether defending or condemning. Instead the lifelong snooze of most people has been disturbed by the usual sexual titillation. Awakened for a few moments, Mr and Mrs Australia, when faced with forming a fantasy casting the matronly Cheryl and the intellectually prissy Gareth, must have begged to be returned to their dreamless slumber.

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