Revealing the intimate details of politicians' romantic lives is usually justified as being in the public interest.
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The public, the reasoning goes, has a right to such insight into their representatives' character, the assumption being that a politician's private behaviour is indicative of their suitability for office. The reason, however, that we take such broad interest in these stories is our inexhaustible desire to uncover the intimate secrets of others, particularly the secrets of those who seem permanently masked so as to preserve their electability.
Yet a carefully dispensed personal disclosure can work in a politician's favour, particularly because these disclosures reliably become the hook upon which any relevant story will hang.
It was clearly electability, in fact political survival, that Gladys Berejiklian had in mind when, earlier this week, she fronted up to 2GB's Ben Fordham and KISS FM's Kyle and Jackie O to unpack the details of her erstwhile relationship with former NSW MP Daryl Maguire. While both interviews raised Maguire's alleged corruption and the ICAC investigation which made the relationship public, neither made serious efforts to question the Premier's judgment.
This was friendly territory upon which to conduct damage control, with Fordham presenting his interviewee with a series of fanatical pro-Gladys callers and telling listeners "nobody ever sounds great on a phone tap", and Kyle and Jackie O sympathising about how challenging Berejiklian must have found these recent weeks. Sandilands describing her as "amazingly talented".
The Premier used the interviews to declare that Maguire had never been her "boyfriend" but she had loved him and had harboured hopes that they might marry, and to emphasise how painful the public exposure had been. On both programs, Berejiklian stressed she is a private person, a fact perhaps belied at that moment by her choosing to appear with Sandilands, who, in a dully predictable turn of events, was ferociously curious about his Premier's sex life.
Throughout both interviews, Berejiklian cast herself as a blend of hapless romantic (she has given up on love and was shocked by the admissions of wrongdoing; she had trusted Maguire) and focused leader (the job always comes first and any personal ineptitude was simply evidence of her prioritising career over love life).
Just as Scott Morrison evaded questions about the sports rorts scandal by appealing to his own crafted blokiness, insisting his fellow Hawaiian shirt-wearing dads are unconcerned with the trivia of the Canberra bubble, Berejiklian made use of the public's eager voyeurism, the emotions behind her ill-fated relationship, no matter how honestly felt at the time, now serving as a smokescreen for the genuine matters of public interest that brought it to light.
And who can blame her? The tactic often works.
While the media has been diligently reporting on the steady drip of revelations emerging from the NSW ICAC, the temptation will always be to understand political contests as struggles of personality rather than struggles of policy. Consistently among the most dramatic stories in politics, the stories that most absorb us, are those to do with sex.
There are many examples, but the tale of Barnaby Joyce's affair was so pervasive, so widely discussed, not because it provided proportionately significant insight into his character, but because of our endless curiosity about the private lives of politicians.
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Why are we so curious?
Much of it has to do with our tendency to treat politics as melodrama, and politicians as people we know. When we evaluate politicians, we like to believe we do so with some clear insight into who they really are, that we see through the artifice constructed for the cameras and question time. Each of us is privately convinced we can see past the persona and access the person beneath.
And what provides more unfiltered insight into someone's person than a detailed account of their sex life, their desires? Knowing who a person loves or who they betrayed endows us with the imagined authority to have an evidence-based opinion about who this person is, and politics is nothing if not a machine for generating opinions.
Regardless of the facts, if a politician is presented with the decision to become, in the eyes of the public, either a misguided lover or a passive accomplice to alleged corruption, it will always be in their interest to choose the former.
There are no clean lines between the political and the personal. Ultimately, we cast our votes for individuals rather than their policies - so we find ourselves, when declaring our allegiances, attempting to divine how those we support resemble us, and how those we're against do not.
Because we are all saved by our desires and doomed by them, any reminder that politicians share this fate allows us to read into them our own worst or most redeeming qualities. Sometimes, this means we are more likely to forgive them, regardless of whether we should.
- Dan Dixon is a writer who teaches at the University of Sydney. He writes about literature, culture, politics, and America.