Former NSW premier Gladys Berejiklian (Image: AAP/Joel Carrett)

A mere association with a character like Daryl Maguire easily would have toppled lesser parliamentarians. But Gladys Berejiklian was no ordinary politician.

When the news about Gladys and Daryl first surfaced, New South Wales was on top of the world. As the pandemic continued to sweep across the world, the state was, against all the odds, open for business. Masks were barely in sight. Restrictions were being eased on a weekly basis. Contact tracers were working hard to contain small outbreaks. It was our little hermit paradise. We all marvelled at just how successful we were.

And Gladys Berejiklian rode high on this. Like other state premiers, she had reached what had previously been an unthinkable level of celebrity for a state leader. People asked her for selfies on the street. In a political party dominated by men, and rife with allegations of the bullying and harassment of women, Berejiklian’s rise to the top made her a role model for many women in politics — and plenty outside it as well.

Berejiklian had no intention of being bowled over by her dud ex-boyfriend. She and her team devised a remarkable plan of attack, a new strategy. She went on a tour of sympathetic media outlets, sharing more than she had ever shared before.

“I loved him … but I’ll never speak to him again” was splashed across the front page of The Daily Telegraph that weekend, accompanied by a picture of Berejiklian along with the revealing admission that she had once hoped to marry Maguire. 

She gave 2GB’s Ben Fordham, an outspoken ally — and friend— her first broadcast interview. It “wasn’t a normal relationship”, she told Fordham. She said she continued the relationship even after sacking Maguire in 2018 because he was in a dark place, and “I didn’t think I could just not continue to be his friend”. 

On and on it went. And it was working. For the most part, the press gallery was with her. The internet was with her too. Hundreds of hilarious memes bounced across Instagram, TikTok and Facebook about “Hot Mess Gladys”. They were laughing with her, not at her. The talkback hosts were also with her. Fordham proclaimed: “I think we would be mad to sacrifice the best premier we’ve had in so long over something like this.”

For another year, Berejiklian held her ground. But despite these efforts, she would eventually become the third NSW premier to resign at the feet of a body that most know simply by its acronym. 

There’s no question that Berejiklian had powerful advocates in government and in Sydney’s cosy media scene. They played a vital role in shoring up support. And the tactics the premier deployed to silence critics, rarely discussed publicly, were intense. But it would be a mistake to assume that the championing of Berejiklian ended there. There was — and still is — genuine, heartfelt support for her in the community, particularly from women, all over the state.

A Resolve poll published in November 2021, just a month after Berejiklian’s resignation as premier and amidst a second round of damaging revelations by ICAC, found that her temporarily dented popularity had bounced back to what it had been before she’d relinquished her leadership of the state. More than 40% of those surveyed believed she shouldn’t have stepped down as premier. These figures were remarkable. Rarely had a leader in Australia been so mired in scandal yet continued to attract such approval. 

This revealed a great deal about this particular era of Australian politics. Berejiklian’s political demise came at a time when Australia’s federal Parliament was beset by scandals, some involving the use of public funds, others involving serious allegations concerning men in powerful positions abusing their power. It’s easy to understand the sentiment voiced by many voters that something was deeply amiss when a powerful female leader could be brought undone by a scandal like this, but men in power in the federal system could not. It was clear that this parallel failure of scrutiny and accountability had fuelled a sense of loss and anger among voters. 

Berejiklian remained popular because, in spite of a party that demoralised and let down some of its own rising stars, she had succeeded. And her crucial decision to lie about her relationship — and to continue to lie about it for years — could be forgiven by some. The same structural failures that had long diminished women in Australian politics — and which have been extensively explored in recent years — could easily be seen as having forced Berejiklian into a position where she kept a secret that she never should have kept. 

Tougher questions were raised around how much the public would tolerate when it came to failures of integrity and the use of taxpayer funds. A key set of allegations related to Berejiklian’s use of grant funding. The last Coalition government spent billions in taxpayer funds across a range of programs, and we now know, thanks to a series of audits, that in some cases the money was used to try and shore up the Coalition’s political fortunes. Some of those schemes involved a staggeringly inappropriate use of taxpayer dollars. But much of what Gladys Berejiklian engaged in on this front had become accepted, entrenched political practice. We know this because she said as much, repeatedly, when giving evidence to ICAC. 

Scott Morrison’s attempts to elevate Berejiklian and admonish the work of the anti-corruption agency in the lead-up to the May 2022 federal election — such as standing up in Parliament and calling ICAC a kangaroo court — showed that he was banking on voters accepting this kind of conduct as simply the cost of democracy. But his attacks on the commission, and his attempts to link his political fortunes to Berejiklian, were badly misjudged. It turned out that while some voters certainly did like Gladys, integrity was an issue at the forefront of their minds. It’s now clear that honesty, along with climate change, was a dominant and decisive issue in the many key federal seats where moderate Liberal candidates were wiped out by the teal wave. Gladys Berejiklian’s name was no help to Morrison then. 

This long saga unfolded publicly for more than four years. It emerged in dribs and drabs of coverage: a phone call here, a text message there. People understandably asked: What did she really do? Ignored a few red flags from her dodgy boyfriend and helped out a shooting club with some grant funding? So what? 

But this one mistake, this one lie, about a very personal matter, snowballed into a series of bigger lies. It clouded Berejiklian’s judgment and coopted the extraordinary powers of a state premier. It revealed the darker side of a premier who had banked on an image that was overwhelmingly respectful and polite and honest. What ICAC eventually uncovered was just how brittle that image was. 

This is an edited extract from Gladys: A Leader’s Undoing by Paul Farrell, part of Monash University Publishing’s In the National Interest series.