Any lingering doubts about Gladys Berejiklian’s judgment were put to rest yesterday after a sleazy interview with shock jock Kyle Sandilands.
She obviously has none.
Forget her political acumen over corruption allegations, or even her personal life choices — she’s now appears to be lacking even basic common sense as she desperately courts the sympathy vote.
Our lovelorn heroine, emboldened after her heart-wrenching puff piece in the Murdoch Sunday papers, spent yesterday reprising her role of wronged woman live on Sydney radio — all while protesting how private she really is.
First up was 2GB’s Ben Fordham oozing sympathy. Gladys obliged by reprising her best lines, except for one adlib claiming disgraced MP Daryl Maguire was never actually her boyfriend.
Which begs the question: what exactly was he to her if not a boyfriend or lover?
This inconsistency is now vexing everyone from lawyers, warning of the dire legal consequences of the term “intimate”, to the increasingly weary NSW voters who simply want to know if she bonked him or not.
Enter Sandilands. A quick google will throw up a litany of salacious remarks. Last month he was found to have breached decency standards in the broadcasting code with offensive comments about the Virgin Mary.
Then there was last week’s gem when he said he always thought Berejiklian was “a mad lesbian”.
Obviously the perfect choice for an interview with a serious premier in the midst of a sensitive sex and corruption scandal.
Indeed, Kyle and his co-hosts were terribly excited she chose to come on their show, gushing about her “getting her freak on”. There was sniggering with her about “secret sex being the best sex”, while at one stage he claimed to have much in common with her, having had sex with seven of his co-workers at a Perth radio station.
“That’s a record I can’t break,” Berejiklian quipped.
Wait, there’s more. The premier, who was once offended to be asked by Fordham whether she ever had an abortion, was grilled by Sandilands and friends about whether she’d ever “dabbled” in same=sex relationships.
“No” she replied coolly, before quoting Seinfeld: “not that there’s anything wrong with that.”
Classy stuff.
Still, with the first polls showing that the public is still behind her despite it all, goodness knows what she has planned next. She only half denied to Kyle she’s in the running to be the next Bachelorette.
Meanwhile in the more boring world of actual politics, things were heating up even more than the premier’s steamy interviews.
Berejiklian will be forced to hand over correspondence from her personal email account after a vote in the NSW Upper House last night.
The account first came up during the ICAC hearings last week and her opponents successfully moved for the emails to be made public to shed light on other scandals engulfing the Berejiklian government.
(Yes there are other ones, including the icare insurance one and a community grants rort).
With echoes of the Hillary Clinton personal server debacle, her opponents could barely contain their glee.
One Nation NSW leader Mark Latham said it was “time to open the blinds and shine a light on what the government has been doing”.
“That might be the premier’s lover and his dirty disgusting deals for financial gain or it might be the way in which there seems to be a magic government funding program that has no official documentation of any description”.
And let’s not forget the Australian Federal Police have just begun an investigation into a suspicious $30 million land deal by the Commonwealth government near Western Sydney airport.
That’s the same Badgerys Creek region where dastardly Daryl was doing his own dodgy land deals and boasting to his sweetheart Gladys who was caught on ICAC wiretaps saying “I don’t want to know about that”.
Premier, we feel the same about your love life. Unfortunately, we can’t just pretend we haven’t heard.
Great article, her ethics and values looked questionable at first glance re this affair but now I’m certain they’re appallingly low and she is no longer credible
To expose herself to Sandilands, Fordham and others of that ilk is an act of pure desperation and this, more than any other of Gladys’s actions or rebuttals in the past fortnight, says to me that she is guilty as charged.
Agreed. Even Barilaro wouldn’t be so desperate.
Agree. Shades of the Bard, and Lady Macbeth – the lady who was wont to protest too much – and paid the price
Actually, Lady Macbeth is most unlikely to have gone running off to Sandilands. For example, she’s the one who told her husband who was having second thoughts,
“I have given suck, and know
How tender ’tis to love the babe that milks me:
I would, while it was smiling in my face,
Have pluck’d my nipple from his boneless gums,
And dash’d the brains out, had I so sworn as you
Have done to this.”
Whatever her faults, she was not going to grovel to the media.
The lady who protested too much was acting in the “play within the play”, a scene in Hamlet.
Lady Macbeth would have stitched up the Badgerys Creek deal herself and successfully manage to put the blame onto some other schmuck.
I’d like Portia to take over the brief.
“… what exactly was he [Daryl] to her [Gladys] if not a boyfriend or lover?
“This inconsistency is now vexing everyone from lawyers, warning of the dire legal consequences of the term “intimate”, to the increasingly weary NSW voters who simply want to know if she bonked him or not.”
Surely, the killer question in not whether there was bonking going on, but whether the nature of their relationship was such that she should have declared his interests as part of her own?
It seems to me a very complex question, but the suitability for office of a Premier who fails to comply with both the letter and the spirit of the Ministerial Code of Conduct must surely be called into question.
She’s back on Tinder .. eyes wide shut.
Well she wasn’t his wife as he already had one of those.
“Suddenly” things aren’t looking so good for “Australia’s Best Government”? You just had to scratch that DIY veneer.
Sandilands has everything required to become Australia’s first president.
He would be better taking over from Les Patterson.
Idiocracy style?