Can anyone now seriously imagine Gladys Berejiklian staging the kind of face-off she engineered with John Barilaro and his koala-killing mates a few weeks ago?
Of course not. Her political authority is gone. Her moral authority, too. Berejiklian lecturing anyone else about standards of conduct is now laughable. The woman who knew enough to know what she shouldn’t have known when it came to her boyfriend is no longer in any position to criticise anyone else for their poor judgment.
What does she do in the next ministerial scandal? A premier who vacillates between telling the Murdoch tabloids about how she hoped to marry Maguire and insisting to ICAC that the relationship wasn’t intimate or of sufficient status to tell her family about can’t complain about others being jesuitical with parliamentary and ministerial codes of conduct.
NSW is a cesspit, riddled with corruption, infested with shinks, spivs and chancers of whom Maguire is noteworthy only because of his lack of success. It needs a strong leader capable of both personally setting a standard of conduct and of enforcing the standard. Berejiklian is now neither.
That’s why, quietly, she caved in on the koala issue last week, watering down proposed protections on land-clearing crucial to helping the recovery of a beleaguered species at the behest of property developers and farmers eager to raze habitats.
It’s a signal to the Nationals — a party genetically engineered for rorting and abuse of taxpayer money — that they’ll now have a much freer hand in NSW. It’s a remarkable turnaround only weeks after Berejiklian challenged them to put some substance to their constant threats, only for them to engage in an unseemly retreat — including Barilaro, who promptly took four weeks’ leave.
But Berejiklian has been keeping her relationship with Maguire secret since 2015, two years before she became premier. What toll has her secret relationship with a man like Maguire taken on not merely her own personal standards — which appear to have fallen to telling him not to tell her the details about his dodgy deals, and staying in a relationship with him after she was forced to sack him in relation to corrupt conduct — but on her own capacity to enforce high standards of conduct?
Let’s look at the evidence. Her treasurer is mired in the iCare scandal — involving failure to properly pay out policies, an accountability averse government body, sham working arrangements for political operatives in the treasurer’s personal office, and undisclosed conflicts of interest.
The government had its own version of the sports rorts affair with $250 million in grants rorted for electoral purposes ahead of the 2019 election, and a separate scandal over the rorting for partisan purposes of local council grants.
There was also the high farce of Barilaro and Andrew Constance and the Eden-Monaro byelection.
The Berejiklian-Maguire scandal is unusual in that the politician caught up in it seems keen to keep the focus on her private life. As Janine Perrett correctly points out today, Berejiklian used the Murdoch tabloids to give a soap opera gloss to the whole scandal, portraying herself as the “romantically inexperienced” woman who fell for the wrong man, and who has now “given up on love”.
But this has never been about Berejiklian’s taste in men, or that she was unlucky in love, or inexperienced at dating, or anything else that seems to infantilise the most powerful person in the state. It was always about what she knew about what Maguire was up to, and her apparent willingness to turn a blind eye as he set out to exploit and use his office as an MP to get him and his mates rich.
It was always about her judgment, the judgment of the person who, from 2017, occupied the key role in the two century-long battle against sleaze in NSW. How can she be taken seriously in that role ever again?
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“Can anyone now seriously imagine Gladys Berejiklian staging the kind of face-off she engineered with John Barilaro and his koala-killing mates a few weeks ago?”
Oh come on Bernard, as we have now learned that “face-off” was nothing but political theatre. The Libs ended up giving the Nats everything they wanted.
See:
https://andrewelder.blogspot.com/2020/10/need-to-know.html
and Keane insisting we should all vote Berejiklian in at the last state election.
Yes, Keane did that, although I think he was only addressing NSW voters, not all of us, and it was more a ‘best of a bad bunch’ call than any suggestion she was the new messiah or in any way perfect.
Yeah? Rat, he said NSW had the ‘best government in Australia’; no mention of a ‘bad bunch’. The praise was unequivocal.
‘best government in Australia’? sounds pretty damning to me.
Crikey’s ethical position seems to have firmed on Ms Berejiklian, Bernard. Crikey thinks that a competent public figure who has delivered some good yet shirked the more stringent parts of professional ethics does not merit public trust.
I endorse that position. Without professional ethics there’s not much meaning to professional responsibility, and we can’t have public trust without it.
But doesn’t that apply to your profession too?
How can someone like Julian Assange, who can’t spell ‘professional ethics’, has subscribed to no published professional ethics himself and has outright ignored friendly offers of ethical guidance from multiple sources including a professor of journalistic ethics and two well-respected newspapers who collaborated with him, be correctly called a journalist?
Would you please also direct me to the Code of Professional Conduct Crikey’s staff subscribe to?
(Scratch the last — Code of Conduct listed below at: https://www.crikey.com.au/code-of-conduct/ )
I wonder about your own personal code of ethics Ruv, if you seriously believe that Assange’s journalistic efforts had no ethical basis,and his current treatment is a just reward for revealing massive political bastardry by our “democratic” world leaders, especially but not limited to the USA.
Fairmind asked: I wonder about your own personal code of ethics Ruv
I think you may ave conflated personal and professional ethics, Fairmind. Here’s a rough distinction that I hope will be constructive:
Personal ethics: a sense of moral obligation that makes us seek good for others, for good’s sake.
Professional ethics: a sense of professional obligation that seeks to ensure that the professional knowledge, skills and privileges we enjoy serve the public good and do not benefit private or personal good at public expense.
Ms Berejiklian may have very good personal ethics and she certainly has the meticulous attention to detail suggesting that she often tries to act professionally. However, under scrutiny right now are not her personal ethics but her professional ethics.
The case is being made by multiple Crikey authors and others that systematic failure of and indifference to the obligations of her professional responsibilities mean she should not occupy that profession no matter how much good she may have done at other times.
Do you agree with that position? If not, why not? And if so, why should not the same argument also apply to the profession of journalism?
Sauce for goose etc, why not answer your own question. So, do you think she should “occupy that profession no matter how much harm she may have done at other times.”
It’s the wrong question. It’s a false accounting. She should get the credit for good work she has done. She should face the full penalty for any misconduct. So, give her medals and glorify her name (as appropriate) for the former, then shame, sack & prosecute her (as appropriate) for the latter.
Sinking Ship Rat asked: do you think she should “occupy that profession no matter how much harm she may have done at other times.”
Per my original comment, SSR, I understand that Crikey has adopted the position that public trust requires ethical leadership, not merely passive ethical lipservice, and that a public figure must be therefore visible, active and committed to the ethical standards the public requires.
Per my comment at top, I have already endorsed Crikey‘s position so your question is already answered. Ms Berejiklian needs to go regardless of how effective she has recently been in Covid management. (The question of when is another matter, but I’d suggest soon.)
But the rest of my comment isn’t about the NSW Premier. It’s about whether the ethical position Crikey has taken on political leadership also applies to its own profession: whether journalism, as a profession of public trust and professional privilege, should be held to the same principle: that if it doesn’t show ethical leadership top-down among its editors, it’s not journalism but just communications.
And if Crikey‘s position is different, why?
And if Crikey‘s position is the same, how do (for example) the political communications of Mr Julian Assange ever qualify (as Crikey emphatically asserts that it does), under the privileges of journalism?
As you say you only want to comment on other matters of no direct relevance or interest to the original article, a meta-discussion as some would term it, I will leave you to it.
Sinking Ship Rat, the issues I commented on link because they connect recent articles by the same author on the same issue.
I raised the comment in this particular article and not some others because this article illustrates what may be double standards both in the author and in left-wing journalism itself.
It’s not really a meta-discussion so much as a broader question about the equivalent importance of ethics in democracy in both legislature and journalism.
If journalism claims that one of its key roles is reflection on public ethics, then I think that’s all to the good. But that means it has to hold its standards of ethics to at least as high a degree as those it comments on.
But that means communications which do not hold those ethics cannot be called journalism, which therefore excludes a range of communications of low ethical integrity, like the propaganda/disinformation parts of Murdoch press — and the publication of potentially dangerous operational secrets with no obvious public interest, such as many of those published by Wikileaks.
Ruv, I do not much care about your opinions on Gladys, my criticism was aimed squarely at your attack on Assange.
There is no comparison between Assange and Berejiklian…he is a towering figure at the epicentre of a crisis in world politics, she is just a competent administrator in NSW who will contribute little to world history.
Fairmind, if I made an attack I believe it was on the facile way that journalists shift between what professionalism means in leaders of legislature, and what it means in their own avocation.
I think the example of Ms Berejiklian illustrates this very well. Ms Berejiklian’s moral authority: as Bernard writes, the authority that lets her lead a state, is either grounded in highest ethical probity or it doesn’t exist
But wait… don’t journalists and newspapers both lead and seek to lead democracies too? Isn’t the influence of their thought-leadership one of their key measures of success?
So… does scrupulous ethical integrity underpin the moral authority of journalism too? If not, why not? And if it does then don’t the same arguments which conclude that a lot of Fox News isn’t journalism, produce the result that Wikileaks is also not journalism?
Ruv, your comments on Julian Assange are strangely tangential, non-sequiturs even. You seem to ascribe to the Peter Greste school of thought, something along the lines of ‘he wasn’t in the union so he couldn’t have been a journalist’ school of thought. Don’t know what you’ve been reading, but Assange did work that a journalist would be proud to own, and didn’t reveal names and personal details until somebody else had, against his expressed demands. His Wikileaks website has helped democracy by applying the disinfectant of light.
It’s such a strange argument, one that I see you as being better than to put up here. No equivalence with Gladys whatsoever.
DB your response misrepresents my position: membership of a journmalist’s union (which I understand Mr Assange does hold) no more assures the practice of legitimate journalism than membership of the AMA assures the practice of legitimate medicine, or membership of the House of Reps assures the practice of responsible legislation.
Your misrepresentative reply indicates that you didn’t understand the argument, however as you didn’t ask a question and seem indifferent to what the argument actually was, I’m not clear what reply would be satisfactory.
Perhaps you have a question? If not, then I’m afraid that yours is a non-sequitur response to a straw-man.
The premier said: “I did nothing wrong.” She should have simply said: “I did nothing.” For years. And that’s why she should go.
She did do something wrong – and that was deliberately ignoring a bloke who was in breach of the ethics she claimed to uphold, and not only not reporting him, but not even chiding or chastising him privately. The thing she did wrong was not doing the right thing.
It is hard to believe there were no dirty deeds done or promises made to become Premier or since.
The grants to local councils just before the last election mentioned here has a long way still to run.