Writer and politician Clare Booth Luce famously said to then-US president John F Kennedy that a leader, however great, is “one sentence”:
A great man is one sentence. Abraham Lincoln’s sentence was: ‘He preserved the union and freed the slaves.’ Franklin Roosevelt’s was: ‘He lifted us out of a great depression and helped us win a world war.’
Former NSW premier Gladys Berejikilian’s sentence: she risked it all for a bloke called Daryl.
And she has paid a heavy price. This morning the NSW Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC) handed down its report into Berejiklian and disgraced former Liberal MP Daryl Maguire, making a finding of corrupt conduct against both.
It all began in mid-October 2020, when Berejiklian — who for so long was held in esteem as a competent premier, the first for many years to lead her state untainted by scandal — revealed to ICAC that she had for years been in a “close personal relationship” with Maguire.
The relationship had lasted until mid-2020, so quite a long time after Maguire was sacked from the government after a previous ICAC investigation exposed his soliciting of contributions in return for helping broker property deals. Indeed it seemed the redeeming feature of his alleged corruption was his apparent incompetence in carrying it out.
Berejiklian faced several gruelling sessions in front of ICAC across 2020 and 2021, and the picture it painted of her time with Maguire — via texts, testimony and taped phone calls revealed during the hearings — was, well, pretty grim.
On again, off again?
Berejiklian initially told ICAC that it wasn’t so much that she’d kept her relationship with Maguire secret so much that it didn’t feel it was of “sufficient significance” to tell anyone about. Which must have stung Maguire, who would later tell the hearings that he “loved” her, that the relationship included “physical intimacy” — which, hey, thanks for that! — and they had considered having a child.
Indeed, a mere week after going all “new phone, who dis?” regarding Maguire, Berejiklian was telling The Daily Telegraph‘s gossip columnist of her bitter tears and lost hope from the break-up with the man she had planned to marry. “I’ve given up on love,” she declared.
Her PR-salvage tour wasn’t done, though, when she decided the best route to repairing her compromised dignity was to go on the hit radio show of monstrous butter carving Kyle Sandilands to be questioned about, among other things, whether she’d ever “dabbled” in same-sex relationships.
Bad romance
While the “I was nought but a naive fool in love” spin was pretty galling from the state’s most senior politician, on a sheer human level there was much to sympathise over with Berejiklian. No-one wants their texts read out or audio of phone calls with loved ones played in court at the best of times. Imagine then that not only is that happening, but it’s detailing your interactions with your most embarrassing romantic partner.
For example, Maguire is heard at one point saying to Berejiklian: “Constituents use you every day. You bare your arse to the world every day. We’ve become prostitutes. We have become fucking harlots and prostitutes.”
In October 2021, ICAC played a 2018 phone call between Berejiklian and Maguire in which they discussed the Wagga Wagga byelection triggered by Maguire’s forced resignation. The conversation begins to take on a slightly stroppy tone, ending with Maguire saying: “Just throw money at Wagga.”
“I’ll throw money at Wagga, don’t you worry about that,” Berejiklian replies, giving us probably the first recorded instance of pork-barrelling carried out solely to get your boyfriend off the phone.
Berejiklian was adamant she had not suspected Maguire of any wrongdoing — despite the man who at one point she had described as being part of her “love circle” warning her that ICAC could be tapping his phone. “Is that going to be a problem?” she replies.
Another time, he starts discussing some business dealings he’s involved in, to which she curtly interjects: “I don’t need to know that bit.” Maguire agrees.
Bad optics
Of course, it wasn’t all bad-tempered. One text exchange features Maguire sharing that he’d got some money from a property developer, to which Berejiklian replies “woo hoo”. When Maguire complains that one of his funding priorities is being held up by government bureaucracy, she reassures him: “Don’t worry. I can overrule them.”
Another phone call has Berejiklian bragging about a discussion she’d had with then-treasurer Dominic Perrottet: “I just spoke to Dom and I said: ‘Put the [money] in the budget.’ He goes: ‘No worries.’ He just does what I ask him to.”
The Spivtionary
In the course of the hearings, Maguire extended the lexicon of high-level dodginess in a faintly icky way when he conceded that he’d attempted to secure a “tickle from up top” by sharing Berejiklian’s email address with “pissed off” landowner Louise Waterhouse.
