Contempt of parliament is a serious business. Before 1987, people who were found guilty could be locked up at Her Majesty’s pleasure, pretty much without trial and without legal representation. New laws around contempt in that year moderated things considerably, but still left people open to fines of $5000 and six months in the slammer. Being charged with contempt is pretty much the only charge in our legal system that denies a person the right to bring in a lawyer to defend themselves in front of the all-powerful Committee of Privileges, although defendants can appeal a judgment to the federal court.
In politics, everyday words can take on meanings that would never be attributed to them in daily life. The explanatory memoranda and the definitions section of parliamentary bills and legislation manipulate the meaning of many words that form part of our everyday lexicon, often causing ordinary people to misinterpret legislation that affects them. Pauline Hanson’s ‘please explain’ moment was absorbed by millions of Australians who sympathised with her against the use of elitist language in political discourse. All too often the public sees parliamentary debates degenerate into the most bitter and acrimonious slanging matches. Politicians who defame and threaten colleagues in a parliamentary debate can also use ‘privilege’ to attack members of the public who question them about their behaviour or decisions.
Without much of an understanding of these issues, Eros’s first year of operation opened explosively. An animated media interview suddenly whooshed up into a wildfire that threatened to burn my new lobby group to the ground. Only weeks after Eros officially launched, I wrote to the Senate Select Committee on Community Standards Relevant to the Supply of Services Utilising Telecommunications Technologies (there’s that jargon at work again) about their recommended ban on phone-sex lines on the 0055 network. This would seriously impact many of my new members. It would also rob many housewives around the nation of their livelihoods. Eros estimated that thousands of women were earning a good wage just from talking dirty on the phone while they did the ironing. I commissioned a legal opinion that said the recommendation was seriously flawed and attached it to my submission. I finished it by writing, ‘Please be advised that traders who have been disadvantaged by the Committee’s rulings in this area will contemplate damages actions in the courts unless some reassessment is done.’ I was fair, firm and polite. I waited for a reply.
Four weeks after lodging my submission, Robbie and I received a late-night phone call from a politically savvy shop assistant at the Fantasy Lane adult supermarket in Fyshwick. With only a few days to go before the federal Coalition was to hold a joint party-room meeting to vote on whether to formalise a ban on X-rated videos, a senior National Party member was caught on security camera buying X-rated videos. Normally it would have been a ‘so what?’ conversation, but I knew the member in question would vote with his colleagues to ban the products he had just purchased. He even told the shop assistant that ‘he couldn’t see what all the fuss was about’, which only made it worse. I made sure the film footage was put in a safe place and then sat down with Robbie to discuss it.
Was it anyone’s business if politicians engaged in personal behaviour that contradicted their stated policies, or was this a case of moral hypocrisy that the public was entitled to know about? Especially as the policy these politicians were endorsing could see people go to jail and pay thousands of dollars in fines. As attorney-general in Bob Hawke’s first government, Gareth Evans had said that he regarded this sort of hypocrisy as one of the most damaging charges a person could bring against a serving politician. Politicians are a privileged class of people and the only ones who can effectively make or change laws. If they are going to make a law that punishes people who can’t change that law, I believed that they should abide by that law or go public with their grievance if they intended to break it.
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The following morning, Robbie did a phone interview with ABC radio journalist, Matthew Abraham while we were staying at his mother’s house. During the course of the interview, Abraham (a fairly devout Christian who never divulged his religious leanings during interviews) pushed him on the rights of politicians to ban erotic material that they found offensive. Robbie exploded and asked Abraham if that included politicians who actually bought X-rated videos and then voted against them. Abraham said Robbie had no evidence of that and was making unsubstantiated allegations. I could see Robbie starting to straddle that thin line between reason and rage. It was the middle of winter and he was standing naked in his mother’s kitchen, so he wasn’t as calm and thoughtful as he usually was on radio. Suddenly, he jumped for the more visceral approach. Eros had video evidence, he said, of the MP in question, and would consider releasing it if he voted to ban X-rated material.
The media went into a meltdown. They called us ‘sleaze bags’ and ‘blackmailers’. Guilty of abrogating the sex industry’s basic principles of discretion and confidentiality. Kiss but don’t tell. Ethics and social commentators argued over the rights and wrongs of outing hypocrisy among politicians. Lauchlan Chipman, an academic who published extensively on philosophy and jurisprudence, called it ‘Fantasygate’ and ‘an indecent exposure even our more wayward politicians do not morally deserve’. The Opposition spokesperson on legal matters, Peter Costello, said that ‘profits from porn will decline if the Coalition is elected and we will not be deterred by blackmail or stunts’. He was also adamant that he would ‘not push for their prosecution in trying to intimidate politicians—a practice banned by the Crimes Act’.
Margo Kingston reported in The Age that Canberra brothels had information and credit card details about two Liberal backbenchers, and a very senior Liberal figure who had been banned for life for ‘roughing up the girls’. She quoted me as saying that the brothel industry ‘would only release the information as a last resort to save the industry’. Derryn Hinch invited me on to his TV show, Hinch, to talk about the issues and asked me directly if the MP in question was so and so. He wasn’t in the slightest bit worried about outing anyone, but still I declined to name names.
Meanwhile, the Eros Board had become involved and was worried about the association’s standing. Robbie would have to stand down, they said, if only for a short period. I issued a media release saying his position had been terminated and that he had been thoroughly spanked with a member’s product. And then salvation came from a most unlikely quarter. A Liberal backbencher from Victoria, Russell Broadbent, issued a press release outing himself as the MP in question, but claimed that he had merely bought the X-rated videos for research purposes. It wasn’t him but it was manna from heaven for us. How many more were there?
The following day, we issued another press release denying that it was him, but thanking him for his honesty. We then asked for all conservative MPs who had made the trip to Fyshwick to come forward. None did, but there was no hiding the collateral damage for the conservatives. The issue soon died as the media started to realise that the hypocrisy probably ran much deeper than one or two backbenchers. It felt like a win of sorts.
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A few months later, Robbie and I fronted the Senate Committee on Telecommunications to give evidence, but before we could even start the Chair of the Committee, Senator Margaret Reynolds, read out a statement telling us that we had both been charged with contempt of parliament for threatening members and senators with legal action in my letter and for threatening to out an MP caught buying X-rated videos. They made no mention of the threat to out MPs who had misbehaved in brothels.
If it was a contempt to interfere or coerce witnesses to a Senate Committee, then the Committee had just done that to us by introducing these trumped-up charges just prior to giving evidence. It put both of us off our submissions. Later that week, we received an invitation from the Committee of Privileges to put forward our case, and in December the Committee came down with a ‘not-guilty’ verdict on both charges. They warned us, however, that if we tried to out an MP again under the same circumstances, the outcome would be different.
The whole thing was a charade. If MPs are immune from prosecution for the decisions they make under privilege, then why was I dragged before this star chamber to answer a charge of ‘threatening’ them with legal action? They are cocooned. And why was Robbie dragged in as well for threatening to expose sexual hypocrisy? It’s not like there wasn’t much of it in the parliament. As a lobbyist for the sex industry frequently in and around the place, I’d heard many stories about the sex lives of politicians. Like the story about the well-known female journalist who was having a long-standing affair with a recent Prime Minister. It just wouldn’t go away. Or the one about the ABC cameraman in the 1990s who was contracted by the local porn industry to film a few sequences and ended up becoming the ‘stunt cock’.
Years later, in 2007, Oswald Hancock, the husband of South Coast Liberal MP Shelley Hancock, was outed by Channel 9 for having made an appearance in a commercial porn movie. The film was one of a series shot by John Lark in the early 1990s. Lark had rented the Hancocks’ holiday resort (the H Ranch Hotel) for a week to make three films and had paid the Hancocks around five thousand dollars. Oswald Hancock claimed he had appeared as an unwitting actor in one film, playing cricket. He also appeared in rushes of the other two, holding a horse from which a naked actress slides off into a sex scene and then at the back of what looks like an aviary where another sex scene was taking place. The Hancocks claimed that they had no idea that the ironically named Parliament Video film crew were making porn; they thought they were making a documentary, but when they found out, they told them all to pack up and leave. According to John Lark, however, the crew, the porn actors and directors all stayed on the premises for the whole week and were never asked to leave.
Then there were the unsubstantiated but persistent rumours, like those around a former conservative senator who was well known for his homophobic views, but who, according to many gay groups, was a frequenter of popular gay beats.
I’d heard a few stories that involved me as well. One had Robbie and me in a threesome with the leader of a particular party in a particular jurisdiction. It never happened, though I can understand how an imaginative mind could have come to that conclusion.
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The sex industry is never far from politics. Politicians make it this way by creating laws on sex and sexuality that they can’t live up to in their own private lives. ‘Do as I say, not as I do’ seems to be the sexual credo under which many MPs enter parliament. When these indiscretions are revealed, the electorate is rightly upset and becomes cynical of legislated sex and morality. My moral compass on these issues tells me that exposing someone’s personal life, particularly a member of parliament, is only ever justified if there are matters of what I would call ‘criminal hypocrisy’ at stake. That’s where a politician injures an aspect of someone’s life or robs them of their wellbeing or dignity by callously and maliciously doing or saying something that they have publicly railed against or decried in the past. Then, I think, the electorate has a right to know.
US pornographer Larry Flynt’s 2011 book, One Nation Under Sex, examined the way in which sex scandals have shaped the history of his country. He revealed many previously unknown scandals, including Benjamin Franklin’s role in seducing women in the American Revolution, Abraham Lincoln’s predilection to sharing men’s beds, Eleanor Roosevelt’s lesbian relationships, James Buchanan’s gay love affair, Woodrow Wilson’s girlfriend, the Kennedys, Bill Clinton, George W. and many more. Over the years, Flynt took out full-page ads in broadsheets asking readers to contact him with information that would link members of Congress or the Senate to illicit or hypocritical sex scenarios. He offered million-dollar rewards for documented evidence, and these forays led to resignations and the exposure of plenty of hypocrisy. His most recent offer is US$1 million for video or audio recordings of US President Donald Trump engaged in ‘illegal behaviour or acting in a sexually demeaning manner toward women’. The recent publication of a story in the Wall Street Journal about Trump’s lawyer paying porn star Stormy Daniels US$130,000 to shut up about a sexual encounter with the president could mean Flynt might be close to paying up.
In Australia, we don’t have a robust tradition of outing sexual hypocrisy, even though Australian MPs have had their fair share of illicit relationships, sex scandals and even sex crimes. The most visible and outrageous transgressor is one who is never called out for his sins. It was our tenth prime minister, Joseph Aloysius Lyons. In 1992 (the same year Eros came into being), Lyons had his name nailed to the masthead of a new religious faction in the federal Coalition known as the Lyons Forum. Founding members included Eric Abetz and Kevin Andrews. The Forum dealt mainly with family and sexual issues, and appeared to revere Joe Lyons’ wife, Dame Enid, as some sort of Australian Madonna. How they could possibly hold that view given Enid was only seventeen when she married the 35-year-old Joseph is beyond me. From many reports, Lyons had been courting Enid since she was fifteen. In what universe is it acceptable, or even legal, for a 33-year-old politician to date a fifteen-year-old girl and later have a group of social conservatives hold up the relationship as a paragon of family values and virtue? Lyons Forum members, like former arch-conservative senator and now Tasmanian state MP, Guy Barnett, still run articles on their home pages praising Lyons for ‘falling in love with a seventeen-year-old girl’. This same group then goes on to decry adult same-sex marriages as an abomination and the first step toward legalising sex with animals. We’ll never know if Joseph and Enid had sex before they were married, but if they did, Lyons was also quite possibly our first and only paedophile prime minister.
On a far more acceptable note, former prime minister John Curtin had a long affair with Isabella Southwell, the owner of Canberra’s historic Hotel Kurrajong, while his successor, Ben Chifley, had a long affair with his secretary, Phyllis Donnelly, and probably with her sister as well. There’s nothing inherently wrong with these adult relationships, either. The problem is that these two PMs presided over laws and public morality that did not support these illicit relationships. To his credit, Curtin told a Catholic priest to bugger off as he lay dying in The Lodge, and to his credit Chifley stared down his detractors in the same Church to marry a Presbyterian, Elizabeth McKenzie. Both actions would have had some small effect in loosening the stranglehold religion had at the time. However, for those who didn’t have the foresight or the social position to keep similar affairs quiet, awful discrimination would have been suffered in those days had they been outed. In my opinion, leadership is all about having the courage to put your personal convictions out there for everyone to see and to live by those same convictions, no matter how politically incorrect they might be.
The list of scandals didn’t end with Curtin and Chifley. Below is a list of other prominent politicians’ so-called indiscretions on the job:
In 1986, Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser was found naked and confused in the foyer of a Memphis Hotel. His minders tried to suggest he’d been slipped a ‘mickey’ by his mates, but southern state sex workers in the US told another story.
In the mid-1980s, Bob Hawke was having an undisclosed relationship with his now wife, Blanche d’Alpuget, while still married to Hazel, and threatened to sue Matilda magazine when they wrote about it.
In the mid-1960s Harold Holt had a long-standing affair with Marjorie Gillespie, a woman who owned a beach house close to his. His wife, Zara, admitted he had a number of affairs while prime minister.
In 1987 former Opposition leader Billy Sneddon had a fatal heart attack while he was having sex with his son’s ex-girlfriend.
In 2007, then federal Opposition leader Kevin Rudd was found drunk in a New York strip club while representing Australia at the United Nations.
Then federal Treasurer Jim Cairns had a sexual relationship with his principal private secretary, Junie Morosi, in the 1970s.
One-time Australian Democrats leader Janet Powell had an affair with fellow Democrat senator Sid Spindler in 1991 which helped bring about her downfall as leader.
In the late 1990s, One Nation leader Pauline Hanson alleged she had an affair with her advisor David Oldfield, who consistently denied the claim.
In 2009, NSW Health Minister John Della Bosca resigned after a six-month affair with a young woman.
In 2013, NSW Opposition Police spokesman Nathan Rees had an affair with a single mother over five months that was carried out mainly in his electorate office and in public parks.
In 2009, a Parliament House barmaid claimed to have had a lengthy affair with the South Australian Premier Mike Rann in a New Idea interview. Rann denied the allegation.
Then Foreign Minister Gareth Evans and Democrats leader, Cheryl Kernot, had a five-year affair that was denied in parliament in the 1990s. The affair was outed by someone who should have known better. Evans was the architect of the X-rated film rating that challenged social conservatives in a way they had never been challenged before. He was a great civil libertarian and social reformer, and he was having an affair with a woman who was every bit his equal in age, intellect and status. They had a right to privacy. Jim Cairns and Junie Morosi were probably on the same level: both were libertarian socialists, and despite the fact that she was employed by Cairns they were more than equals. Morosi even went on to write a book called Sex, Prejudice and Politics and together they worked on alternative-living communities that were progressive and non-judgemental around relationships and sex.
Unfortunately, I can’t say that for most of the others. I can’t see where any of them have said ‘let’s legalise sex work’ or ‘let’s legalise gay marriage’ or even ‘let’s discuss the issue of extra-marital affairs in politics’. The only positive outcome for any of them fell to Kevin Rudd when 85 per cent of respondents to a Herald Sun Galaxy poll taken after his indiscretion revealed it made them feel better about him and proved he ‘was a normal bloke’.
Most political hypocrites generally sow the seeds of their own undoing. This was the case with former Deputy Prime Minister and National Party leader Barnaby Joyce, who alleged that his rival in the 2016 federal election, Tony Windsor, was having an affair. When the inevitable happened, Joyce’s own outing of his illicit affair with a junior staffer who became pregnant to him came at the same time as he was doing his utmost to lobby for a ‘No’ vote in the same-sex marriage plebiscite. Joyce’s actions almost amounted to criminal hypocrisy under my definition of the term. The plebiscite that he championed resulted in widespread vilification of LGBTIQ Australians. The Black Dog Institute, QLife, Diversity ACT and many independent counsellors all noticed a dramatic spike in calls for help from LGBTIQ people after the first two weeks of the campaign. Posters calling on people to ‘Stop the Fags’ and describing the gay community as ‘a curse of death’ went up all over Sydney and Melbourne.
Meanwhile, Joyce’s consistent rejection (even criminalisation) of practices that threaten traditional marriage and the nuclear family (X-rated films, legalising abortion, cervical cancer vaccines), and his public support for the morality favoured by the Catholic Church of which he is a staunch supporter, makes his transgression even more egregious. Only a month before the Daily Telegraph story, Joyce opened a $3.3-million taxpayer-funded upgrade to St Nicholas School in his New England electorate. In his speech, he told the hundreds of parents and teachers present that their children would really need a good Catholic education in their formative years to set a good moral compass for themselves as adults. He said all that knowing full well he was involved with another woman. If he had any moral fibre, he would have fessed up then and there, done an Edward VIIIth and abdicated his position, divorcing his old wife and marrying his new partner.
During the debate on same-sex marriage, he told the parliament that he had ‘separated’ from his wife and that he had not ‘come to this debate pretending to be a saint’. He stopped short of telling the parliament any of the details of the affair that had led to his separation. Joyce had already got the message via social media that his support for traditional marriage looked pathetic when he couldn’t uphold the ‘till death us do part’ and the ‘forsaking all others’ aspects of his own marriage.
In an interview with 2GB the day after his mea culpa, he said he had made the revelation because he didn’t want to look like a hypocrite. In fact, it made the hypocrisy even worse.
Labor’s reluctance to enter the debate at all, calling it ‘private life’ business, only reinforced the fact that they had a hypocrite or two in their senior ranks with a similar degree of culpability.
Jennifer Wilson, a journalist writing for Independent Australia, went further and attacked parliamentary press gallery journalists who refused to write about Joyce’s affair. As she described it, the convention never to explore the private or sexual lives of politicians is selectively applied, and I suspect there are a few reasons for it. First, it’s a way for some press gallery journalists (and their bosses) to shift attention from their own indiscretions as far away from Parliament House as possible. Second, a number of senior press gallery figures are just plain prudish and won’t comment on sexual matters whether they pertain to parliament or anywhere else for that matter. Third, there is a fear in the press gallery that by reporting sexual affairs and indiscretions, serious journalists will end up looking like gossip columnists. Criminal hypocrisy, however, is not insignificant when perpetrated by a member of parliament, and can profoundly affect the lives of hundreds of thousands of people. It happens in state parliaments and at local government level as well. Righteous and religious MPs, many in real positions of power and influence, uphold and create morality laws that punish ordinary people, while often maintaining an illicit affair of their own . . . I could write a book on it!
Then there are MPs who exhibit the most bizarre sexual behaviour just because they are in positions of influence and authority. Again, in the teary apologies that follow these brain snaps, there’s never a mention of moving the goalposts on other issues around sexuality in our society.
In 2006, Len Kiely, a Northern Territory deputy speaker once asked for a kiss from a security guard, telling her, ‘I have a very long tongue and I could use it on you and make you a very happy woman.’ Then, in 2016, NT Sports Minister, Nathan Barrett, a man who campaigned on ‘family values’, filmed himself masturbating in his office and then sent the film to a female constituent with whom he had a relationship but not ‘that sort’ of relationship. In 2013, Queensland state MP Peter Dowling stood aside as Chair of the Parliamentary Ethics Committee after taking a photo of his penis in a wine glass and then sending it to his former mistress. WA Opposition leader, Troy Buswell, sniffed the chair of a female staffer in 2005 and started writhing in mock sexual ecstasy in front of a group of stunned staffers. Previously, he was alleged to have snapped the bra strap of a Labor staffer. In 2010, the Reverend Fred Nile’s office computer was found by parliamentary authorities to have had 200,000 hits on porn web sites. Nile denied ‘perving at internet porn’. And on it goes.
Last, but not least, are those MPs who have committed sexual crimes. Interestingly, all of those reported involve children. In 2008, NSW Minister Milton Orkopoulos was found guilty of 33 counts of child-sex offences and drug possession, while in 2000, Queensland Labor MP, Bill Darcy, was sentenced to eleven years’ jail for child-sex offences. In 2012, Terry Martin, a Tasmanian independent, was convicted of creating child pornography and having sex with a twelve-year-old girl, and, in 2015, a former South Australian police minister and Shop, Distributive and Allied Employees Association (SDA) assistant secretary, Bernard Finnigan, was found guilty of child-porn offences. The most high-profile case was that of morals campaigner and former Member for Capricornia, Keith Wright, who in 1993 was found guilty of one count of rape, one count of indecently dealing with a girl under fourteen, and four counts of indecently dealing with a girl under sixteen. Before their convictions, each of these men would all have cited adult pornography, adult sex work or gay and lesbian relationships as the main moral dangers in our society.