Here’s what our beloved Crikey readers have to say in favour of our decision to expose “Cheryl’s Big Secret”.

First, here’s what we said in our exclusive to subscribers on Wednesday morning – remembering that this was after the Bulletin had hit the stands, but before the 6pm Channel 9 news went to air and The Sphere of Influence revealed “Cheryl’s Big Secret” in full.

“Wednesday, July 3, 2002, 10.13am

Dear Sole Subscribers,

Well, well, well, the Packers should have Buckley’s chance of insisting on privacy over the breakdown of the James and Jodhi marriage now that Laurie Oakes has chosen to draw the public’s attention to the rumors of an affair between Cheryl Kernot and Gareth Evans.

The Bulletin will sell off the shelf today and the Packers will profit from some of these lines from Oakes which are only available on the mag’s website to subscribers. This is the first third of Laurie’s column:

SECRETS AND LIES

By Laurie Oakes

“In the long whinge that Cheryl Kernot has produced to explain why she bears no responsibility for the collapse of her once brilliant political career, a constant theme is media intrusion. And there is no doubt that she has grounds for complaint over some incidents. The dredging up of aspects of her private life from many years before she went into politics is an example [CRIKEY: that was sanctioned by Oakes’s ultimate boss, John Alexander, at the time]. So is the behaviour of a few journalists and photographers who tried to breach her hospital security when she was ill at the end of 1999.

But, while it is unlikely that she would admit it, Kernot has been protected by journalists, too.

For a long time now, some members of the Fourth Estate have been aware of the biggest secret in Kernot’s life. If made public, it would cause a lot of people to view her defection from the Australian Democrats to the Labor Party in a different light. It helps to explain some of her erratic behaviour. It was a key factor in the erosion of her emotional and physical health that contributed to her political disintegration. It even caused a lie to be told to the Parliament – not by Kernot, but by a colleague. But it was also personal, so as far as the media was concerned it was treated as out of bounds.

While it is one thing for journalists to stay away from such a matter, however, it is quite another for Kernot herself to pretend it does not exist when she pens what purports to be the true story of her ill-fated change of party allegiance. An honest book would have included it. If Kernot felt the subject was too private to be broached, there should have been no book, because the secret was pivotal to what happened to her. Had Kim Beazley, John Faulkner and other ALP leading lights been aware of it when then-deputy leader Gareth Evans proposed bringing Kernot into the Labor fold, they would have thought twice about the idea and probably said “no”. Without the distraction and distress it caused Kernot at crucial times, she would certainly have been a less flaky and more effective shadow minister. To white out such a major element resulted in serious distortion.”

Etc etc etc

CRIKEY’S RESPONSE

The reaction this morning has been as follows: Cheryl laughed and said there is no big secret when asked about it on Channel Seven. Jenny Macklin refused to be drawn when door-stopped on the issue at a Melbourne school this morning. Joan Kirner said Laurie Oakes should “lift his game or get out” and said journalism is now in the gutter. Neil Mitchell ran big on the Oakes story but refused to run the rumor because he didn’t know it to be fact. His callers were split. Some said he was a gutter-dwelling rumor-monger and others said Cheryl deserved everything she got.

Mitchell is right to say that the issue will not go away now that Oakes has chosen to put it in the public arena.

The actual rumor is not as bad as the concept of “Cheryl’s big secret” and will now inevitably get around on email and chat rooms before the mainstream run with it. The genie is out of the bottle and Cheryl will now have to deal with it. She has no choice because Australia’s most powerful and respected political commentator has treated it as fact, not rumour. And Oakes has no doubt checked with several Labor heavyweights before taking this highly controversial step. Crikey only regarded it as unsubstantiated rumor but Oakes has come out and effectively said “Gareth and Cheryl had an affair which was pivotal to her defection and subsequent political failure – this is fact”.

So, what do we know about this rumored affair with Gareth Evans? It is speculated that the affair started around the time of the Mabo debate.

Cheryl’s husband, Gavin, certainly knew about it and is said to have taken it very badly. It contributed to the breakdown of their marriage which in turn contributed to Cheryl’s own ill-health.

Clearly Gareth Evans’s family is the biggest victim in this story becoming public because their marriage is still together. The rumor is that Cheryl is said to have regularly rung Gareth and it was he who ended the affair to save his marriage.

We’ll probably get an almighty bucketing from some people for running this but believe me, it is out. Inevitably, the parties will now have to deal with it after The Bulletin chose to reveal that Cheryl had “a big secret” in the first place.

Oakes should have gone all the way and actually spelled out what it was. [CRIKEY: Well, we now know why he didn’t – save the juiciest morsels for the evening news / ACA. Brilliant team work, Packer camp.] And the timing of it – right in the middle of her interview circuit – was designed to cause maximum damage. Ironically, it will cause Cheryl’s book to sell better. Clearly Oakes is incensed at what he sees as the hypocrisy in Kernot’s attacks on the media.

Okay, I’m turning off the phone and going to yoga for a few hours. Just email smayne@crikey.com.au if you want to cancel your subscription but if Crikey is serious about “disclose, disclose, disclose” and claims to fearlessly report political gossip, then we would not be doing our job if we ignored this issue.

Do ya best,

Stephen Mayne”

– Ends –

Over to you, the Crikey readership.

Here are the letters in favour of our policy to “disclose, disclose, disclose” on this issue. We should point out, it seems that most of the early feedback has approved of the disclosure and a lot of that is on the basis that the letter writer is glad to see Cheryl “get her just desserts”. That is, the people glad to see Cheryl exposed seem to be predisposed against her.

To give a bit of balance, we’d like to hear from people who are fans of Cheryl and whether they approve of the disclosure.

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I certainly don’t want to cancel my subscription!

Good on ya for coming out with this information. It’s great to see Crikey standing by its policy of “disclose, disclose, disclose”. Pity Cheryl couldn’t do the same in her so-called “tell-all” book.

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Good on you for analysing the motivation behind Laurie Oakes’s disclosure, which even the Fairfax press has strangely ignored. It seems to be very out of character – or at least, high-minded persona – for Oakes to be so eager to reveal what is essentially tabloid-fodder.

Looking through your selection of Kernot’s and Oakes’s interactions, it is obvious that Oakes does indeed have an unnatural interest in her doings, and that this seems to spring from a personal dislike of her.

It could be that her tendency to the moral high ground and vitriolic outrage may grate on him, but amateur psychology musings aside, I find it hard to believe that Oakes would have so primly stuck the knife in to other politicians on whom he undoubtedly has equal amounts of dirt.

Deeply personal animosity on both sides is driving and escalating this issue, and surely all serious consideration of the rights and wrongs involved must take this into account.

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Yes OK it’s a good story and probably worth running; Crean looks like an idiot who is always the last to know anything – credibility factor sinks further, but after all who cares now? She was a dismal failure.

PS Please tell your subs/writers etc that the past participle of mislead is misled.

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Thank you for publishing the Cheryl Kernot information. What a hypocrite she is – and always has been. I’m glad people can now see her for what she really is.

Thank goodness she has had no job offers. Perhaps we will be free of her for a while.

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Stephen,

Just writing to say I’m not surprised. Remember when Cheryl was spitting the dummy on election night 1998 when it looked like she’d lost her seat? That same night Gareth announced he was resigning from parliament. By the time she’d finally scraped back in, Gareth announced he was staying in parliament. I thought at the time “I wonder if Gareth’s jumping Cheryl and couldn’t bare to be away from her?” Could be coincidence, but if you choose to publish this idea don’t attribute it to me.

Cheers,

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Crikey,

For what its worth, my wife and I were always suss that the overt gushing between Gareth & Cheryl was more than just glee over the “political coup”. Their behaviour in appearances together conveyed something more. You may accuse me of having 20/20 hindsight but there it is.

As to what it means for Kernot? Mike Steketee & Laurie Oakes (and probably others) have rightly labelled her as a whinger who caused most of her downfall. The most telling occasion was spitting the dummy on election night 1998 when she should have at least waited for the actual result before dumping on the ALP. She was embarrassingly wrong!!!

So she had an affair (if that proves to be correct). Her attitude is still a liability and her reputation was already shot before this revelation. Unless she does some serious self examination and at least recognises her own (at least partial role) in her downfall, she will never progress very far in life let alone politics. I think we can all bring to mind colleagues, relatives etc who are always “missing out” because SOMEONE or SOMETHING stopped them from achieving their goals. Trouble is, in their mind, that someone/thing is never themselves.

If the affair is proved to be true, it won’t be her undoing, it will just show her up to be a stupid whinger.

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Dear Crikey,

After reading this update on Chezza’s big secret, I went into a colleague’s office to have a wee chat about it and the palava surrounding Ms Kernot once again. This colleague of mine did a stint in Canberra a while back and was familiar with the rumour regarding Chezza’s affair. The way my colleague tells it, the affair was with [name withheld] and everyone knew about it but no one was prepared to talk about it.

Keep doing your best,

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I feel very sorry for Gareth’s family, and also for Cheryl’s, but I think you’re absolutely right to run this. I can’t understand why Laurie Oakes didn’t if he was willing to say as much as he said; surely he must have known that his article was an open invitation for someone to fill in the dots. You should perhaps be asking him this.

Stephen, you know as well as I do the amount of reasonably substantiated rumour floating around newspaper offices which effectively creates two tiers of news – one for those ‘in the know’, i.e. journos and their mates, and the rest for the reading and viewing public. At the Age in the mid-80s we all knew… [CRIKEY: We’ve deleted a few anecdotes here which might only lead to more muck-raking. We don’t disclose at all costs – the whole point on this debate is whether Oakes was right to titillate without disclosing. We won’t do the same.]

I’m not sure what the answer to this is, but issues of potential libel aside, I think that journalists should not always take refuge in “privacy” when choosing not to publish substantiated information that fills in the gaps of stories that everyone else is reading. Even more so, I don’t think that journalists should publish teasers that indicate we know something that the general public doesn’t, unless our intention is to open up the topic and so help us push on to the next step when we can (which may very well have been Laurie Oakes’s intention). Either we leave it well alone or we publish.

There are obviously issues of privacy in many cases that should be respected and in most cases are. With all due respect to the families involved here, I don’t see how this applies in this case. In fact I would have thought an affair would be fundamental to understanding the political dynamics. On a personal level, it’s none of our business. But on a political level it helps us understand what was at the time a significant event in Australian public life.

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Hi Stephen

Congratulations on running the Kernot/Evans story – just the sort of thing we need Crikey for. As Oakes says, if she wasn’t prepared to deal with the story she shouldn’t have written a book. And that’s true regardless of whether or not the story is true – and I have no idea either way. But it was a widespread rumour at the time, so even if it’s false it must have had a real impact on how things played out. Much as I feel sorry for Kernot, to write that sort of book without mentioning it is just intellectually dishonest.

All the best,

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Stephen,

Good on you for having the guts to publish the “Big Secret”, at least you have a go unlike piss weak Mitchell who is only trying to build a bigger audience for his interview with the turncoat Thursday morning and Oakes who is a pompous wanker.

The only ones who will complain to you will be the usual soft cock Democrats, so as Pricey would say, tell them to “get stuffed and piss off!”

Keep up the good work.

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Stephen

Far from cancelling my subscription I applaud your running of the Cheryl Kernot details.

I remember at the time of the Wayne Carey saga that no-one (read 3yAWn) would actually spell out what was rumoured to have been done by the King. I’m sure it wasn’t out of any deep respect for the people involved, rather a not so cunning way of giving the issue more legs.

At least this way the parties get a chance to respond in a proper forum, rather than have it do the rounds of the chat sites you mention.

Keep up the good work

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G’day Cobber

Well done on the Kernot report … I had no idea about the Gareth stuff.

For what’s it worth I reckon Kernot is fair game – the hypocrisy of the media is in not reporting it before. To the extent that the media can establish how political decisions are informed because of momentous personal/private decisions, then it should be fair game. This is a simple public interest test. If Ruddock was caught having an affair with a woman who was a consultant to Australasian Correctional Management it would have to be reported, right? [CRIKEY: To avoid any possible doubt, we stress that this is just a hypothetical!] Same goes with Cheryl, if her defection to another party was informed partly/wholly by an affair with an ALP MP it should have been reported. The public has a right to know that coz she represents them.

Cheers mate

Keep trucking

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Stephen,

Thanks for the update.

An irony that should be noted is that the Bulletin has suffered declining sales of late. I’m wondering whether this is perhaps an attempt to boost the circulation with the breaking of a so-called BIG story. Normally the story would make the weekly blats such as Who?, No Idea, etc, etc.

Anyway just a thought.

Cheers

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Stephen,

Well done for disclosing this. I too am a Fourth Estate steward, and like many others, was aware of this rumour for some time. Kernot’s book was the perfect opportunity to set the record straight. And she chose not to. Thank you for doing so.

Keep up the great work.

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I love it! And, while I don’t usually condone media intrusions into a private matter, it’s not unreasonable to assume that it was germane to her decision to move. I think it’s pretty dishonest of her not to include it in the book. I was going to buy it, but now I’m not so sure….

I wonder if this revelation will spark a plethora of similar “outings”? Do you think the [names withheld] thing will ever see the light of day? It’s politically relevant in as much as it appears to have influenced the choices she has made in her career. But probably not as directly relevant as Kernot, so I guess the media will leave it alone.

I won’t be canceling my subscription – rest assured!

I had heard mumbles about this issue some time ago.

That egomaniac Evans and that turncoat Kernot deserve all they get!

Keep up the good work.

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Good Morning Stephen,

Well the secret is out. Congratulations on having the audacity to reveal the secret, which is more than we can say for Neil Mitchell’s program this morning, who constantly referred to the Laurie Oakes story and revealed he knew what Laurie was referring to but did not have the clout to reveal any details.

Keep up the good work

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Good on you Steven,

What’s Laurie Oakes doing prancing about in the press like a sanctimonious prick tease? Why shouldn’t Cheryl’s big secret be told. The responsibility of the press is to the reader, not the politicians. Unfortunately this kind of thing is one of the hazards of public life – but there are benefits too. What would Cheryl’s life be like now without the benefits of a parliamentary pension?

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Well done Stephen – how anything that was known by the majority of Parliament House staff (which is over 4,000 during sitting weeks) and several hundred in the press gallery could be regarded as a secret is beyond me.

Given this, isn’t Oakes being a bit lenient giving Faulkner and Beazley the benefit of the doubt – how could they not have known when everyone else seemed to? And from my recollection, it’s not that it didn’t emerged until later on. On the day of her defection, there were many knowing nods and comments etc around the Ministerial wing that Cheryl & Gareth had been on for a while, so no surprise he’d played the key role in “recrooting” her.

Perhaps Beazley and Faulkner are complicit in the timing of these revelations and seeking to wash their hands of the Kernot fiasco – “we was duped!! If only we had have known…”

And perhaps the very first caller to Neil Mitchell this morning has a point – why is it only being revealed now? If it is/was so important to the question of her motivation/defection, then surely it should have been revealed at the time. And if the press gallery knew/knows that a pollie misled the parliament, why wasn’t that exposed at the time?

Hopefully this whole scenario will raise even more questions about the press gallery’s relationship with and reporting of the pollies they are cloistered up with for weeks on end, and exactly what ‘news’ the public are being fed.

Keep doin’ ya best,

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Stephen,

Two cheers for “outing” what most people in the press gallery, the Labor party and the Coalition already knew, and some of them (in the ALP) before Cheryl made the big leap from the Dems. Indeed it was one of the main talking points around Melbourne ALP circles at the time of the defection. I withhold one cheer because we’re all human beings (well, most of us) and it’s never nice to see something dragged through the media that has already caused so much distress to families involved in private. Nevertheless there are still some questions to be answered.

For example, if senior ALP figures did know what was going on before Cheryl made the jump, why did they choose not to tell their infamously moralistic leader about it in advance? Could it be that the unhealthy “cone of silence” that covers personal behaviour in politics and in the media and often the exchange of bodily fluids between both “camps” distorted the political antennae of some of the hard heads in the ALP who privately knew that this was a problem? Or could it be a case of “let he/she who is without sin….”?

And here’s another question. Why did Cheryl not include this pivotal issue in her book? Was it just to save her and the others involved any further personal distress, or was it more of case of her trying to wipe the slate clean and re-invent St. Cheryl?

Finally – why did the usually admirable Mr Oakes chose to dance around the issue rather than just exposing her biography for the whitewash that it is? [CRIKEY: Well, the 6pm news and ACA solved that riddle.]

Don’t tie yourself in knots over this – save that for the yoga!

Do ya worst

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Hi Stephen,

I for one support your decision to publish gossip and scandal. It makes for interesting reading. Moreover, sometimes you need to push the boundaries. I’d like to think Crikey is the “New Idea” for the politically aware (and I mean that as a compliment!)

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I know what side of Neil Mitchell’s debate I’d be on. I won’t be cancelling my subscription to Crikey. Nor will I be buying Cheryl’s bloody book. I recall Hugo’s line “Gone baby gone!” after she got the Khyber in the election last year and remember feeling that the word “comeuppance” was invented for people like her.

Good on Oakes for going public on this. I confess I have no inside knowledge of the affair, or whether it’s true, which perhaps makes me sound a little vindictive. But I doubt someone like him would risk his reputation in Canberra by getting such a thing hopelessly wrong.

Kernot has absolutely no credibility as far as I’m concerned and she deserves what she gets. And politicians rooting around IS public interest if it produces the sorts of results this did. Final word: on looks alone, they deserved each other!

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Stephen,

Good on you for publishing this. It will be interesting to find out if Oakes’s original copy included the full claim but this was deleted on legal advice. [CRIKEY: No, it was deleted on Packer advice. Write a cracker of a story for the Bulletin, but save the juiciest morsel for the 6pm news / ACA.]

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Hi Stephen,

Enjoyed your piece on Cheryl.

But what did the garrulous, circumloquatious Gareth see in the shrill verbose Cheryl? Was it perhaps their mind numbing beating around their mutual bushes that set hearts a panting?

While recent scrutiny of poor old Chezza has centred around her “principal place of residence”, now the spotlight focuses on her “principal place of passion” – and her “principal point of reticence”!!!

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What is ‘Crikey’? I’m glad they agree with me that Oakes should have actually stated what the ‘big secret’ is. It does seem rather stupid of Kernot to write a book on that topic…

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Crikey

If you are to do your job (now you have penned or typed the matters below), you should go out and make a list of all the autobiographies that have kept the big secrets a secret. There are heaps of them. Start with [name withheld], and go through them all. What about “Mates” – [names withheld] as well. Good luck to Cheryl is all I say. But Crikey, don’t be part of the media double standard act. If politicians are not to be protected in their private affairs – what about journalists?

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Bravo, Crikey.

The whole Cheryl Kernot episode now makes some sense.

Keep it (the disclosure imperative) up.

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Hi Stephen,

On balance, I think it’s a ‘Good Thing’ ™ to keep your subscribers as politically informed as it’s ever going to be possible. So thank you for shedding light under this particular bushel.

I started off listening to this morning’s Margaret Throsby ABC Radio interview with that sanctimonious twit Kernot but it was only raising my blood pressure to unnecessarily dangerous levels, so I turned it off.

It’s a fine line but on balance, these people choose to put themselves into a profession (sic) that exposes them to the ‘heat of the kitchen’. It’s their choice and they knew the risks (or should have).

Keep up the good work.