Former NSW premier Gladys Berejiklian arriving at the ICAC on Friday.Credit:Dominic Lorrimer
The scales are different but the ethical and emotional questions lie in parallel.The Reader is set in post-war Germany. Hanna,the central character,is a former concentration camp guard who tries to expiate her guilt for her hidden war crimes by finally accepting punishment. Yet,it emerges that Hanna’s original crime of being a guard,and her later self-sacrificial confession,are motivated by something very personal and private:she is illiterate. She could have avoided wrongdoing by admitting she couldn’t read or write,but so large does that shame loom in her own heart,she compromises herself rather than let go of her secret. Her private shame is so disabling,she will do literally anything to avoid people knowing about it.
Evidence of Berejiklian’s concealment of her private shame – her relationship with Daryl Maguire – has mounted in the Independent Commission Against Corruption hearings. She lied about it to her close friends,staff and political allies. She declared conflicts of interest when her distant family might be impacted by government decisions,but not when they benefited her lover. If not for the expiatory work she had done during the COVID pandemic,her career probably would have ended a year ago and,were that the case,the one thing she’d still share with her ex would be the ineradicable adjective “disgraced”.
The ICAC hearing is concerned less with Berejiklian’s private shame than the measures she took to conceal it. But it can’t help probing,because no matter what she says about compartmentalising – “I was always able to distinguish between my private life and my public responsibilities” – the two were intricately entwined. Indeed,her fanatical adherence to her “brand” of probity is emerging,more and more poignantly,as the blind spot that has brought her undone.
In novels as in psychoanalysis,it’s often a shameful personal secret that drives public actions,both good and bad. The mysteries of the heart are not the ICAC’s or the public’s business,yet while we can speculate on what the hellshe was doing withhim,that question is,like Hanna’s illiteracy,so privately painful that we want to turn away from it. Yet,it remains the eye of the storm.
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To the objective eye,it’s clear that she would have been ashamed of admitting to being in love with such a man. Whatever the judgments of Berejiklian,those of Maguire are unanimous. A pest,a grub,a dud,a shonk,or,in his own preferred description,a pain in the arse. Not one degree of deviation. Everybody knew what Maguire was. Except – and this is agonising to see – the then premier,who saw something in him that remains invisible to everyone else.
Notwithstanding that,in the phone conversations we have heard,Maguire’s attitude to her was wheedling,whingeing,bullying,self-absorbed and manipulative,Berejiklian’s given reasons for not disclosing the relationship has even more pathos:she wasn’t convinced he was really committed to her. He visited Sydney sometimes without telling her. To repeat:her explanation for keeping this relationship secret was not the shame of being tied to such a man,but because she wasn’t convinced he really loved her.
This vulnerability is what makes Berejiklian’s mistakes understandable and,for many,forgivable. Who has not been in,or been close to,a personal relationship that is so embarrassing that one party or the other will go to self-mortifying lengths to cover it up?