By now we all know the final ruling into the conduct of former NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian.
Delivered by the Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC) yesterday morning, the 688-page report concluded that Berejiklian had indeed engaged in “grave misconduct” when she awarded government grants in a “desire on her part to maintain or advance” a personal relationship with former state MP Daryl Maguire.
The commission also condemned her for not disclosing her relationship with Maguire.
It’s an outcome that will effectively end Berejiklian’s hopes of ever pursuing a career in politics again and rightly obliterates her legacy as premier of the state. We deserve more from our elected officials, and it’s plain that Berejiklian’s interests weren’t vested in the good of NSW when she capitulated to Maguire’s exploitative requests.
But despite all this, there’s an important factor in this story that does carry bearing when it comes to cases of political corruption: motive. Because while Berejiklian’s conduct was inexcusable, her fatal flaw was not innate immorality; it was naivety and a flattened sense of self worth.
We see this underscored time and again in the toxic text exchanges between her and Maguire. Messages where he berates her, belittles her and begrudges her power. He tells her, “I am the boss, even when you’re the Premier” to which she meekly replies, “I know”.
She apologises to him repeatedly, for no discernible reason.
The report states that during a private examination during Operation Keppel’s public inquiry, Berejiklian was asked whether this exchange was “a fair understanding of your relationship at that point in time, that in the sense that, at least privately, it was Mr Maguire was the leading party or the boss?”
“Look, as you can appreciate, when you’re the Premier of the state, it’s very difficult in private relationships to make people feel that – he wanted, he, he wanted to feel equal in the relationship because of my position … To make him feel less insecure in a private capacity I’m talking now, not in a public capacity,’’ she said.
“In a private capacity, it’s very personal … when you have a position of power, it’s very difficult in a personal relationship to address that position of power, and that’s what I was referring to. It’s very personal and private. It’s got nothing to do with work. It’s actually making him feel that because I was the boss during the day, that I wouldn’t necessarily be exercising that relationship in the private relationship.”
This response is so desperately, desperately sad.
That Berejiklian fell for a man who couldn’t stand her power and what she’d achieved; that someone with such supreme intelligence and influence could fall such easy prey to coercion and manipulation from a man so patently her inferior.
And yet, it is a situation we see all-too frequently. Berejiklian was a perpetrator, but she was also, so clearly, a victim.
Corruption is rife in Australian politics and it’s a shameful state of affairs. But more often than not, the motive, such as in Daryl Maguire’s case, is driven by greed and seriously questionable moral fibre.
It is also overwhelmingly perpetrated by power and privilege-hungry men, not manipulated women.
Motive doesn’t excuse egregious acts, but it should matter in our collective response. Because unlike Maguire, Berejiklian isn’t a bad seed. She’s a weak one.