The shock jock and the premier: the public reframing of Gladys Berejiklian
When Gladys Berejiklian chose to speak to a gossip columnist and a popular FM radio shock jock, the contrast with last week’s appearance before the Independent Commission Against Corruption – not to mention her longstanding public image – was jarring.
But political and media advisers who spoke to Guardian Australia said they could see the logic behind the NSW premier’s shift from cautious reserve to at-times excruciating revelations.
In the witness box of the commission, Berejiklian carefully defined her involvement with disgraced MP Daryl Maguire only as a “close personal relationship”. But in a cosy chat with the Sunday Telegraph’s Annette Sharp she went further, saying she had fallen in love with him, had envisaged marriage, and now felt “silly”.
By Monday her publicity blitz had moved the narrative from “she has questions to answer” to “it’s OK Gladys, every man I’ve ever been with has been a dud!”
With Kyle Sandilands on KIIS FM, Berejiklian threw her dignity out the window and agreed to talk about “getting her freak on” with her ex-lover. We learned she was not a lesbian, and she could not beat Sandilands’ record for having sex with multiple partners at work.
That looser description of the relationship may put her in breach of the NSW ministerial code of conduct, experts have said. Under the code, the definition of a family member includes “any person with whom the minister is in an intimate personal relationship”.
A breach of the act would leave it open to the commission to make an adverse finding against the premier.
But Toby Ralph, a former adviser to John Howard who has worked on 40 elections around the world, believes Berejiklian’s dual strategy of saying one thing to Icac and another in interviews makes political sense.
“She was framing the relationship carefully, hoping she could close it off at Icac, but when she realised she couldn’t she had to take it further and win some emotional ground,” Ralph told Guardian Australia.
“I think it’s a sensible strategy from a political survival point of view. Whenever I give advice to politicians I say ‘experiment with the truth’. Tell the truth and people will understand. I genuinely believe they will. I think there’s actually tremendous sympathy for Gladys. I think a lot of the public imagine she has been found guilty of having a bad boyfriend, and of course 51% of the population have been there.
“But of course you don’t look for sympathy at Icac. You look to escape some of the more searing investigations if you can, and then failing that you move on to trying to get public understanding and sympathy, and that’s clearly what she’s done.
“The question is: how much do you need to expose? I’m sure there is more that could be exposed, but it’s a pretty demeaning thing to go through.”
The 50-year-old premier had to wear the description of herself as “romantically inexperienced” in Sharp’s front page story, which said “the emotional impact has left her raw – as anyone might be when a love affair fails”.
But crisis PR expert Peter Wilkinson says Berejiklian’s decision to open up to Sharp, and to talk about her sex life with Sandilands, plays well to her strengths as a communicator, and talk directly to her constituents.
“She is authentic and warm and empathetic and transparent and is able to communicate in soundbites that people can remember,” Wilkinson, the chairman of Wilkinson Butler, told Guardian Australia.
“I suspect part of it is gender specific, it’s just a woman is much more able to be empathetic than a bloke,” Wil
kinson said.
The Labor leader, Jodi McKay, said on Monday the interview with the paper “was an admission from the premier that she was in a relationship that should have been disclosed under the ministerial code of conduct”.
Wilkinson argues Berejiklian had no choice but to risk the strategy because her sex life was the topic and she couldn’t avoid it
But media adviser and PR expert Anthony McClellan said talking to Sandilands was a “bizarre strategic decision” which he would not have advised.
“Kyle is a loose cannon only interested in being a shit-stirrer and getting his audience talking about him and his show,” McClellan told Guardian Australia.
“He’s not interested in the facts … I simply don’t comprehend, it was always going to end in tears … which it did.”
McClellan, a former head of Seven news and current affairs, said it was a good idea to talk to the Sunday Telegraph, because it is an important political force in Sydney.
“It’s probably a good idea to keep them on side by giving them an interview that’s not politically focused but trying to showcase that she’s just human, a woman who ‘fell in love with the wrong bloke’, which is now the driving narrative that she and her minders want the media to swallow.”