‘I wake in the night shaking at these memories’

Inside the Beehive Paris probe The minister, his mistress & the trip to France

When the little head takes over from the big head, all hell breaks loose, as illustrated by the sex scandals wreaking havoc in Parliament this week.

Does this behaviour from the likes of Andrew Falloon and Iain Lees-Galloway signal a decline in standards among Members of Parliament?

Hardly. Think back to former Prime Ministers David Lange and Robert Muldoon, now dead, whose extra-marital affairs were the worst-kept secrets in the land.

MPs are human and, like many people, have illicit affairs. It’s nobody else’s business unless they’re hypocritical (e.g. preach family values) or go public to get revenge, excuse themselves, or hurt the other party who doesn’t deserve the pain. For example, Jami-Lee Ross accused his leader Simon Bridges of corruption (claiming the moral high ground) then told media he’d been having an affair with Sarah Downie. The words “love rat” come to mind.

When pride is hurt, men become infected with “entitleitus”.

I was in and around the parliamentary precincts for years. Along with other women, I saw, heard and experienced an overdose of manipulation, harassment and abuse — from men in all parties. The MP who follows you home after the House rises at 10pm. You walk deliberately past your apartment door and shake him off a block further on so he doesn’t know where you live.

The one who repeatedly tries to get you into bed, despite you telling him you’re happily married, thanks. He later says he’s been told by another MP that he had sex with you in the parliamentary gym. This is a straight-out lie but the more you deny it, the more he laughs. An MP in your own party tells a locker-room joke shared with MPs in another party about the size of your breasts. You laugh along with it because you don’t want to appear a prude.

More than once I crouched in my office wardrobe, hiding from a visitor who’d been told repeatedly

I was not interested in seeing him, while my executive secretary fibbed about my whereabouts. These days he’d never get past security.

There was no Twitter, Facebook or Instagram when I was there, but blogs were just beginning and hardly a day went by when a few of us women MPs weren’t tormented by a guy who (anonymously) cut and pasted our faces onto women’s naked bodies on his blog.

In the end, like Clare Curran who suffered the ignominy of having her face illustrating a toilet seat, the lack of support in the face of male harassment and bullying gets too much and you leave for a happier life. I discovered if I didn’t keep quiet about this crap my list placing would put me out of Parliament anyway.

Many years later I still wake in the night shaking at these memories; sweating with feelings of shame and guilt. “Did I do anything to encourage the overtures? Was I too flirty?”

But I didn’t sexually harass or abuse anyone, so why do I still feel like the bad guy?

Critics of Parliament say this would not be tolerated in other workplaces but it is; it occurs everywhere. Of late, a string of academics have been hauled up for indecent assaults. I don’t need to mention law firms. Teachers are often coming before their council for illegal sex with pupils. State and private corporations have their share of sex scandals involving power imbalances.

Once, pre-Parliament, I met a heavyweight CEO over lunch at his hotel. He said he had a book to lend me, up in his room. We went to his suite. I did think he was taking rather a long time to fetch said book when he reappeared wearing nothing but the hotel bath robe. I fled.

I know what you’re thinking — I was stupid to go to his room. I was asking for it?

Hold that thought. A long time ago, when I was about 18, there was only one GP in Wellington known to prescribe the contraceptive pill to single girls. When I went to his rooms he told me to take off all my clothes from the waist down and lie on the bed. No nurse, no gloves. He masturbated me until I had an orgasm then told me to get dressed while he wrote the prescription. I remember walking out, face burning, through the waiting room full of young women, holding back tears and feeling the most crippling shame. I still can’t talk about this without descending into hysterics. But I did nothing wrong.

Would you ask: “Why did you go into his rooms? You were just asking for it!”

One brave woman did report him for rape. He was prosecuted but found not guilty and now he’s dead. I have since connected with other women who received the same abuse and in hindsight wish I’d had the guts to come forward at his court case.

We feel shame and it’s not right: I think about Monica Lewinsky — betrayed not only by men but women too. And all the Jeffrey Epstein, Harvey Weinstein complainants slut-shamed by those who probably still believe “no” means “maybe”.

Parliament won’t change unless robots are in charge. Men and women will always have affairs, never knowing if it will end well or as a train wreck.

We can argue that women should be safe to walk streets at night, go into men’s hotel rooms, visit doctors, without fear of being sexually assaulted, but that’s never going to happen. There will always be sexual predators — and some will be women, as the Centrepoint Community proved when partners and wives were found to have procured young girls for their partners to sexually abuse.

We could stop feeling sorry for sex pests. They’re worse than robbers who break into your house, nick the family heirlooms then poop everywhere for kicks, yet burglars don’t get cuddles from do-gooders. “Mental health issues” is no excuse for helping yourself to sexual gratification, using sex as a weapon, or power trip. Save the empathy for those coping with the damage these dangerous people leave in their wake.

Hashtag campaigns and parliamentary inquiries won’t stop predatory behaviour. They simply give women a false sense of security. In the time I took to write this, more women have been hurt. I hope that, unlike me, they’re told it’s not their fault, they are not the guilty party.

The political scandals of the past two weeks — sharing confidential Covid patient details; transmitting pornography to unwitting young women; and an extra-marital dalliance — may cause a few to reflect on whether the pressures of public office play a part in such parlous decision-making.

It is worth noting that one common method deployed by researchers to introduce stress to study participants is to make them deliver a speech — a task not unfamiliar to our elected representatives.

No doubt MPs and Ministers of the Crown, in particular, are subject to stresses beyond the terror of a lecturn at the Colville Rotary fundraising committee. Public scrutiny of one’s every move, from popping into a liquor store to signing off decisions of heightened public interest, might give many of us the jitters.

Few would argue the triennial cycle of reapplying for your job through election isn’t without trepidation, especially among those responsible for teams. The more elevated the responsibility, the tighter the squeeze. Todd Muller, perhaps, is the most recent and stark example of the Icarus paradox where he flew higher and further than he was equipped to sustain.

But is the politician’s lot so demanding?

The 10 most stressful jobs, according to CareerCast’s annual report, are: Enlisted military personnel; firefighter; airline pilot; police officer; broadcaster; event coordinator; newspaper reporter; public relations executive; senior corporate executive; and taxi driver. It would appear political careerist doesn’t scrape into the top 10.

Noted, there is no paucity of poor life choices among the acknowledged high-stress occupations. While politics may be a comparatively lowpressure pursuit, all walks of life have shown a capacity to stray from the right path.

One trend, which continues to manifest in political scandals, is the disproportionate representation of men making the wrong calls.

There may be a physiological explanation for that. Males and females respond differently to stress, according to Nichole Lighthall, from the University of Southern California.

It’s believed this gender difference originates from differing responses to stress in the dorsal striatum and anterior insula, two areas of the brain also associated with reward-related decision making.

It has been demonstrated by setting volunteers a risky task in which they could earn a lot of money — but also had the potential to lose everything. Men and women took similar amounts of risk in the control situation. Under stress however, men took more risks while the women tended to be more conservative.

None of this explains why grown men do such dumb things. However, researchers have also found men to be generally more overconfident

While politics may be a comparatively low-pressure pursuit, all walks of life have shown a capacity to stray from the right path.

than women in a variety of different domains, such as answering academic tests.

New Zealanders are, by nature, deferential when dealing with public figures. We may have given some men the impression they are infallible.

Following similar logic, perhaps the strain of ticking ballot paper boxes is also a highly pressurised prospect for many voters? Could this explain some of the terrible decisions this nation has been saddled with?

David Bowie sang — in Under Pressure with Queen — of “the terror of knowing what the world is about. Watching some good friends scream: ‘Let me out’…”

Hamish Walker, Andrew Falloon and Iain Lees-Galloway have been let out. May they find calmer paths and clearer heads for their future choices. And may those who remain learn from their mistakes.