Cheryl Kernot

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Cheryl Kernot (Pronounced Ker-no) (born 5 December 1948) is a former Australian politician. She was the fifth leader of the Australian Democrats (23 April 1993 to 15 October 1997).

Contents 1 Political career 2 Life after politics 3 Reference 4 External links

[edit] Political career

Kernot spent twelve years as a political activist while working as a school teacher in Queensland. She was first elected as a Senator for Queensland in 1990, taking over from the retiring Senator Michael Macklin, who had held the seat for the Australian Democrats following the 1980 election. She allied herself with the group of senators which used questionable tactics to depose leader Janet Powell less than a year after the 1990 election. As a result of the bitterness of this coup, Senator Paul MacLean resigned from the Senate and Senator John Coulter became leader with Meg Lees as his deputy. Kernot was herself elected leader after the 1993 election, with Meg Lees as her deputy. Inside the party, she spearheaded a drive for undemocratic central control of the State organisations, resulting in mass resignations of members and the total annihilation of the West Australian Division. Externally, however, she became a popular media spokesperson, leading the party to one of its best-ever results in 1996 and obtaining a primary vote of over 13% for herself. In October 1997, having failed in an unrealistic bid to take the Democrats into coalition with Labor, Kernot controversially defected to the Australian Labor Party, resigning her Senate seat and leaving the leadership of the Democrats to Meg Lees. In her speech resigning from the Democrats[1], Kernot did not criticise the Democrats, saying her motivation was due to a "growing sense of outrage at the damage being done to Australia by the Howard Government" and that her position leading a minor party in the Senate meant she "had a limited capacity to help minimise that damage." She also stated that she was "well aware of the political risks in this course of action", a statement that proved prescient, as history shows it to have turned out disastrously.

Cheryl Kernot must share with her leadership successor Meg Lees the dishonour of having systematically destroyed the aspiration of the Australian Democrats to being a 'bottom-up' grassroot political alternative to the country's so-called major parties. Both ignored Don Chipp's founding principle that there would be no collusion nor coalition with Liberal or Labor. Both also entrenched 'top-down' rather than 'bottom-up' authority, which negated the original purpose of the party and caused thousands of members to leave the party. (While Kernot and her lover Gareth Evans failed to bring about an AD/ALP federal coalition, Lees succeeded in colluding with the Howard Liberal Government to impose a 10% GST on all Australians--in clear conflict with the Democrats' member-balloted policy.)

While a member of the Australian Labor Party, Kernot narrowly won one election as the ALP candidate for Dickson at the 1998 Federal Election, before losing it at the 2001 Federal Election to the Liberal Party candidate Peter Dutton. Her period as a member of the Labor Party was marked by her position as Shadow Minister of Education, and a series of badly judged media appearances including an infamous photo of her wearing a red dress with a red feather boa. When she was voted out in 2001 she appeared on national TV to launch a stinging and bitter attack on the Labor Party, the Australian voters and various other figures.

[edit] Life after politics

After retiring from politics she wrote a "full and frank" book about her experiences, which notably failed to reveal that she had been having an affair whilst leader of the Democrats with ALP frontbencher and former Australian Foreign Minister, Gareth Evans, despite both of them being married to other people at the time. [2] She also did not mention the fact that in March 1998, Gareth Evans had denied in Parliament that the two were having an affair. The affair is thought to have ended in October 1999 and Kernot was hospitalised for what was called glandular fever at the time, but which she later described as an immune system breakdown caused by emotional and physical exhaustion.

Kernot now lives in London, and has recently been the director of learning at the London School for Social Entrepreneurs. She has since become a Programme Director in the Nurse/AHP's Developmental Programme in Social Entrepreneurship at the Saïd Business School of the University of Oxford.

[edit] Reference

• Cheryl Kernot, Senate Biography

[edit] External links

• An article by her on Lynton Crosby in The Guardian
• A look at Laurie Oakes's "outing" of Kernot's affair.

Preceded by John Coulter

Leader of the Australian Democrats 1993-1997

Succeeded by Meg Lees