During her last year in office Gladys Berejiklian divided people over her response to the Coronavirus. Even her critics, however, praised her decision to resign from office after the Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC) announced that it was investigating her conduct.
On the surface her resignation was an event without consequence. A new premier was soon chosen and politics carried on as before. But at a deeper level her resignation made a strong statement about the way in which public life should be conducted, one which holds a mirror to all involved in it. Like Shakespeare’s historically based plays it prompted reflection on the significance of the human values involved in political life.
If the reports about Berejiklian’s resignation are to be believed, it followed consultation with Party members, which suggested that she faced no legal nor political barriers to her remaining in Office. The following morning, however, she announced her resignation on the grounds that she had required ministers in her government to stand down if under official investigation, and that she also must also do so. Furthermore, the State demanded stable and undistracted leadership that she would be unable to provide during the investigation.
I found her decision refreshing and surprising. Refreshing, because she did not attend only to its political but also to its ethical dimensions. Surprising, because today we commonly take it for granted in Australian political life that politicians will evade and deny responsibility for any a priori illegal or unethical behaviour, will not resign, and will continue to act in their own self-interest and that of their party. They will ask only what they can get away with and not what they ought do.
To describe it properly Berejiklian’s decision requires words that are unfashionable. Such words as responsibility, integrity and honour. They may seem to belong to an older age as descriptions of what is expected of politicians and of public life. Responsibility has many dimensions. It requires you to be responsible to yourself by being thoughtful and measured in what you do. It also requires you to take responsibility for what you have done. You may not conceal, minimise or lie about your actions, nor deflect responsibility to others. It demands, too, that you will be responsible to others. You will see your public role as a service to the people whom you represent, and will be transparent in your actions.
Integrity and honour are words also used to describe political virtue. Integrity refers to a comprehensive and consistent set of ethical values that govern your conduct in public and personal relationships. Honour includes reference to how you are seen in addition to what you are. It implies that you act with respect in all your relationships, including those involved in your public position. It involves moral courage, fidelity, decency and transparency. To act to someone’s disadvantage behind their back would be dishonourable. Whatever may prove to have been the virtues and faults of her behaviour as Premier, Berejiklian’s action of resigning invited the association with responsibility, honour and integrity.
'In contemporary Australian public life, as in Shakespeare’s Rome, leaders fail to act responsibly, the punters and their agitators in the media move to cancel those with whom they are displeased, and honour and integrity are treated as old fashioned values.'
Many people will see these qualities old-fashioned, associating them with an aristocratic and not a democratic sensibility, with noblesse oblige and not with the cut and thrust of winning popular support. In that sense they have always been old-fashioned. Aristocracy in its derivation means rule of the best people — the most educated, ethically schooled, disinterested members of the community. It was always an ideal and never a reality. Rulers have regularly pursued their own interests and indulged their own passions while appealing to high principle in aristocratic words.
Literary accounts of public life have explored the discrepancy between the values that politicians professed and their behaviour, and the tension between good intentions and the compromises that political life demands. This is the stuff of Shakespeare’s historically based plays, all of which reflect conflicts and quandaries of his own day, notably Julius Caesar in which the ethical ideal of honour in the service of the republic motivates Brutus’ opposition to his friend Caesar’s perceived desire to become king. It eventually leads Brutus to participate in his killing. Brutus’ title to honour is praised at the start of the play, is savaged by Mark Antony in the turning point of his fortunes, but again acknowledged by Antony after his suicide. Yet his honour also leaves him vulnerable to manipulation by the conspirators to participate in the killing his friend Caesar. It leads to the suicide of his wife and to the scruples that result in the fatal failure to kill Antony as well as Caesar and then to allow him to speak at Caesar’s funeral. It leads him finally to reject extorting from the poor the costs of raising forces against Antony and Augustus.
As a study in honour Julius Caesar explores the potential conflict between the honourable treatment of friends and the honourable service of the nation, and the ambiguous demands of the latter when democratic institutions had largely been captured by wealth and demagoguery. Mark Antony is a man for the times in being well connected, being single-mindedly loyal to Caesar and his advancement. He is also willing to befriend and use others as expedient, to trim Caesar’s will leaving his wealth to the populace, and to employ his gift of rhetoric to enrage the populace against Brutus. Shakespeare sets this drama of conflicted honour and its consequences within a cosmic tent that stresses the larger significance of often grubby and confused human actions. In the play omens and portents, storms and monstrosities accompany the killing of a political aspirant. Not only Caesar and Antony, but the moral universe, is affronted by his murder.
Shakespeare’s detached view of public life as a play of passion, marked by the inevitable gap between the service of the public good that the players avow and the wickedness or self-deception of their actions, speaks to our own day. He uncovers the messy human reality that underlies public life and rule and gives texture to the human relationships and behaviour in which high rhetoric is actually embodied. In Julius Caesar no one acts with consistent integrity. It is an aspiration. Nor do they act responsibly without inner struggle. In that sense the play speaks to the politics of today, of every day.
Equally, however, the play’s focus on honour offers a specific challenge to public life today. It is also that posed by Gladys Berejiklian’s resignation. In contemporary Australian public life, as in Shakespeare’s Rome, leaders fail to act responsibly, the punters and their agitators in the media move to cancel those with whom they are displeased, and honour and integrity are treated as old fashioned values — rhetorically useful but of no value in real life. The difference from Shakespeare’s Rome is that in contemporary society there is no cosmic tent of which honour is a pole, no higher world in which to consider the consequences for society of irresponsibility, lack of honour, dishonourable behaviour, and of pervasive cynicism about values.
In such a society the lasting importance of honourable behaviour needs public witness. That is the significance and the gift of Berejiklian’s resignation. It affirms the value of honour, integrity and responsibility, invites praise rather than pity for those who act in accordance with these values, and stirs anger rather than weary resignation when they are condemned. It may also make us more tolerant of people whom we believe pay only lip service to honour. As Oscar Wilde, that stern moralist, once remarked, ‘Hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue’.
Andrew Hamilton is consulting editor of Eureka Street, and writer at Jesuit Social Services.
Main image: NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian resigns after ICAC announces investigation into conduct. (Getty Images)