The relationship was being portrayed as an "affair", despite the fact that Powell was divorced, Spindler had been separated from his wife for some years, and their relationship was open and had been declared to the public long before then. Indeed, at the first party meeting after the 1990 election, discussion of the relationship was first item on the agenda. In the chair as the new leader, Powell briefed the team and sought feedback about how her colleagues felt about the relationship. No voices were raised expressing concern, and indeed the convention that private lives should remain private was, I believe, unanimously confirmed. For Kernot to raise the relationship as an "affair" in the context of a leadership challenge seemed incredible to all of us. That a woman MP should resort to such tactics against another woman MP was stunning.



At that time, the Canberra gallery was reluctant to report Kernot's allegations. Most of the journalists had known of the relationship for some time, and resisted all entreaties to publish. Journalists told our office about informal gatherings of media sponsored by senators Kernot and Meg Lees, pressing the point that the "affair" was detrimental to party room harmony and compromised Powell's leadership.

Persistence was eventually rewarded and the "affair" emerged in the media. It may well have been the knock-out blow. A motion of no confidence in Powell quickly followed in the party room, and at a subsequent membership ballot senator John Coulter was confirmed in the party leadership. Just two years later Kernot defeated Coulter in another ballot and secured the position, which, in mid-1991, she feared would never be in her grasp because of negotiations with the Greens about a possible merger with the Democrats. Such a merger had posed a threat to the ambitious Kernot's plans. Janet Powell's leadership involved, as part of its vision, the building of a strong and influential third force in Australian politics - one that would have the clout to really challenge the major parties. Part of that strategy was to achieve a merger with the Greens, or at least a firmly based coalition. It was a brave strategy because there were risks. One of those risks was that as members of the new identity some of us may lose our

leadership positions. The strategy required us to be more ambitious for the vision than for ourselves. In 1990, when Kernot stood for the deputy leadership, she demonstrated that she was ambitious - the "senator-elect in a hurry" - but at the time Powell defended her nomination as "healthy in a party based on participatory democracy". We had no way of knowing that the negotiations with Greens leader Bob Brown were seen as a threat to those ambitions by Kernot, and that the promotion of an "affair" was a desperate attempt to speed up the removal of Powell before any merger deal was struck.

The tragic outcome of this chapter was not just the removal of a woman of courage and vision brought down by a campaign of smear. The greatest tragedy was that with the defeat of Powell, Kernot hijacked the reform agenda of a fledgling organisation on the threshold of becoming an effective voice for those Australians alienated by the sameness of the old parties. In the process the Democrats lost their "squeaky cleanness", which had for 14 years attracted support from a cross-section of Australians, and was an inspiration to the idealists who still saw politics as a viable way to change society for the better. Since then disagreements have necessarily had to be acted out in leadership challenges. Coulter did it to Lees after the GST, and now Lees is doing it to Natasha Stott Despoja. When Kernot dragged a distorted picture of Powell's private life into the media 11 years ago, she dragged Chipp's motto about "honesty, tolerance and compassion" into the mud. With it she hurt and disillusioned many people who believed the Democrats were better than the other parties because we lived that motto.

The controversy surrounding Cheryl Kernot now is not a cautionary tale about women in politics. It is a tale about hypocrisy in politics - and about ambition, too. Hans Paas was private secretary to senator Janet Powell from 1986 to 1993.