Scandals spell end for high-flyer

A long-running saga involving suicide, political scandal and falls from power culminates in a riveting perjury trial. GREG ANSLEY reports.


CANBERRA - On a warm November day seven years ago, Perth lawyer Penny Easton parked her car, ran a hose from the exhaust pipe, and gassed herself.

It was the final act of a larger tragedy that had seen the disintegration of a decade-long marriage, a bitter and messy divorce and, ultimately, public humiliation and accusations of criminal dishonesty.

This week the woman who just a few years ago was one of the most powerful in the land and widely tipped to become Australia's first female prime minister entered court, charged in connection with the events that prompted Easton to take her own life.

Dr Carmen Lawrence, the first woman to become a state premier, the political housecleaner appointed to clear the stench of corruption from the West Australian Labor Party and a one-time meteoric star in federal politics, is accused of perjuring herself to the royal commission investigating the Easton affair.

In itself, this is another final act: the last retribution from the long and shameful scandal known as WA Inc which cost state taxpayers $A500 million, ripped Labor from power, toppled two premiers and sent one, with his deputy, to jail.

Even if Lawrence is cleared of the three charges of perjury, it is doubtful if her political career can ever regain its former momentum, slowed as it has been not only by the allegations but also by deep-seated antagonism from within Labor.

The trail leading to Lawrence's trial this week winds back to 1983 when charismatic, chain-smoking WA Labour leader Brian Burke rolled the state's conservative Coalition Government which, with the exception of three years in the early 1970s, had ruled since 1959.

Burke was a favoured son of Labor, a man with a dynamic view of the state's development and an assured road to the front benches in Canberra, should he wish to take it.

But under Burke, the Government became impossibly entangled with the rogue entrepreneurs who scarred WA in the 1980s, creating one disastrously flawed business venture after another and culminating in the spectacular collapses that put Alan Bond, banker Laurie Connell, Burke, and a range of lesser players in jail.

Lawrence, although part of the cabinet that approved the WA Inc deals, escaped unscathed and, in 1990, ousted Burke's successor in a coup to become Australia's first women premier.

Lawrence had come from almost nowhere.

Born in the tiny town of Gutha, 300km north of Perth in WA's vast and featureless wheatbelt, and educated by Catholic nuns, Lawrence renounced the Church at 19, gained an honours degree in psychology, adopted the causes of the left, bore a son in 1973, later married and divorced, gained a PhD and, in 1986, won a previously blue-ribbon Liberal seat and entered state parliament.

Four years later she took the reins of Government as the state plunged into recession and the clamour grew for a royal commission into WA Inc.

That decision, and her subsequent refusal to testify on Burke's behalf, laid the foundations of internal Labor Party antagonisms that grew further when she made her stellar move to Canberra in 1993, after the Liberals had swept back into power in WA.

But even as Lawrence arrived to fanfares in the nation's capital, accelerating past longer-serving talent to take the high-profile health portfolio and de facto anointment as a future Labor leader, real trouble was brewing back in Perth.

There had already been brief shadows: a police decision that charges were not justified after the discovery in her bank account of a "forgotten" $A5000 in travel allowances for an aborted overseas trip, and a public accounts committee finding that she had misled parliament over the extent of Government involvement in the contro-versial granting of public land to a private Catholic university.

WA's new Liberal Premier, Richard Court, however, wanted blood.

In the dying days of Lawrence's administration, Labor's upper house leader, John Halder, had presented a petition to parliament on behalf of Penny Easton's former husband Brian, alleging perjury by Easton in the Family Court and accusing Court of improperly obtaining confidential company minutes for use in the couple's divorce proceedings.

Brian Easton had been managing director of a failed state-owned company set up during the rash days of WA Inc, and subsequently held a number of other senior Government jobs.

The parliamentary privileges committee found the petition to be misleading and unfair, and a police investigation into the claims it made found no basis for criminal charges.

But Penny Easton, despairing in her suicide note of a "political conspiracy," had by then killed herself. Lawrence has always maintained that she was told in broad terms of the petition the day it was presented - a claim disputed by two former press secretaries and several of her cabinet colleagues, who claimed that the "Easton grievances" were raised with the premier of the day on at least two occasions.

A royal commission later found that Lawrence had lied, acted improperly to promote her own personal political interest and had fabricated a story in her own defence. The decision on who is telling the truth will now be made in a Perth courtroom.