Balls, Bubbles and Bosses: Australian Politics and Sex Scandal

Abstract

ABSTRACT Sex scandal has been an aspect of Australian political culture since colonial times, yet it has rarely been explored as a subject in its own right. The eruption of scandal has a serendipitous, unpredictable aspect, but it also has the capacity to reveal underlying societal structures and values. Scandals can also effect political, social and cultural changes in their own right. While male sexual privilege remains easily discernible in the history of recent scandals, the forces making for exposure rather than concealment have strengthened as a result of broad social, political and media transformations since the late 1960s. The development of a more public intimacy and the redefinition of many previously “private” matters as the proper concern of politics have challenged flexibly applied conventions of concealment that in practice upheld heterosexual male domination of political life.