Gladys Berejiklian’s youngest sister Mary has cheered on a scathing opinion piece tearing into The Project host Lisa Wilkinson over her views on the former premier.
A column written by Joe Aston for the Australian Financial Review last week said Ms Wilkinson ‘owed Gladys Berejiklian an apology’ after the Ten Network personality repeatedly criticised the previous NSW leader’s handling of the recent Covid-19 outbreak.
Mr Aston questioned why the television host was complaining about lockdown from her ‘Sydney Harbour mansion’.
Ms Berejiklian – who has otherwise kept mum on her sister’s plight – ‘celebrated’ Mr Aston’s criticism of Wilkinson after he posted it to LinkedIn last week.
Gladys Berejiklian is pictured with her youngest sister Mary. The AFR recently published an opinion piece saying The Project host Lisa Wilkinson needed to ‘apologise’ to Gladys for her critique of her handling of the Covid-19 pandemic
Mary Berejiklian ‘celebrated’ a post of columnist Joe Aston’s opinion piece which tore into Lisa Wilkinson
Mr Aston’s piece came about ahead of the release of Ms Wilkinson’s new memoir It Wasn’t Meant to Be Like This, which Mr Aston claimed would be missing an explanation for her ‘gratuitous diatribes’ against Ms Berejiklian.
‘From her mansion on Sydney Harbour and while continuing her highly remunerated TV duties uninterrupted, Wilkinson berated Berejiklian for not more ruthlessly curtailing the liberties of the city’s residents,’ Mr Aston wrote.
‘It remains unclear which ‘people’ Wilkinson purported to speak for, but it was certainly not the hundreds of thousands of low-income workers already suffocating in their tiny apartments with their children, five weeks into home schooling, climbing up the walls.’
Ms Wilkinson had claimed Ms Berejiklian had been too ‘soft’ in her response and instead praised the hardline approach of Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews, despite cases numbers in the state now breaking daily records.
Mr Aston noted Gladys had dragged NSW from ‘hopeless imprisonment to semi-normal life’ and added residents should be grateful.
Mary’s response to the piece wasn’t the first time she stood up for her sister.
The opinion piece came ahead of the release of Ms Wilkinson’s (pictured) new memoir It Wasn’t Meant to Be Like This, which Mr Aston said would be missing an explanation for her ‘gratuitous diatribes’ against Ms Berejiklian
Two years ago when Ms Berejiklian was copping abuse on social media, Mary stepped in and fired off several responses to the trolls.
She told one who was complaining the former premier was going to ‘kill live music’ to ‘relax and go read something’.
Another person who left their opinion under the premier’s photo by saying she ‘sucked’ was told by her younger sister: ‘Grow some pubes then we can talk’.
Mary famously revealed her sister with in a relationship with esteemed barrister Arthur Moses on Instagram.
As for Wilkinson, she has been a strident critic of Ms Berejiklian – demanding she step down in August and labelling her leadership a ‘bin fire’.
‘The whole state needs a complete reset and if Gladys Berejiklian isn’t up to the job, then she needs to step aside and make room for somebody who is up to the job, because she’s stuffed this up,’ Ms Wilkinson said on The Project.
Wilkinson urged the state pursue a tougher lockdown.
Ms Wilkinson took aim at Ms Berejiklian’s ‘soft’ handling of the Covid-19 outbreak. Gladys is pictured with sisters Rita (left) and Mary (right)
During her scathing August segment, Wilkinson took aim at Ms Berejiklian’s ‘unwatchable’ daily press conferences.
‘On a day when NSW is recording its highest numbers of the pandemic, another family is grieving a loved one, Gladys Berejiklian makes no new restrictions,’ Ms Wilkinson said.
‘She’s doing nothing, the soft lockdown continues and we’re all scratching our heads trying to work out if she’s not going to do anything more, why is she continuing with this same rhetoric?
‘That light she can see at the end of the tunnel, we can all see it too – it’s a complete bin fire. And somebody else needs to step in.’
Wilkinson also said Sydney ‘needs to apologise’ for unleashing its Covid-19 outbreak on the nation and ultimately plunging Victoria into yet another lockdown.
‘There’s a lot of us in Sydney who feel like we need to apologise to you guys because all of this comes from what happened six weeks or so ago,’ she said on The Project in early August.
‘The problem was the messaging from the very beginning.’
She claimed the key moment to get the outbreak under control was missed when Ms Berejiklian resisted going into lockdown until June 26, 10 days after the current outbreak began when an airline limo driver in Bondi tested positive.
‘We’ve all become experts but just watching this unfold, it really does feel like the problem sheets back to the original mixed messaging with a lockdown that wasn’t hard enough,’ she said.
‘People wanted the hard lockdown. We wanted to know what the rules were so we can follow them and get out of it quickly.
‘But Victoria keeps proving every time that the minute you get an outbreak there, you stamp on it, and you get back to normal life again.
‘It’s just a pity it’s happening for you guys for the sixth time now.’
Mary Berejiklian famously revealed her older sister was in a relationship with esteemed barrister Arthur Moses
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