Does he still like her? He pauses and searches for tactful words. He respects her, but he remains attached to the opposite side of politics. ‘Do I like what she stands for? No. Do I think she represents the people who vote for her well? Yes, she is an extraordinary politician. She was extraordinary back then, and today she outperforms most of the people in federal parliament.’ He pauses again. ‘But, you know, she actually is scary. You need to be careful when you talk to Penny. You can’t be flippant on any topic because she’ll pull you up immediately. She can be ferocious. Yes, there’s something very scary about her.’
Today Wong remembers the battle in simple and unapologetic terms. Hamilton represented the Liberal agenda and was out to damage student unionism. He was also against fair treatment of union staff, in her view.
*
Penny Wong’s university career did not start this way. In her first year on campus – 1987 – her politics were so far to the left of the Hawke government, which was re-elected to its third term that July, that she told her fellow students she could not possibly join the Labor Party.
David Penberthy was one of her early friends on campus, thanks to their encounter at O’Halloran Hill. Penberthy had been radicalised by Latin American politics. In his first year of university he joined, and ended up running, the local branch of the Committee in Solidarity with Central America and the Caribbean. It was a far-left organisation sponsored by the Socialist Workers Party – a Trotskyist group advocating socialist revolution, particularly in developing countries. CISCAC was well to the left of the campus Labor Club. Penberthy thought the club ‘a bunch of apologists’ for the economic rationalist innovations of the Hawke–Keating government.
The issue at the time was US president Ronald Reagan’s funding of the Contras in Nicaragua, in their armed opposition to the Sandinista government. Penberthy persuaded Wong to join CISCAC, but she was never as involved as he was. ‘I threw myself into it headlong,’ he says. His chief activity was organising the sale of Nicaraguan coffee at markets throughout Adelaide to raise money for the Sandinistas. He would ride his bike around the suburbs every Saturday, delivering the beans. He also distributed literature on campus. Penny was less committed – more an interested fellow traveller. ‘I think she saw it as a fringe activity,’ says Penberthy. He recollects Penny attending the monthly meetings of CISCAC at the Adelaide University Union. He thinks she was present on the day they built a Reagan piñata and encouraged students to give it a whack, though she was not there on the day he led an occupation of the BHP offices in Adelaide, protesting against the company’s investments in South America. He remembers an argument at one meeting about whether Daniel Ortega, the Nicaraguan president, should have done an interview with Playboy, and whether they should pass a motion expressing disapproval. Penny was in favour of the motion.
To him, Penny Wong was fascinating. ‘She was a very striking, very beautiful person, and I guess to someone like me, who had led a pretty culturally sheltered life, you know, she seemed very exotic and very worldly. I’d never met someone who knew what a laksa was or what hokkien noodles were, or who knew what the patriarchy was. We just sort of started going out together all the time, and she took me to all these fantastic cafés, and places like the Asian Gourmet at the Adelaide Central Market, and we’d just sit there for hours solving the world’s problems.’
They were not involved sexually or romantically, but the friendship with Penberthy has endured. He says, ‘I kid her every now and again about starting up CISCAC again, and she just laughs. I think she’s a bit embarrassed by it all.’ Penberthy is married to Kate Ellis, who was until her 2019 retirement the Labor member for Adelaide, and in the party’s Right faction while Penny Wong is a member of the Left. Had events played out differently, and Wong’s ambitions taken a different direction, Ellis and Wong could easily have found themselves rivals. If Wong were ever to move to the House of Representatives and make a bid for leadership, the natural electorate for her to contest would be the seat of Adelaide.
Wong claims that her politics have changed less than those of many other student politicians she mingled with at university. She has always, she says, been a social democrat – supporting government interventions in favour of social justice, but within the framework of a liberal democracy and capitalist economy. She remembers the conversation in which she told Penberthy that she was not a socialist. ‘He said, “Really?” And I said, “Look, I think the market’s got a place, and private property has a place.”’ Penberthy was apparently shocked at this contention.
By the end of their first year, both Penberthy and Wong were moving away from CISCAC. Penberthy describes his disenchantment as sudden. He woke up one morning and realised he no longer had the motivation to spend his weekend delivering coffee beans. He was becoming interested in journalism. He began writing for On Dit. Once he was a journalist, he says, ‘My view suddenly became “Let’s treat all the student politicians with a degree of contempt.”’
Meanwhile, Penny Wong was making what Penberthy describes as a ‘steely-eyed decision’ to get involved in the mainstream. As he puts it, with a self-deprecatory dig at his younger self, ‘She wanted to have an impact, rather than being involved in this really quite minute and bizarre conversation that CISCAC were having. I think at the end of that first year she decided it was time to stop hanging around with that ratbag Penberthy and get serious.’
Academically, Penny is remembered as studious. In first-year politics tutorials she was the one who had always done the reading, and always had a forthright view. Her own memory is different. She describes her first year as a bit of a mess. She did one semester of drama, following through on her school involvement, before concluding she was no good at it. She enrolled in Spanish as a substitute for Portuguese, but did not persist with it. Later, as her political involvement shifted up a gear, she made compromises. She claims she did enough study to get by, but not enough to excel. University life was different back then: it was possible to swot in the weeks before exams and pass well, while spending most of the semester attending political meetings or talking on the campus lawns.
Penny was learning at least as much outside the classroom as in it. In these years, the University of Adelaide punched above its weight in terms of its students’ future contribution to public life. David Penberthy went on to be a newspaper editor and senior journalist. Also part of Penny’s wider social circle were Annabel Crabb and Samantha Maiden, both of whom would also become prominent journalists. Wong remembers attending performances on campus by Shaun Micallef and Francis Greenslade, who had recently left the university, where together they had dominated the Theatre Guild. Others on campus included Christian Kerr, later a Liberal political staffer and then a journalist. Embryonic politicians included the future Australian Democrats leader Natasha Stott Despoja, who was at different times an ally and a rival of Penny Wong’s, but broadly aligned with her in the battles over union control; Jack Snelling, later Labor treasurer of South Australia; Pat Conlon, then a mature-age law student, later a minister in the South Australian government; and Mark Butler, today shadow minister for climate change and energy in the federal parliament. Jay Weatherill, a future premier of South Australia, had graduated the year before Wong began her degree. Christopher Pyne overlapped her by one year. He was president of the University Liberal Club in 1987 and went on to be a minister in the Abbott, Turnbull and Morrison governments. Butler, Conlon and Weatherill would all prove vitally important to Penny Wong’s future, but in her first couple of years at university, Butler and Conlon were acquaintances rather than friends, and she did not cross paths with Weatherill until 1989.
The legacy of Penny Wong’s flirtation with CISCAC was membership of a broad left coalition on campus that included some Labor Party members, but also many who were not aligned with a party but were active on particular issues – such as opposition to apartheid in South Africa or environmental causes. It was the Hawke–Keating government’s proposal to introduce a ‘gradu
ate tax’ – a fee for higher education to be collected once graduates were earning – that brought this group together and bound them in a loose coalition called the Progressive Education Team. In 1988 it propelled them onto the streets in the largest student demonstrations since the Vietnam War.
Universities faced huge waiting lists but lacked the funds to expand. The federal budget was tight. Federal education minister John Dawkins established a committee, chaired by former New South Wales premier Neville Wran, to find a solution. Its report recommending the graduate tax was released in May 1988. The next week, an estimated 5000 students protested on the steps of Adelaide’s Parliament House.3 In the months that followed, there were sit-ins, attempts to storm the premier’s office and more demonstrations. Penny Wong was in the midst of the protests. She had been to demonstrations before – when she was a teenager her mother had taken her to marches marking International Women’s Day, for example – but these were the first political demonstrations she attended in her own right. The issue went to the heart of her family’s story. She had been raised by a father whose life had been transformed by education. Her mother, who had completed her degree and social work qualifications as a single parent in a fee-free system, was another example.
In July 1988, Penny Wong succeeded in her first electoral campaign, being voted onto the Students’ Association and the board of the Adelaide University Union as part of the Progressive Education ticket. Her candidate statement read:
Back in ’87 student politics didn’t appear that important to me (the bar seemed like the place to be!). Then Mr Dawkins started talking about ‘more students to the dollar’ and fees and amalgamations were suddenly on the agenda. Some of these changes may be good, others not so good, but one thing we must not lose sight of is that it is OUR education that is being discussed. You have a right to be heard. I’m not interested in petty politicking – let’s concentrate on the real issue: our education.4
Viewed from today’s perspective, that call to arms is classic Wong – measured, almost fence-sitting, in its acknowledgement that some of the Dawkins-proposed changes might be worthwhile. It was also a little disingenuous. Penny Wong had never been one for hanging around the university bar, and she had always been interested in politics.
It was while handing out election material with other members of the Progressive Education group that she met Wendy Wakefield (no relation to the founder of South Australia), who was active in campaigning against apartheid and in support of the African National Congress. Wakefield was elected president of the Students’ Association. She and Penny Wong were to become lifelong friends. Wakefield remembers that they first bonded over fried rice at the university refectory dedicated to serving Asian-style food. Wong also met Anthea Howard, who was elected education vice-president of the Association. She was a politics student destined for a public service career specialising in environmental management. By the beginning of 1989, the three women were sharing a house in the suburb of Prospect. The political battles of the next few years were discussed over the kitchen table. They enjoyed cooking for one another. Penny Wong’s abilities in the kitchen were a revelation. Wakefield remembers: ‘It was the first time I had seen a prawn that wasn’t pink, a green prawn.’ Wakefield became a vegetarian at one stage, only to recant when faced with Penny’s chicken curry.
Penny Wong’s political rivals thought she was intimidating and chilly. To her friends, though, she was ‘great fun’, though always with an undertone of seriousness. It was clear to all of them that Penny Wong was destined for great things – but not necessarily for politics. Wakefield says, ‘I remember saying to her that I didn’t know if she was going to be a judge or a politician.’
*
In the same week that Penny Wong won her first election, the leader of the federal opposition, John Howard, launched a new immigration policy for the Liberal–National coalition. Called One Australia, it advocated the end of support for multiculturalism, which had been bipartisan policy ever since the end of the White Australia policy. Howard’s initiative followed a four-year debate on Asian immigration sparked largely by the historian Geoffrey Blainey, who argued that Asian immigration threatened Australia’s ‘social cohesion’.
During an interview on the John Laws radio program, and again that evening on ABC Radio, Howard said the level of Asian immigration was too high. ‘I do believe that if in the eyes of some in the community it’s too great, it would be in our immediate-term interest and supportive of social cohesion if it were slowed down a little, so the capacity of the community to absorb it was greater.’5
The Labor government exploited discomfort on Howard’s frontbench by quickly introducing a parliamentary motion rejecting the use of race to select immigrants. Three Liberal MPs – Ian Macphee, Steele Hall and Philip Ruddock – defied their leader by crossing the floor. But Howard had support. The shadow finance minister, John Stone, insisted that Asian immigration had to be slowed, and the National Party leader, Ian Sinclair, warned against any ‘undue build-up’ of Asians.
Until this moment in Australian history, there is no compelling reason why Penny Wong’s hatred of racism should have caused her to lean more to the Labor Party than to the Liberal Party. Anti-racism had for more than a decade been bipartisan – and a prominent feature of Liberal prime minister Malcolm Fraser’s record. Going further into history, the Labor Party and the union movement had been at least as racist as their opponents. Jane Chapman’s concern for social justice, and Penny’s experience of poverty in a developing country, would probably always have driven her towards Labor, but this new policy made it almost inevitable. Howard’s remarks, and his use of race for political purposes, meant that in her view the Liberal Party was not only historically wrong but also immoral.
Ask Penny Wong about her memories of John Howard’s comments today and it is as though the temperature in the room has fallen ten degrees. Her head drops, her eyes harden, her speech slows. ‘I will never forgive him,’ she says, with intensity.
Howard’s remarks legitimised the things the bigots were saying. They placed the future prime minister of her country on the same side as all those who had abused her and Toby over the years. She was used to discrimination – racist comments were made to her all too frequently in shops and on the street. But she remembers conversations from this period in which people who were supposedly friends assured her that, while she was ‘OK’, perhaps there were, after all, too many Asians.
Sometime during the Howard years, Toby, by then in his mid-teens, failed to come home from school as expected. Jane and Penny were frantic as the hours ticked by. Eventually he arrived, footsore and weeping. A group of young men had got on the bus and abused him for being Asian. The bus driver had stopped and made Toby get off. ‘I remember thinking that this is what Howard was doing,’ says Wong. ‘He was talking to those people. Those racists, that bus driver.’
Two weeks after Howard announced the One Australia policy, Penny Wong joined the Australian Labor Party. This followed a conversation that has remained a touchstone of her political involvement.
Lois Boswell and her husband, Don Frater, are two of Penny Wong’s oldest and closest friends. Today, they are both senior bureaucrats in the South Australian government. In 1988 they were still fairly new to Adelaide, self-exiled from New South Wales, where they had been involved in Young Labor. Moving to Adelaide was an impulsive decision. Frater had been working for Telecom, Boswell for the Federated Miscellaneous Workers’ Union. For different reasons, both were feeling sour about their employment. They met for lunch one day and agreed it was time to move. Where to go? As Boswell retraces their reasoning, ‘Can’t move to Queensland, Bjelke-Petersen is in power. Can’t move to Melbourne, we’re from Sydney. Can’t move to Hobart, it’s too small. Can’t move to Perth, it’s too far away. Can’t move to Darwin, it’s too hot. Bugger it. Adelaide, here we come!’
When they arrived, in early 1987, their only contacts were other members of Young Labor, in particular I
an Hunter – a Flinders University science graduate active in campaigning for gay rights. He had founded the Flinders University Gay Society and helped found the state’s AIDS Action Committee, as well as campaigning for South Australia to outlaw discrimination based on sexuality. Hunter welcomed Boswell with open arms and invited her to join him at Labor’s state convention that year. Boswell recalls a young woman was onstage talking about the importance of moving Bubbles the dolphin from the entertainment park Marineland before it closed. ‘In Sydney, they would have turned the microphones off,’ she says. Later that night there was a division over a point in the rules, and all the combatants had a civilised cup of tea together afterwards. Boswell was in culture shock. For someone reared in the tough world of New South Wales Labor, politics Adelaide-style was hard to take seriously. ‘I could hardly believe it.’
Soon after, she and Frater attended a sub-branch meeting in Adelaide dominated by the Centre Left. Boswell nominated for the position of president and set about doing what you would in Sydney: ‘doorknocked everybody and rang people’. She notes, ‘We found half … were residents at the homeless shelter. We turned up on the night and started challenging votes.’ She lost 58–57, but she and Frater won two of the sub-branch’s positions to the state convention. Soon, rumours were circulating that they had been brought over by the Left to take over the party. But ‘we had just been taught in a different style of politics’, she says.
So it was that in August 1988 Boswell was attending the state Labor convention at Adelaide Trades Hall, where one of the hot topics was the Wran proposal for a graduate tax. Boswell was opposed to student fees, but was also taking a pragmatic position: ‘If we are going to end up with this thing anyway, how do we stop it from preventing poor people from going to university?’
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