It was a bitterly fought conference. The voting was delayed by a dispute over whether Young Labor could take part in its own right. After a vote, Young Labor members who did not also represent local branches were locked out.6 The victims of this rude rebuff were outraged, and joined a gathering group of student protesters outside the conference. Among the students were Penny Wong and her friends from the Progressive Education Team.
There were two votes on the graduate tax. In the first, then premier and ALP national president John Bannon moved to support the tax. The delegates tied at 96-all.7
It was probably after this that Boswell stepped out to visit the protesters. Penny Wong stood out immediately. ‘She was very striking and clearly had some sway with the people she was with.’
The two women fell into conversation. Fired up by the vote, Boswell told Wong she agreed with her stance on education. But what, Boswell asked, was she doing outside demonstrating when she should be inside trying to influence the future of the party?
Penny Wong replied that she could not, on principle, join a party that was proposing to introduce fees for education. Boswell referenced the vote that had just taken place – a tie. It really mattered ‘who was in the room’. Wong should be in the room. Being outside protesting was easy. Winning the debates that mattered was harder.
It turned into an extended conversation, with the central theme being that it was better – more sensible, more effective and braver – to be on the inside trying to bring about change, even if that meant compromise. Being outside protesting might mean you could stay pure, but you were also impotent. Boswell remembers, ‘I pitched a whole lot of stuff with it. We talked about uranium, we talked about feminism. We talked about racism. It was all about values, but I was talking about these issues as a battle within the ALP between progressive and less-progressive politics. And if you wanted to really make a difference, you had to be inside the room having that battle.’
By the end of the conversation, Lois Boswell had signed up Penny Wong as a member of the ALP.
Later that day there was a second vote. The convention defied Bannon in a 106–81 vote against the graduate tax. It was written up at the time as a significant blow to the Hawke–Keating agenda, but it made no difference in the long run.8 The graduate tax was introduced on New Year’s Day 1989.
The irony, Wong says today, is that she now believes the policy rationale for what became known as the Higher Education Contribution Scheme (HECS) was correct. Her political experience, not least her time as a finance minister, has given her a deep understanding of revenue and husbanding limited resources. The tertiary system had to expand to give opportunities to students with fewer advantages than her. Provided the revenue raised from fees was reinvested in education, she now says, ‘I think it was the right policy.’
Over the three decades that have passed since Penny Wong made that fundamental decision about what serious political involvement required, the phrase ‘it matters who is in the room’ has become something of a mantra between Wong and Boswell, often invoked when planning, strategising or rallying after a defeat. The words, or phrases reflecting the same sentiment, recur in Wong’s speeches and public statements. They are used, often, as a justification for being in politics – including the compromises Wong has made in order to retain influence within the Australian Labor Party.
As Wong recounts, her decision to join the party was driven by a recognition that those such as Lois Boswell, Don Frater and others on the left of the Labor Party were ‘people like me … there was a comradeship or an affinity or a philosophical kind of alignment’. It felt like finding her home.
Frater and Boswell have been important backroom operatives in Labor politics ever since. They keep a low profile. The clippings file on each of them is thin, but they are occasionally referred to in the Adelaide press as a public-sector power couple. Frater is a deputy chief executive at SA Health. When Penny Wong was minister for climate change and water in the first Rudd government, Frater was her chief of staff. Boswell served as Jay Weatherill’s deputy chief of staff when he was premier of South Australia, and after a stellar public-service career is now deputy chief executive at the Department of Human Services. The couple are known to be among Wong’s key advisers.
Thanks to Boswell and Frater, by the time Penny Wong took up her position on the board of the Adelaide University Union she was a member of, and in regular touch with, the left wing of the Labor Party, and had redefined her involvement in student politics as part of the broader battle for control and influence over the party’s future.
*
George Karzis knew and liked Penny Wong. In theory she was studying law alongside him – although his attendance record was poor. He remembers turning up to an exam on jurisprudence, and running into Penny, who ‘politely but in disbelief’ asked him if he was there for the exam. He confirmed it. ‘Have you attended a single lecture?’ she asked. He said he had not, and she playfully whacked him on the shoulder. He managed to score a credit in the exam.
Karzis was the president of the University of Adelaide’s Labor Club, and from the Right. After Julia Gillard left Adelaide, the club tore itself apart through factional rivalries, but in 1987 he reconstituted it. Karzis was a supporter of the graduate tax: as a working-class boy, he saw the tax as a means of opening the door to tertiary education to those with fewer social advantages. More broadly, he believed in the Hawke–Keating economic agenda.
Penny Wong had joined the campus Labor Club sometime in the first half of 1988 – before she joined the party proper. At first she was barely active. Now, armed with a broader sense of why campus politics mattered, she began to organise.
The Labor Club’s annual general meeting was usually attended by only a couple of dozen people. In May 1989, it was packed. There were several disputes about voting rights, but in the end 114 people were deemed eligible to vote. Penny Wong ran on a ticket against Karzis with another Labor Club member, James Greentree, and Karzis was rolled. Greentree was elected president and Wong general secretary – but there was no doubt about who was really in charge. In the barrage of letters Karzis wrote to On Dit in the ensuing weeks, the new leadership team was dubbed the ‘Wong–Greentree oligarchy’. Karzis claimed the club had fallen victim to ‘the Progressive Left and its McCarthyist tactics’. He accused Progressive Left ‘bouncers’ of demanding voter ID only from Greek Australians and of intimidating others. ‘The Progressive Left, led by James Greentree and Penny Wong, talks about democracy but denies members a vote … Hail the new regime!’9
Greentree had a letter in the same edition describing the AGM as an ‘ordinary event’ where members had made their democratic decision. The only attendees who had been denied voting rights, he said, were Liberal Party members trying to make mischief. Meanwhile, the club was getting to work, hastening to organise a forum on uranium mining, with Richard Mills, a member of the ALP’s Uranium Policy Review Committee, as the guest speaker.10
With this takeover, Penny Wong became one of the significant political operators on campus. Meanwhile, on the Adelaide University Union board, the battle with Andrew Hamilton and the medical students was getting underway.
Within the Labor Club, Andrew Lamb was an opponent of Wong’s. He was further to the right than she was. But in the battle on the Union board, they were allies. Also on their side, more often than not, were Andrew Lamb’s partner, Natasha Stott Despoja, and Penny Wong’s housemates, Wendy Wakefield and Anthea Howard.
Underneath the petty wrangling with Hamilton over the presidency, there were important issues for young students to be negotiating. The student union managed a budget of $8.5 million, had a staff of more than 100 and held responsibility for three refectories, the bar, dozens of clubs and associations, On Dit and the Students’ Association. Debate could move from compulsory student unionism, or renegotiating awards and unfair-dismissal cases, to whether the beer in the bar had a terrible aftertaste, and what could be done to correct this before Orientation W
eek.
At the beginning of 1990, Hamilton returned to focus on his study as he entered a new year. The Adelaide University Union presidency, which carried an honorarium, was meant to be a full-time position, and he claimed to be doing his presidential work on evenings and weekends. Penny Wong and her allies demanded a close accounting of how he spent his hours. They wanted him to keep a diary. They picked holes in his reports and criticised him for not following board directives.11 The argy-bargy over Hamilton fed into a wider dispute about whether elected Adelaide University Union officials should be paid an honorarium. Those opposed to the professionalisation of student politics argued that money should be spent on services, such as refectories and sporting clubs, rather than on politics. It was in this context that Wong wrote her first article in On Dit – and the first thing she had published since her teenage poetry in the Scotch College magazine.
Shorn of the heat the disputes ignited at the time, the article is a nerdy yet eloquent statement of the objectives to which she was to devote her professional life. Today Wong says she does not remember writing it, but remarks that it could be run under her name today and would still reflect her views. She described political representation as being a service – indeed, one of the most important forms of service that can be provided to students or citizens.
Australians have a tendency to damn all forms of political representation. How often do we hear people saying, ‘Those bloody politicians, they’re all the same’? Given the current leaning of our politicians, I’m not sure I’d disagree. However, there is a danger of equating the players with the game and throwing both in the rubbish bin. I have heard some extremely convincing criticisms of both our Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition. I have yet to hear any argument that could convince me that political representation is not a good thing … Political representation is also a service, and the students at this university deserve competent and committed representation … political representation with maximum consultation and participation of the wider student body must be a priority for any student organisation worth its salt. It is not an optional extra.12
Wong and her allies finally won the battle against Hamilton. It was in the second calendar year of his term, with just weeks to go. He was spending large amounts of time at hospitals. Finally, they got the numbers to move a motion of no-confidence in him, and he resigned on the morning of a meeting at which he would otherwise have been sacked.
Andrew Lamb took the presidency, with Wong’s support. Recalling these events today, he says he believes Wong would have much preferred ‘someone more left-wing’. However, he was a consensus candidate – someone the non-aligned board members would support.
To Lamb, it seemed that Penny Wong had arrived at the University of Adelaide fully formed. Her skills were formidable, her poise extraordinary. She was more emotional than she appears to be these days, he says, but a fearsome debater. ‘A lot of people going into student politics sort of make their mistakes there. I don’t remember Penny making mistakes or being foolish. She was always very thoughtful and considered,’ he says.
Others recall that even in the most heated exchanges Wong would frequently show flashes of temper but never shouted. She also adopted the habit – which others soon followed – of referring to ‘Mr Lamb’ or ‘Mr Hamilton’ rather than using first names. Some thought it pompous. Others thought it showed that she was taking things seriously and wanted others to as well. She still does this today. Her opponents remark they know people are in trouble when she calls them ‘Mr’ or ‘Ms’.
Remembering their battles, Wong and Hamilton agree – though in very different terms – about what was achieved. He thought she was practising on him, already focusing on a future political career. Wong denies that she was knowingly preparing for politics, but says that through this period she learned how to ‘exercise influence and win, even when you don’t have the numbers’. And it was great training for the Senate.
In the 1989 elections, for those taking up office in 1990, Wong helped organise a ticket that encompassed the broad left on campus. It supported Natasha Stott Despoja for women’s officer, and David Penberthy and Steve Jackson as editors of On Dit. Wong ran for education vice-president of the Students’ Association – an important position, particularly at a time of such disruption in education policy and campus amalgamations. The post had previously been held by Wong’s housemate Anthea Howard. Even as the vote was held, Wong was widely understood within the organisation as ‘meant to be’ the next education vice-president. Most candidates on the ticket were successful, but Penny Wong was not, losing to Mel Yuan, an independent who had also been on the Union board.
Losing was a shock. The memory clearly still stings. Asked about it, Wong describes it as her ‘first experience of the disloyalty and banality that can come from within my own party’. There had been a deal around the ticket, but the Right ‘broke off and supported an independent against me. So it took the Liberals and the right wing of the Labor Party acting together to beat me.’
Mel Yuan remembers events differently. She says she won through old-fashioned retail politics. It was ‘a war of wallpaper paste’: whoever put up the most posters around campus won. She was also prepared to do what Penny Wong would not – go into lecture theatres and persuade students to get down to the ballot boxes and vote. ‘There were no debates, there were no policy issues. This was Adelaide. It was just a matter of who did the best job of getting out there and getting people to vote.’ As an independent, she worked closely with the Overseas Students’ Association, and remembers ‘those guys were amazing at turning people out to vote.’ Independents on campus, she says, were a cross-section of ‘Labor right, wet Libs, non-aligned centrists, party girls and guys. Our voting base came from across campus … We could get people to come out and vote who traditionally didn’t. I was an economics student and so had that base, who normally didn’t vote … Medical students had me on their ticket. Liberals had me on their ticket. We had candidates from every faculty on our ticket.’
Stott Despoja, too, was a strong campaigner – at that time ‘friendly’ to the Wong–Wakefield–Howard grouping, but later aligning herself more closely with the independents. She would front lecture halls of engineering students not known for their interest in politics and get them to the ballot box. ‘They loved Natasha, those engineering boys,’ recounts one contemporary.
Andrew Lamb describes the contention that the right of the Labor Club undermined Penny Wong as ‘completely wrong, even if Penny believes it … Mel Yuan got elected on the coattails of the tide of additional votes for the “Independents” faction that year.’ Meanwhile, Karzis also denies an organised anti-Wong campaign. He says today that he still likes Wong. One of the reasons is because she has integrity. Her ruthlessness is never personal. He knew she was coming for him, and he remains awed by how successfully she did so.
Whatever the reasons for her loss, in this ‘war of wallpaper paste’ and lecture-hall bashing, Penny Wong failed, despite her proven abilities as an operator. She was formidable but not, at this stage, a good campaigner – and was also apparently outclassed on election strategy.
Wong acknowledges that she was not a natural ‘retail politician’. Popular campaigning did not come easily to her. Partly it was her constant suspicion that her ethnicity would count against her. Partly it was her natural reserve and shyness. She has got better at it, but admits that even today it is not her ‘natural game’. As her profile rises, increasing numbers of Labor MPs want her in their electorate come election time. She does her best to be there, but her colleagues observe that a day of campaigning will drain her, whereas others – the Anthony Albaneses and Bill Shortens of the world – are energised by it.
Education vice-president at the Adelaide University Union was the only elected office Penny Wong has ever contested and not won. It spelled the end of her close involvement in student politics. She continued to attend National Union of Students meetings, and was on the executive, but
had no deep or long-term involvement. She did not run again for any campus positions. By now, she had moved on to bigger things.
4
BOLKUS LEFT
In the summer of early 1989, Penny Wong took a road trip. She was travelling with a group of fellow Young Labor members to a national conference in Melbourne. They must have taken the scenic route – via the Coorong and the Great Ocean Road – because they stopped overnight at a youth hostel in the South Australian coastal town of Beachport, near the Victorian border. Here, she attracted the attention of a young industrial officer at the Australian Workers’ Union, Jay Weatherill. They both remember their walk along the Beachport jetty – proudly if underwhelmingly promoted, at 1.2 kilometres, as the second-longest in the state, stretching over the waters of Rivoli Bay.
Weatherill was four years older than Wong and had graduated from the University of Adelaide with degrees in Law and Economics in 1986. In some ways they could not have been more different. He was from a working-class background, the product of an unremarkable state school. Young Jay had been raised in the western suburbs of Adelaide. His father, George Weatherill, was an English-born migrant employed by the waterworks, as well as being a part-time wharfie and a shop steward. He worked out of the Port Adelaide depot of the waterworks and organised other waterside workers. He moved on to a job with the Australian Government Workers’ Association (later part of the Miscellaneous Workers’ Union), and acquired the nickname ‘Bolshi George’. In 1986, when John Bannon was premier, he was elected to the upper house of the South Australian parliament. Jay Weatherill was already deeply involved in student politics and it was widely assumed he would at some stage follow his father into parliament. In fact, he was to surpass his father’s career, serving as premier of South Australia for seven years, from October 2011 through to March 2018.
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