Penny Wong

by Simons, Margaret;

  But on this day in Beachport, that was far in the future. Weatherill, like his father, was part of the Left faction of the Labor Party, which was locked out of power and influence within South Australian Labor by an alliance between the Centre Left and the Right. Given that Wong was being drawn into the Left, it is surprising that she and Weatherill had not met before this trip, but he is sure this was their first encounter. ‘I’m certain. I would have remembered,’ he says today. He was instantly smitten. There would have been important issues to discuss at the national conference they were due to attend – fees for higher education were being introduced that year, universities were amalgamating, the Hawke–Keating economic agenda was taking its grip – but today all Weatherill can remember about the conference is his pursuit of Penny Wong. ‘I was attracted to her, and that was the main issue at conference for me. She was beautiful, immensely attractive.’

  Soon after the conference they became a couple. It was not Penny Wong’s first love affair. Those who knew her at university in 1987 and 1988 recall her dating a radical left-winger called Nick – usually referred to as ‘Nick the environmentalist’. He has disappeared from history, and Wong, with a wince and a laugh, declines to give his surname. Jay Weatherill, however, was her first longstanding relationship. At this time, none of her contemporaries had any reason to think she was other than heterosexual.

  By 1990 Weatherill and Wong had moved in together. Altogether their relationship lasted five years, of which four were spent living together. Over that time, they shared several townhouses and flats around the East Terrace area of Adelaide.

  The relationship was formative for both of them. Weatherill credits Wong with ‘knock[ing] me into shape’, particularly on women’s rights and feminism. He had come from a traditional family, his mother not working outside the home. ‘I was a pretty unreconstructed bloke, and I would just make assumptions about the role of women. With Penny if I made any kind of mistake I was very quickly corrected … it was tough but very rewarding. I was constantly being challenged.’

  Wong says of Weatherill, ‘I think he’s actually the most talented politician of us all, of all our generation. He’s smart and he’s as determined as I am, but he has much better emotional intelligence than I do. He knows how to bring people with him much better than I do, or did back then. And I learned some of that from him.’

  Weatherill remembers Wong as ‘passionate and exciting’ but, at the same time, intensely competitive and ambitious, and hyper-alert to any suggestion that she was not being taken seriously. ‘She would have flashes of temper … She’s much more relaxed now.’

  He accompanied her on some of her regular trips to Sabah to see her father and siblings. On one trip they met in Singapore and spent weeks travelling the length of the Malay Peninsula. It seemed to Weatherill that Wong got her sense of social justice and her feminism mostly from her mother. She resembled her father, though, in her reserve and reluctance to show too much public emotion, as well as in her methodical, logical thinking and organised habits.

  Penny Wong’s grandmother Lai was still alive at this time and in her mid-seventies. Weatherill met her but didn’t come to know her well. She loomed large, though, in their conversations. Wong often referred to her as an exemplar of courage and strength. Weatherill also met Toby. He was ‘a really charming, cool kind of guy’ – easy to like. He would come and cook for them. By now, though, his drug problem was increasingly evident. ‘Penny was constantly worried about him and spent a lot of time trying to help him.’

  Many people remember Penny Wong at this time as oversensitive to any suggestion of racism or sexism. She could be oddly combative, sometimes taking offence for reasons that were not apparent to others in the room. But those who thought her sensitivity excessive didn’t live in her skin. Her friends all share stories of being out with Penny and being surprised when suddenly somebody would hurl a racist taunt. She would shrug, they say, and dismiss it. She was used to it.

  Jay Weatherill remembers that an issue between them was the depth of his connections within the Labor Party, thanks to his father. She thought he was privileged in that way, and that she was at a disadvantage. He remembers taking her to a Labor lunch his father hosted at Parliament House. They walked into a room of ‘crusty old Labor blokes’. As they passed by, one man looked at Wong and said in a stage whisper to his dining companions, ‘Don’t mention the war.’ She heard it. According to Weatherill, it helped confirm her view that she would have to work harder, and be tougher, if she was to make her way in the party.

  Today Jay Weatherill and Penny Wong remain good friends. They have dealt with each other frequently over the years, both regarding internal Labor Party and factional politics and while negotiating deals of national importance, such as when Wong was the minister for water, and Weatherill was South Australian premier, intent on cutting a good deal for the state’s irrigators. At the time of writing, Weatherill had just been appointed to conduct a ‘warts and all’ review of Labor’s 2019 election loss.1 Long after they ceased to be a couple, Wong and Weatherill’s alliance continued as part of the drive to transform South Australian Labor and build a platform for power.

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  There aren’t many models for female political power in Australia. We have trouble dealing with it. We seesaw between discomfort with women seeking and exercising influence, and idealising them as somehow better to and different from men. Then we punish them if they turn out to be, after all, like other politicians – making the same kinds of compromises and engaging in the same types of political warfare.

  It’s shocking to look back at the media coverage from the early part of Penny Wong’s parliamentary career. She was elected to the Senate in 2001 – less than two decades ago – yet the headlines show that it was still permissible to belittle and trivialise female elected representatives. Wong was billed as a ‘lipstick warrior’.2 Another headline proclaimed, ‘Women come to the rescue’, greeting the fact that more women from both the major parties had been elected to the federal parliament, and that for both parties, women were ‘the standout performers’.3

  Meanwhile, The Advertiser assured its readers that Penny Wong and her fellow Labor senator Linda Kirk were ‘determined to be seen as serious politicians rather than “pretty faces”’.4 Wong was frequently compared to Natasha Stott Despoja, who had been elected to the Senate in 1995 for the Australian Democrats. After all, they were both women.

  None of this was unusual. Victorian premier Joan Kirner had to put up with cartoons showing her as a fat, harried housewife in a polka-dot dress. Carmen Lawrence, who was on the Labor frontbench when Penny Wong was elected, received similar treatment. South Australian Liberal senator Amanda Vanstone was regularly ridiculed for her weight.5 In the years ahead there would be the denigration of Julia Gillard for being ‘deliberately barren’, for being Bob Brown’s ‘bitch’, for being a ‘witch’ – and, of course, for her empty fruit bowl. ‘Sexism is no better than racism,’ Gillard was to say later.6 But it isn’t only about negative prejudice. The tendency is to hold women leaders to different standards – idealising them, then tearing them down.

  Penny Wong is different and not different at the same time. Carol Johnson is a political scientist at the University of Adelaide. She has known Wong since she was a student, and subsequently became a friend, even though they disagree on some policy issues. Johnson has cited statements by Wong in her academic work, and Wong has quoted Johnson’s extensive publications on the history of social democracy in some of her speeches.7 Johnson describes Wong as part of the broadening of the Australian Labor Party from an organisation that understood tackling inequality as negotiating a better deal for white working men to one that practised a more complicated and ambitious politics – including seeking equality of opportunity across gender, race and sexuality.8 Wong is both an advocate and a personification of this broadening. It is not an easy position.

  But Wong is also a player in a Labor Party formed by its narrower histor
y. In the past, socially conservative Catholics were a key part of its power base, and they remain important, particularly in her home state, South Australia. She is bound by party loyalty and both constrained and enabled by factional power plays. Labor Party factional politics is deeply unappealing to most outsiders – perhaps particularly those who adore Penny Wong and like to think of her as above the machinery of political power. The truth is that it is not possible to understand the rise of Penny Wong without seeing her as an accomplished and sometimes ruthless player in those contests. Why should we expect different?

  Labor’s factions are usually mentioned with negative connotations. The factions have a strong and sometimes determining influence on preselection of election candidates. Sometimes factional allegiance counts more than talent. They also have a central influence over who gets frontbench positions and what policies are pursued. Both Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard have at different times described Labor’s factions as out of control, ‘nonsense’ and a ‘cancer’ on the party.9 Perhaps it is only possible to appreciate the positive side of factions by considering the alternative. In some countries, political parties are mere flags of convenience, while the real power is held by family or business dynasties. Or internal contests for power are resolved by the jailing or killing of opponents. Just as political parties are part of an orderly democracy, party factions are part of the machinery that enables large groups of people with different views and multiple ambitions to work together. Factions allow large and diverse parties to cohere. Through factions, the cats are herded, power is distributed, preselections are contested and, when we are lucky, policy is debated and honed. Sometimes, and for some people, factions represent political positions. Sometimes they represent nothing other than the advancement and containment of ambition and allegiance. Minor parties, usually lacking formal factions but not factionalism, have trouble holding together and lasting. The Labor Party persists largely because the factions are part of the managing of internal power contests and policy disputes. The price is that sometimes the faction members hate one another more than they hate those on the other side of politics.

  In the 1990s there were three main factions within the ALP – the Left, the Right and the Centre Left. Within each, there were subgroups based on geography, personalities and the all-important union affiliations and sponsorships. The federal Left faction was divided between the so-called soft Left and hard Left. The Left faction within the South Australian branch was a small player in the national scheme of things but generally seen as aligned with the soft Left. This was the faction that Penny Wong had joined, driven by both personal conviction and by her affinity with individuals such as Jay Weatherill, Lois Boswell and Don Frater.

  When Weatherill and Wong met, South Australian Labor had been through a period of disruption. In the Don Dunstan era, the internal machinations of the party had been dominated by a few towering figures – federal ministers Mick Young, Clyde Cameron and Senator Jim Toohey among them. They had mediated the power of the unions and managed the factional contests. When the Labor state government was trounced in 1979, after Dunstan’s resignation, the party had to reassess and reflect.

  Peter Duncan had been state attorney-general under Dunstan and was a federal minister then parliamentary secretary in the Hawke–Keating government. He had corralled a group of left-wing unions in South Australia and dominated the faction with the assistance of their votes. From 1979 until about 1984, he was highly successful: the Left dominated the state party. But every action has a reaction.

  The South Australian Labor Party was different to its eastern siblings. In particular, it had not been through the split in the 1950s that scarred the party along the east coast. One of the effects of this in South Australia was that the Catholic conservatives had remained within the party, and they retained great influence. For them, Duncan was an obnoxious and dangerous figure. The Centre Left, meanwhile, was dominant – effectively the governing faction in the state. The premier, John Bannon, was allied with it, and so were federal representatives Mick Young and Senator Chris Schacht. From 1984, the Centre Left and the Right allied to lock the Left out of preselections, power and influence. The preselection of Jay Weatherill’s father in 1986 was the last to be won by the Left, and that had been close-run. The Right would not deal with Duncan: he was considered abrasive and radical. Duncan himself seemed content with maintaining control of his faction rather than seeking meaningful influence within the larger party. Meanwhile, Senator Nick Bolkus, also of the Left, had entered federal parliament in 1981 – and he and Duncan did not get on.

  Jay Weatherill was one of a group of nascent political leaders who were increasingly convinced that Duncan’s stranglehold on the Left had to be challenged. They wanted the ability to cut deals with the Right – to have greater influence in a growing party. That wasn’t possible under Duncan. In later years, when it began to get noticed, the media referred to this group as the ‘Bolkus Left’. Today, Bolkus and all those involved regard the tag as a misnomer. Bolkus was the group’s senior member, and provided contacts, mentorship and support, but he was not its leader. The initiative came from Weatherill and Wong’s former university acquaintances Pat Conlon and Mark Butler. Also important was Ian Hunter, the gay rights campaigner from Flinders University who was working in Bolkus’s office. Don Frater and Lois Boswell were also involved.

  Penny Wong has loyal friends. In particular, she has loyal female friends. Long before she agreed to be interviewed for this book, they were monitoring its progress. As word got around that I had interviewed one person, the next would show in their response to questions that they were aware of what I had asked. An idea floated or a perception voiced to glean a response would be greeted at the next interview with a comment like ‘I hear you think …’ and a reply that showed the signs of workshopping behind the scenes.

  When word got around that I had interviewed Nick Bolkus and Mark Butler, the message that came back through Penny Wong’s female friends was that the men should not be allowed to get recognition for her political achievements. ‘None of the men can claim credit for Penny Wong or her views,’ I was told firmly by Lois Boswell. Perhaps it was this fear – that the men’s voices might dominate this book – that helped Wong decide to agree to be interviewed.

  To some extent, she need not have worried. Nick Bolkus agrees that he put opportunities in her way, but he does not take credit for her rise. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Bolkus hosted barbeques at his home to nurture and cultivate a group of young Labor people ‘who obviously had talent and were frozen out of most of the decision-making in the party’. They seemed to him to be the kind of people the party could not afford to ignore. By this stage he had stepped back from state factional contests to focus on his federal career; in 1988 he had become the minister for consumer affairs. Nevertheless, he supported the group’s ambitions for the Left to wield greater influence, easing the path for Butler, Hunter, Weatherill and, a little later, Wong. He built connections between those in South Australia whom he regarded as ‘the pragmatic Left’ and their eastern state and national counterparts – the likes of Gerry Hand and Pete Steedman in Victoria. ‘It was a model that was prepared to make deals and to compromise to get good policy out,’ he recalls. That meant cutting deals with the Right.

  Mark Butler was central to the group. An Arts/Law graduate, he was two years younger than Penny Wong. Butler is now shadow minister for climate change and energy, but for most of his career he was a union leader and a key factional powerbroker, vital to the internal manoeuvrings of the party at a state and, increasingly, federal level. He became the secretary of the South Australian branch of the main Left union in South Australia, the Liquor, Hospitality and Miscellaneous Workers’ Union (known as the Missos, pronounced miss-ohs) in 1996, and the following year was elected as president of the South Australian Labor Party – the youngest in its history.

  Butler shared a house and was close friends with Pat Conlon, who had begun his working life as a
roof tiler, storeman, timberhand and deckhand before working for the Missos and then enrolling at the University of Adelaide as a mature-age student. As the so-called Bolkus Left cohered, Conlon was working with Weatherill and Butler at the main Left law firm in town, Duncan & Hannon. Conlon went on to be elected to the lower house of the South Australian parliament in 1997, and became one of the most influential ministers in the Rann and Weatherill governments. If Butler was the quintessential backroom strategist, Conlon had the talent for reaching out, persuading and cutting deals.

  Bolkus claims no credit for the faction that bore his name. Very soon, the young people had their own networks and connections on the east coast and were as helpful to him as he was to them. He does remember when Penny Wong and Jay Weatherill used to attend barbeques at his house. He talked to Wong about racism, and they shared their outrage about John Howard’s One Australia policy. As the son of migrants, Bolkus sympathised with her experiences of discrimination.

  Bolkus says today that he recognised ‘natural political capacity’ in Penny Wong and admired her frankness. ‘I liked the fact that you could talk with Penny and she didn’t feel shy about disagreeing with you. You could have an honest discussion with her and get insight into what people were really thinking. When you are in the federal cabinet, people don’t always tell you the truth, but Penny was always ready to tell me what she thought.’

  He did his best to put her in positions where her talent would be recognised – recommending her for work on party policy committees and the like. She soon needed no help from him. She was a success in all the roles she took on,‘She could read the play very well. Penny was not a person who would isolate herself with inept contributions. She could read who her opponents were and who her supporters were, and she knew how to handle herself in a political situation.’ Before long, she was dominating the policy committees she served on at state and national conferences, and getting noticed across the party.