Penny Wong

by Simons, Margaret;

  Today, asked about Nick Bolkus, both Penny Wong and Mark Butler speak with hesitation – almost embarrassment. They are no longer friends with him. By 2003, Bolkus was on his way out of parliament. The reason was what Bolkus saw at the time as a fundamental betrayal by Butler and Wong. She says she did what she thought was best for the party, and in any case it wasn’t her decision.

  But that was in the future. By the mid-1990s the Bolkus Left had routed Duncan and taken control of the Left in South Australia. By the end of the 1990s they had cut a deal with the Right to form what was dubbed ‘The Machine’ – an unassailable coalition that divided up preselections between them. This laid the path for the parliamentary careers of Jay Weatherill and Penny Wong – and later of Mark Butler and Ian Hunter. In the process they destroyed the Centre Left and the political careers attached to it. The resulting bitterness has lasted to the present day.

  The Right faction was led by the secretary of the Shop, Distributive and Allied Employees’ Association, Don Farrell, who also entered the Senate. South Australia is a small pond, and in most areas the differences between Left and Right were not enormous. Back in the 1990s, those topics on which they fundamentally disagreed – social issues including abortion and gay rights – did not seem as defining as they were later to become.

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  In 1993, at just twenty-four years of age, Penny Wong was deputy chair of the state Labor policy platform committee, and had successfully spearheaded a proposal for racial vilification legislation, making it illegal to abuse someone on the grounds of his or her race. At the July state party convention, she moved for it to be adopted as party policy. The Centre Left, led by state MP Ralph Clarke, argued against her on free-speech grounds. It got fiery. Clarke, who had just been made state president of the party, went head to head not only with Wong but also with the premier, Lynn Arnold, who was strongly in favour of the proposal. Wong conferred with Lois Boswell, who had observed that she probably didn’t have the numbers to win. ‘I remember Lois saying to me that I could decide how I handled it, but I could probably win it if I “did the personal thing” and told my own story.’ For the first time in her political life, Penny Wong used her personal trauma for political ends. She told the story about the neighbour who had abused her as a child, and the racist graffiti on her driveway.

  There is, she notes, always a cost to ‘going personal’. In the heat of debate, Clarke stood up and said either ‘two wrongs don’t make a right’ or ‘two Wongs don’t make it right’ or ‘two Wongs don’t make a white’. Memories differ about which it was, but everyone remembers the uproar. Mark Butler recalls, ‘It just blew the show up.’ Penny Wong remembers hearing a collective intake of breath across Trades Hall. Then people booed and hissed, and cried out ‘Racist!’ The ruckus was reported in the next day’s Advertiser – the first among thousands of times Penny Wong would be mentioned, and quoted, in a mainstream media publication.10

  Opinions differ today about what Clarke meant. Weatherill and Butler both think he didn’t mean to be personally offensive. He was harking back nearly half a century to when Labor leader Arthur Calwell had said ‘two Wongs don’t make a white’ while arguing for the White Australia policy. He was trying to say the days had passed when people said such offensive things – and that therefore the legislation wasn’t needed. Penny Wong agrees with Weatherill and Butler’s interpretation. At first she claims she wasn’t upset by the exchange. When pressed, she acknowledges that she was shocked her personal story had been used against her. But ‘that’s the risk you take’, she says. Others remember differently. One person says she was ‘glowing with rage’; others say she was in tears. But everyone agrees that, within minutes, she swept back into the debate with perfect aplomb, and won the day.

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  Through her university years, Penny Wong worked a handful of jobs. She was a care assistant for the disabled, and waitressed – ‘very badly’, she says – at private functions in the homes of Adelaide’s wealthy.

  Her first serious job began in her final years at university. She began doing paralegal work for the state branch of the Federated Furnishing Trade Society of Australasia, where Don Frater was an organiser. The union represented a wide range of occupations, from woodworkers and musical-instrument makers to sewing machinists and wickerworkers. (At that point Wong did not know enough about her family history to appreciate the symmetry, but she was also working for cabinetmakers – the trade of her great-great-great-grandfather Samuel Chapman.) Wong had taken on a lot. She appeared before the South Australian Industrial Relations Commission (IRC) on unfair-dismissal and wage-underpayment claims even before she had graduated. She recollects these experiences as ‘terrifying, but good’. In her final year she had to take leave from the union job to finish her honours thesis, which was ‘a bit of a disaster’. But by 1993 she had graduated and accepted a full-time position with the union while also studying for her Graduate Diploma in Legal Practice at the University of South Australia. Meanwhile, Don Frater had become the branch secretary, and the union was in the process of amalgamating with the Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union (CFMEU).

  In the words of one of her oldest friends, Wong is not ‘a leaning-on-the-bar-having-a-few-beers kind of person’. Being a union organiser was the first time that she had dealt on a daily basis with ordinary working-class people. It was a shift of culture – but, as in every previous stage of her life, she adapted, learning the language and adopting the tone.

  She remembers visiting one factory on a forty-degree day and seeing rows of migrant workers – mostly Vietnamese women – sitting at sewing machines under a corrugated iron roof. ‘I thought, Bloody hell, this is Adelaide.’ Her attempt to organise them into the union failed. The capital costs of entering the industry were low; the employers were fly-by-night operators who would close down and set up somewhere else at the slightest sign of being held to account. The women were desperate for the income and frightened of losing the work.

  The job also gave her a direct experience of sex discrimination. The trades covered by the union were mostly male-dominated. The exception was the sewing machinists, who were nearly all women. They were also the only ones that did not have a trade-agreed rate of pay. Wong undertook a detailed identification of the work skills involved so as to establish a trade rate. The result was a brace of decisions by industrial relations courts and commissions reflecting enterprise agreements with local blind and furniture manufacturers.11

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  Most of those who knew Penny Wong at this time assumed that she was set on becoming a politician. By now it had become common for Labor Party figures to suggest she should consider a political career. Bolkus claims he raised the idea early in their friendship. Wong remembers a conversation in about 1994 with Terry Cameron – a member of the South Australian Legislative Council and the nephew of Whitlam government minister Clyde Cameron – in which he suggested she run for the South Australian upper house. She claims her reaction to Cameron’s suggestion was horror. ‘At that time it just seemed like a dreadful idea.’ She felt the idea advancing on her, acquiring an air of inevitability. She needed to escape.

  It was a bitter time for Labor in South Australia. With a landslide loss looming at the 1993 polls, Bannon quit as premier in September 1992, swamped by a tidal wave of fury at the collapse of the State Bank of South Australia and the resulting public debt. Successor Lynn Arnold’s fifteen months in office ended in a crushing defeat. An opposition seat in the state upper house would have been an easy job, but also an obscure one for Penny Wong. This was also a difficult time for her on a personal level. In 1994 she ended her relationship with Jay Weatherill.

  A few months after the break-up, Weatherill recalls, Wong arranged to see him to break the news ‘before everyone else told me’ that she was in a relationship with a woman. Weatherill was surprised. There had been no hint of Wong’s attraction to women during their time together. But, looking back, he says, ‘I think I found it easier than i
f she had been involved with another man.’ Soon, Wong was bringing a female partner to Bolkus’s barbeques. Bolkus says, ‘I can’t remember if anyone told me she was with a woman or if I just kind of noticed it. She never made a secret of it.’

  Penny Wong is reluctant to talk about her sexuality. It is, as she says, deeply private; yet she will acknowledge it possesses a political dimension. One of the reasons she was uncertain about a political career was ‘I think I was very frightened about being openly gay … there was the Asian thing, and I had added this.’ There was no model.

  Today, she acknowledges, she is the model. And for that reason she talks about it.

  Wong says she did not think of herself as exclusively gay until well after the relationship with Weatherill had ended. She says, ‘If you’d asked me at the age of thirty, “Would you ever have a relationship with a man again?” I would probably have said, “If I fell in love with a man, yes.” For me it is always about the person first. You fall in love with the person. It’s different now because I’ve been in a long-term relationship with a woman for so long, but back then I didn’t see it as rigid. I hope I have some empathy for those whose coming-out experience was really formative, but that wasn’t my experience. I was who I was in most ways before I decided I was in love with a woman. I was formed much more by an awareness of race than sexuality.’

  At the same time, some of her other supports were falling away. Lois Boswell and Don Frater had moved back to New South Wales. Her mother, Jane, had re-partnered and moved to Melbourne. A few years later, Toby also moved there, where he acted as a consultant to gastropubs wanting to redesign their menus. Shane Grant, who had gone to school with Penny and Toby, remembers catching up with him around this time and being shocked at his appearance. Cheap heroin was flooding into Melbourne, and Toby was in its grip.

  As Penny Wong saw it, ‘I just had to get out of Adelaide. It was a pressure cooker. And I didn’t really know what I wanted to do, whether I wanted a political career. I could feel it all closing in on me. It was a very confusing time. I just needed to do something different.’

  An opportunity presented itself. As the Federated Furnishing Trade Society of Australasia was absorbed further into the CFMEU, Penny Wong was drawn into that union’s politics. She met the top CFMEU official, Michael O’Connor, a factional ally of Julia Gillard’s in her unsuccessful 1993 attempt to gain preselection in Victoria. She also met Gavin Hillier, a leader of the union in New South Wales. Towards the end of 1994, he offered her a job in Sydney with the union’s timber-working division. She quickly accepted.

  She must have been packing her bags by the time of the October 1994 South Australian state Labor convention, which was a high point in the long campaign by the ‘Bolkus Left’ to seize control of the faction. A key issue was who would go into the party office representing the Left – Ian Hunter or a candidate backed by Peter Duncan. The long work of cultivating unions paid off. Duncan lost the vote, Hunter went on to become state Labor Party secretary and, as Mark Butler puts it, ‘Peter Duncan just spat the chewy and left the faction.’

  People who knew Penny Wong at that time remember her as cool, even chilling. She could be oddly combative, sometimes resorting to cutting words without provocation. She was also emotional, showing anger and sometimes tears. It would be wrong to describe her as brittle, because nobody thought for a moment she would break. Wong was formidably strong. For the most part, she had the ability to hide inner turmoil beneath an impenetrable exterior and use her intellect to dominate the room.

  Adelaide in the mid-1990s could be an ugly place. Leadership of the far-Right National Action organisation had passed to a local man called Michael Brander, a Roman Catholic who had studied for the priesthood without completing his novitiate. Brander knew who Penny Wong was. Having opposed the racial vilification laws she had advocated at the state Labor convention in 1993, he led a protest that featured a poster with the words ‘Stop the Asian invasion’. It showed a caricature of a Chinese man with buck teeth and slanting eyes, wearing a conical bamboo hat. More demonstrations followed. Over Easter 1994, protesters went on a rampage in Rundle Mall and held a rally against the ‘Asianisation of Australia’.12

  Penny Wong was always watchful. Racism could come from any corner in the midst of her ordinary life. Suddenly there would be a word, a casually flung phrase or, more rarely, outright abuse – all of it saying, ‘You do not belong, you are not one of us.’ And now she had added sexuality to the mix. Would the city of Adelaide – let alone the state, or the country – ever elect someone like her? And what would she be opening herself to if it did?

  She turned twenty-six in November 1994. It had been six momentous years since she began dabbling in student politics. She was now recognised – whatever her own feelings on the topic – as a political talent for the future, and in her home state friends and allies were in control of the Left of the party.

  But Penny Wong was moving away.

  5

  INTO THE WOODS

  Penny Wong thought of herself as an environmentalist. If you had asked her in her university years about the roots of her political commitment, she would have talked about anti-racism and equality of opportunity – and the environment. One of her first substantial contributions as a Adelaide University Union board member was to devise an environmental policy for the union. In the wrangling with Andrew Hamilton and the medical students it got reduced to debates about whether staff could distinguish what bin to use for paper recycling, but behind the argy-bargy lay a political commitment.

  Through the amalgamation of the Federated Furnishing Trade Society of Australasia with the Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union, Wong was drawn into what is arguably Australia’s oldest culture war – land use, and access to the resources that go with it. Battles over land use are almost impossible for the Australian Labor Party to navigate successfully, as they pitch working people whose incomes rely on resource industries against those dedicated to limiting those industries, or in some cases closing them down. The themes she encountered, of environment, identity and resources, were to recur throughout her political career, including in the 2019 election campaign.

  January 1995 saw Penny Wong waving a placard outside Parliament House in Canberra as part of a blockade by the forestry industry. She was demonstrating for more Australian native forests to be opened for logging and woodchipping. Chris Schacht, a then senator who knew Wong from the Labor Party in Adelaide, saw her there ‘among the megaphones and speaking to the rally’ and recalls thinking that she was putting herself in a ‘difficult position … of opposing the Labor government’s policies’. Other Labor parliamentarians also noted her presence. Penny Wong’s enemies within the party have not forgotten that she was there. They still refer to it when questioning if she is the unsullied left-winger her fan club would like her to be. Is she a woman of principle, or pragmatism?

  The blockade of Parliament House lasted for several days and was devastating for the Keating government. It was, as forest expert Judith Ajani has described it, the first public display of ‘Howard’s battlers’ versus Keating’s ‘special interest elites’1 – or the division between the insiders and the outsiders, as Mark Latham would later put it.2 Prime Minister Keating was forced, day after day, to encounter crowds of braying, horn-tooting demonstrators. His speechwriter and adviser Don Watson has recalled that it ‘visibly diminished him … They blew their horns and jeered him. Perhaps it was paranoia, but it felt as if the loggers represented all that section of the community which wanted to be rid of the Keating government …Truly it was like watching the strength drain away before our eyes.’3

  So what was Penny Wong, environmentalist, doing there? Asked about the blockade today, she describes it as an example of what happens when ‘you allow the politics of identity and division to dominate a policy debate’. People adopt hardline positions that are not only about the facts. Environmental issues are often like this. They are tied up with how people see themselve
s. The politics becomes ‘us and them’, with both sides resistant to reason and persuasion. This is the enemy of good policy. In this sense, Penny Wong says, the forest wars were like more recent battles over climate-change policy. The interview in which she said this took place in late 2018 – but the same tendencies were part of the story behind the 2019 election defeat, which saw coal-mining communities in Queensland swing hard against Labor. Sandwiched between a fear of losing votes in the inner suburbs of southern cities and a fear of alienating the working people of Queensland, the party had been ambiguous about its attitude to the Adani coal mine and was punished for it.

  There is a phrase that Penny Wong uses a lot. She used it when talking to journalist Greg Sheridan about her religion.4 She used it in interviews for this book, when speaking of the challenge that confronts Australia in navigating between its alliance with the United States and its trading relationship with China. It is ‘binary thinking’. She dismisses it as a kind of intellectual laziness. Few things are binary, she says; the world is complex. Environmental issues are almost never binary. Wong seeks to navigate the binaries and the complexities. She is a compromiser, a negotiator. But people who knew her well during this period would sometimes listen to her discuss the complexities, noting her caution and reserve, and tell her not to sit on the fence. ‘You sit on the fence and you get your balls ripped off’ was the crude advice of one close friend.

  The forest wars had barely touched South Australia. The desert state had few native forests subject to logging, and instead was home to softwood plantations, which offered an important component of a long-term solution to the conflict over the woodchipping of native forests. But on the east coast of Australia and in Tasmania the issue was a determinant of federal political victories and losses. Graham Richardson, as minister for the environment in the Hawke government, had corralled environmentalist votes by protecting the Daintree Rainforest. The Keating government’s mishandling of the issue damaged that legacy. Years later, Labor leader Mark Latham’s 2004 pitch for power was wrecked by pictures of Tasmanian timber workers cheering Prime Minister John Howard.