Penny Wong

by Simons, Margaret;

  In March 1991 Bob Hawke had announced legislation whereby the federal government would allow logging of native forests, provided state governments guaranteed that environmental obligations would be met. There was to be a process of forest assessments resulting in agreements identifying which areas were to be protected and which could be logged. By 1993 the process was stuck, frustrated by the Liberal governments that dominated the woodchipping states. With the exception of Queensland, no state government had yet invited the federal government to assess its native forests.

  In late 1994, as Penny Wong prepared to move to New South Wales and work with the CFMEU, an enormous political row was brewing in Canberra between the minister for resources, David Beddall, who was close to the forestry industry, and the minister for the environment, Senator John Faulkner.

  Each year, the federal government issued licences for the export of woodchips.5 As resources minister, this was Beddall’s responsibility. Faulkner, as environment minister, was meant to provide advice to feed into the decisions around these licences, to ensure the government met its environmental obligations. Faulkner and Beddall didn’t get on.

  Because of the stalled assessment process, Faulkner lacked information to work with. His office commissioned environmental groups to provide advice. The result, after much back and forth, was a list of 1297 coupes – about 30 per cent of the area proposed for logging – that Faulkner said should be protected.6 It was an ambit claim. Faulkner was trying to delay logging long enough to allow for proper assessments, but the woodchipping industry was desperate to convince Japanese buyers that Australia was a reliable supplier. Buyers were fickle, and there was competition from Chile, the United States and South Africa. The forestry industry lobbying ramped up. On 20 December 1994 Beddall announced the new licences. Only eighty-five of the 1297 coupes identified by Faulkner’s office would be protected. The wrangle between Faulkner and Beddall erupted onto the front pages of the nation’s newspapers. Labor began to bleed green votes. There were environmentalist marches in the capital cities and a tent embassy on the lawns of Parliament House. A Newspoll showed that 80 per cent of Australians wanted an end to native forest woodchipping.

  The New South Wales election was weeks away. The leader of the state opposition, Bob Carr, did everything he could to distance himself from the mess in Canberra, promising that, if he was elected, woodchipping native forests would stop. Two days after Beddall’s announcement, Keating returned from holiday to try to sort out the mess. He made a statement blaming the woodchipping states’ recalcitrance and threatened to ban all native forest woodchip exporting in regions that did not have a forest agreement in place by 2000. In late January 1995, he announced that another 509 coupes would be withdrawn from logging. That announcement was the spur for the blockade – a demonstration of power that had been months in preparation. The logging trucks descended on Canberra, and Penny Wong went with them.

  Today, Wong justifies her participation by saying that the list of protected coupes identified by Faulkner and withdrawn from logging by Keating was ‘stuffed up’ by the public service. The CFMEU members’ jobs were on the line, and ‘because of the consequences for jobs in the immediate term, yes, I was there demonstrating’.

  The solution to fights over forests, Wong says today, is ‘non-binary’. You can’t simply shut down the industry, because it means more logging in places such as Borneo, which is less sustainable because regulation there is less robust. The only way forward, then and now, is to arrive at a settlement between the different interests.

  The attempt to put that thinking into practice, and reach a balance between jobs and environmental sustainability, was to dominate almost two years of her professional life.

  Penny Wong’s participation in the blockade had another consequence. Her work for the union movement – both in Adelaide and now in New South Wales – was bringing her into direct daily contact with working people for the first time in her life. As always, she was alert for prejudice. But outside Parliament House that January, she experienced the opposite. She was in a union t-shirt and surrounded by forest workers when a woman representing the far-right Citizens Electoral Council – anti-globalisation, implicitly racist and certainly anti-Semitic – began to hand out leaflets. The CFMEU members surrounding Penny took the papers, but she refused. ‘I disagree with your views,’ she told the woman. She recalls, ‘There were five men around me. They didn’t know me personally. I was the only Asian in sight and one of very few women. These were people from rural working communities. But when they heard what I said, they all handed the pamphlets back to the woman. They said, “If the union girl won’t take them, I won’t either.”’ It was, Wong remembers, ‘a beautiful moment’. She took their gesture as one of profound acceptance and group solidarity. ‘If you ask me what I learned about being a trade unionist, it was that. That solidarity, that trust.’

  It must also have served as a small example of how someone like her – in so many ways an outsider to Labor traditions – might, after all, be able to exercise leadership.

  *

  Penny Wong’s new boss within the CFMEU was Gavin Hillier, former secretary of the New South Wales branch of the Australian Timber Workers Union and, following the amalgamation, state secretary of the forestry division of the CFMEU. Hillier was central to the forest wars. He was also, within the CFMEU, often in opposition to the Victorian-based forestry division national secretary, Michael O’Connor, who was frequently aligned with the industry and vehemently critical of environmentalists. O’Connor has been described by Paul Keating as a ‘Labor rat’ who should be ‘excommunicated’7 for his role in jointly organising, with the forestry industry, the blockade of Parliament House; by Mark Latham as a ‘sellout’ for rallying the CFMEU Tasmanian timber workers to support John Howard;8 and by Julia Gillard as her ‘closest confidant’ and most committed supporter.9

  Hillier, on the other hand, was a subtle operator. Wong recalls that when Beddall announced the woodchip licences Hillier ‘just closed his eyes and shook his head and said, “We’re in for it,” because he knew what would happen and what the reaction would be. There was enormous outrage across the country. People wanted to know why we were exporting woodchips to Japan from our beautiful Eden forest. And that was quite legitimate.’

  Hillier argued that the blockade was necessary to get Labor to pay attention to the workers’ interests, and not be captured by the greenies.10 But he, unlike O’Connor, was prepared to deal with the environmentalists. An ABC documentary in the lead-up to the 1995 New South Wales state election caught Hillier cheerfully telling green activists that he, like them, was a ‘feral’ – and that he had sabotaged vehicles belonging to the bosses and non-union contractors in his time. ‘You guys probably got blamed for it,’ he chortled.11 He and the environmentalists compared notes on the difficulties of dealing with their ‘electorates’ – his members committed to continuing old-growth logging, and theirs refusing to contemplate any result other than closing down the industry.

  Gavin Hillier was an unlikely friend for Penny Wong, the Scotch College girl from Adelaide. He was a former tiler from Wagga Wagga who had become a timber worker, then a union official, after his father was made redundant. The ex-boxer was an Elvis Presley enthusiast. Wong recalls him as a ‘rough diamond’ with missing teeth and huge hands. He wore thick gold rings that he never took off: ‘I think he just got bigger and bigger and the rings stayed on.’ But Hillier was also, in her estimation, an ‘extraordinary political leader’ because he saw that the industry could not win the forest wars in the long term. He wanted to protect his members’ interests by making sure environmental policy was accompanied by industry policy, including good redundancy and retraining opportunities. Wong thinks he recruited her because ‘he could see what was to come’ and wanted her negotiating skills, which she was already known for within the union. Despite their differences, they were similar in rejecting binary thinking. They both believed in compromise and cutting a deal.


  Immediately after the Parliament House blockade, the leading conservation groups formed a delegation to see the New South Wales leader of the opposition, Bob Carr. The conservation groups, while disappointed in the Keating government, were aware that forestry policy had to be implemented by state governments, since they had responsibility for land use. They had high hopes about Carr, given his historically strong position on the environment and his December promise to end woodchipping in the state’s native forests. After that meeting, Carr tasked frontbench MPs Kim Yeadon, later to be minister for land and water conservation, and Craig Knowles, a trusted adviser and later to be the minister for planning, with devising ‘a forest policy that meets the needs of the industry and the conservationist aspirations, especially with regard to the South East Forests’.12 It must have seemed like mission impossible.

  Yeadon remembers that about six weeks before polling day Hillier came to see him. Hillier said he believed Carr could win the election and that if he did he would implement the National Forest Policy Statement. He wanted an industry assistance package for retraining and redundancy for workers who would leave. He also wanted money to help the timber-milling industry re-tool to process plantation and regrowth logs in place of native old-growth forest logs. In short, Hillier wanted a ‘seat at the table’ for the CFMEU. He brought Penny Wong with him and introduced her to Yeadon as the CFMEU’s chief negotiator.

  The result, Yeadon recalls, was a raft of long and tense meetings in Parliament House. The environmentalists – groups such as the North East Forest Alliance, the South East Forest Alliance and the Total Environment Centre – were in one room. Most of them wanted to hold Carr to his promise to end logging in old-growth forests. In the other room were Penny Wong and the CFMEU, intent on protecting the interests of their members. The MPs and their staff moved between the rooms. The positions seemed irreconcilable, and time was short. It was clear that failing to resolve the forest issue would probably doom Carr’s attempt to win government: Labor would lose either the environment vote or the votes of workers. It was the classic Labor Party dilemma. On one occasion, Yeadon remembers, he and members of staff ran down the road to buy pizzas in order to keep the negotiators at the table instead of allowing them to go home for dinner.

  Yeadon was immediately impressed by Penny Wong. She emerged, he says, as a clear thinker and formidable negotiator, constantly clearing the thicket of disagreement to find a way through. Yeadon says today that Hillier was the ‘catalyst’ for the agreement that was reached – acceptance of limits on old-growth logging, together with an industry assistance package. In negotiating this, Wong was a key player.

  The result was a forestry policy that fell short of Carr’s promise to end all old-growth logging but shifted the industry towards plantation and regrowth. Carr committed to a string of new national parks, but also to a guaranteed supply of sawlogs for the industry, and money to refit mills for plantation timber. There would be $60 million for industry restructuring and to provide retraining and redundancy packages. Carr announced all this with Hillier and the environmental groups at his side. In his speech, he singled out Hillier as ‘one of the finest unionists in the state’.13

  Gavin Hillier paid a price for cutting a deal with the hated greenies. Wong remembers he would not let her go with him to a meeting of timber workers in Eden just after the policy was announced. He feared for his own and his staff’s safety. Arriving on site alone, he was bombarded with eggs and rotten fruit. He told the workers that the deal meant their future was guaranteed, so long as Labor won. If Carr lost, old-growth logging would still be in decline and they would get nothing. ACTU secretary Bill Kelty swung in behind Hillier, calling for plantations to ‘double and triple the number of forests in this country’ while old-growth forests were protected. Kelty topped Carr’s assessment, describing Hillier as ‘one of the great trade union officials in this country’.14

  Labor won the New South Wales election by one seat. The environmental vote was key. The deal in which Penny Wong had been a negotiator – an environmental policy with a strong industry policy to go with it – had helped bring about a change of government.

  The challenge of implementation remained. In all the forest areas of the state, coupe by coupe, decisions had to be made about what should be preserved and what freed for harvest. According to Yeadon, it was Hillier who suggested that Wong should transfer to his office to drive the process. Hillier wanted someone he trusted on Yeadon’s staff, and Yeadon was easily convinced. Wong had to be persuaded. Yeadon recalls that she told him she wanted to return to South Australia and seek preselection. Wong believes she would have said this later, during her time working for him. She says when he recruited her, she still hadn’t settled on a political career.

  Yeadon persuaded her to give him twelve months. It turned out to be closer to a year and a half. She was his principal policy adviser, dealing with a wide range of issues but with the implementation of the forestry policy her main task.

  It was high-level, difficult policy work with many stakeholders. Given Labor’s narrow majority, the environmentalists feared the government might fall before patches of forest could be protected. They were pushing for areas to be locked up as quickly as possible, and the maximum amount of land preserved. On the other side, the forestry industry wanted guaranteed access and secure supply. The north-east forests were assessed in a process described internally as ‘quick and dirty’. In all this, Wong was at the centre of negotiations, a crucial person in the minister’s office. The environmentalists found her frustrating – a roadblock in their campaign to hold Carr to his promises. Judith Ajani has described the negotiations as clever tactics, in which Carr neutralised the environmentalists by involving them in ‘years of grinding meetings with the bureaucrats, industry and unions in Sydney … it compromised and distracted the environmentalists and left them with little energy for public campaigning’.15 Yeadon, on the other hand, thought Penny Wong was invaluable, and today he says it was thanks to Hillier and the industry assistance package he argued for that New South Wales had a ‘relatively peaceful’ implementation of the twenty-year Regional Forest Agreements, which covered the management as well as the conservation of native forests. Without Hiller, and Wong as his frontline negotiator, Yeadon says, ‘Yes, reform would have been undertaken, but it would not have produced the millions of acreage of national parks nor an improved industry. Just as importantly, it spared a lot of workers and businesses severe economic hardship.’

  The New South Wales policy, together with other Regional Forest Agreements, became the largest natural resource-planning process ever undertaken in Australia. Some thought the ‘forest wars’ were settled – but that was optimistic. Carr doubled the area of protected public forests in New South Wales, and crucial zones were safeguarded. Yet the area of public native forests available for logging fell only 4 per cent. According to Ajani, the inventory work resulted in the identification of more native forests, which explains ‘this seeming miracle’.16 Meanwhile, at the time of writing, the Regional Forest Agreements are up for renegotiation, and environmentalists argue that the original estimates of sustainable yields were too generous.

  The work in Yeadon’s office was Penny Wong’s first involvement in the intricate day-by-day grind of policy implementation. The contentious nature of the issue also required political strategy – keeping everyone onside.

  The process left her cynical about the environmental movement. In the end, she says, they ‘couldn’t deliver … We delivered our part. We halved the quota, we agreed to the moratorium, we agreed to the national parks. But they had to go through a process compartment by compartment and they couldn’t agree internally, because compromise is not part of their make-up … because basically their position internally is that there should be no timber industry.’ As well, she points out, if the timber industry in Australia ends, logging will move elsewhere – to regions with less regulation. Closing down the forestry industry in Australia is only progressi
ve policy if you ignore the international impact.

  History unrecorded disappears. The environmentalists wrote books about the battle for the forests. So too did the politicians. The working people did not. Gavin Hillier was difficult to track down in research for this book. The CFMEU under its current leadership was either unable or unwilling to provide contact details. The number Yeadon had for Hillier had long since been disconnected. The man once described as the finest unionist in the country had disappeared from the public eye.

  Hillier had returned to his home town of Wagga Wagga. Over the years he made a couple of appearances in local media – once, wearing his trademark Elvis Presley shirt, in an ABC vox pop on train services in Wagga, and again in a 2018 newspaper story about his collection of Presley memorabilia. He was shown clutching a guitar and surrounded by posters and vinyl records. The piece made no reference to his union past.17

  Penny Wong got a call when he passed away on 5 December 2018, aged seventy-two. The funeral notices carried the legend ‘He will be Rockin’ and Rollin’ with Elvis’, and asked people attending the memorial service to wear bright colours ‘in honour of Gavin’s memory and his quirky dress sense’.18 Bill Kelty read a eulogy and described him as an unsung hero. Kelty also reminded Yeadon that Hillier had always predicted that Penny Wong would ‘go places’.19

  When Wong told me Gavin Hillier had died, she cried.

  Meanwhile, the lessons learned and the attitudes adopted during her involvement in the forest wars were to endure. There was the need for negotiation. There was the shunning of what she describes as ‘binary thinking’. There was the view of environmentalists as ‘unable to deliver’ and unable to compromise. All of these battlelines, issues and attitudes were to resonate when she was the minister for climate change and water, dealing with what Kevin Rudd famously declared ‘the greatest moral, economic and social issue of our time’.20