Penny Wong

by Simons, Margaret;

  Her father had remarried a devout born-again Christian. In that household, prayer was frequent: grace was said at meals, and regular appeals were made to God. Penny never found the evangelical style of faith appealing. But she liked the ‘incredibly moving’ quiet of the practice of faith at the Uniting Church, the sense of grace and mystery. She would not, she says, go to any place of worship where she did not feel accepted. The anti-gay rhetoric in some religious communities is ‘sad’. The Uniting Church is where she found her spiritual home.

  Today, she is an irregular attendee at her local Uniting Church. She prays in quiet moments. ‘I don’t think of God as a power to go to with a shopping list. I think more of asking for the patience or the courage to cope. For me, it’s more of asking that he walk with me.’1

  Those who have met the family say they see the influence of both parents in Penny Wong. Both Francis Wong and Jane Chapman are fiercely intelligent, but otherwise almost opposites. She has her father’s reserve and well-organised habits, her mother’s expressiveness. People who work closely with Penny see her in tears. ‘They are strong tears,’ says one former staffer. ‘You don’t ever think for a moment they are weak.’

  *

  Penny Wong had returned to the incestuous world of Adelaide Labor factional politics as the presumptive candidate for the Left in the Senate, but preselection was not guaranteed. There was still campaigning to be done. The preselections that took place in 1999 in preparation for the next federal election marked a fundamental shift within the state party as the power-sharing deal between Left and Right, brokered by Mark Butler on the Left and Don Farrell on the Right, took hold at the expense of the Centre Left. But the Centre Left had one last punch before it died.

  Preselections for election candidates were decided by delegates to the state convention. The unions appointed half the delegates, with individual unions’ voting power decided in proportion to their membership. Amalgamations with the liquor and baking trade unions had made the Missos, where Penny now worked, one of the strongest unions in the state. Farrell, meanwhile, was secretary of the enormous Shop, Distributive and Allied Employees’ Association, which was a power base for the Right, and deeply conservative on social issues – including gay rights.

  The other 50 per cent of the preselection vote was determined by the sub-branches and other affiliated groups – the ordinary membership of the party. In the lead-up to the power-sharing deal, Left and Right were jockeying for position and influence to strengthen their negotiating positions. This led to one of the most outrageous exercises in branch stacking in the history of the Australian Labor Party – which is saying something. Branch stacking – or ‘vigorous recruitment exercises’, as the operatives prefer to call it – was part of politics as normal within Labor, but even in that context what happened was breathtakingly filthy. Gary Johns, who had been a minister in the Keating government, later described it as a ‘veritable stacking spree’.2 Had the stacking succeeded, Penny Wong would have been one of the beneficiaries, together with the other bright young candidates – Jay Weatherill and Pat Conlon – who were the hope of the Left in its bid for increased power in the party of government after the next state election, due by 2002.

  How much did she know about what her party colleagues were up to?

  The deadline for new members to join if they were to be allowed to vote for convention delegates was 26 February 1999. On that single day, 2000 new memberships were lodged and paid for, by about ten people. According to the paperwork, most had been signed up on the Australia Day holiday, a month before.

  The stack almost doubled the state party membership. Sub-branches were flooded with new members who were strangers to the existing ones. Seats made newly marginal by an electoral boundary redistribution were at the centre of this frantic activity. Some quadrupled their memberships overnight, swollen by recruits from both Left and Right. The police investigated allegations made in the remote town of Coober Pedy by Indigenous residents who said they had been signed up without their consent. A report was sent to the South Australian Director of Public Prosecutions, but no charges were laid.3 Ramsay, the seat of the state opposition leader, Mike Rann – later to be premier – was also among those stacked, probably by his own Right faction in order to protect him.

  In the wake of this flood of new members, the non-aligned and Centre Left MPs went door-knocking in their branches and, as they had suspected, found many people who didn’t know they were now members of the Labor Party. The party’s rules said that new members had to be nominated and accepted by the sub-branch to which they were affiliated; clearly, the rules had not been followed. The cost of the new memberships was $42,000, which, as Labor politician Ralph Clarke later remarked, ‘means that the entire SA branch could be purchased for less than $100,000’.4

  Clarke, a former party president and Centre Left state MP, was one of the victims of the stack. It had been Clarke who opposed Penny Wong in the state conference debate on racial vilification legislation six years before. He was an effective parliamentarian, but scandals in his personal life had left him vulnerable, and now the Machine was moving against him. He was fighting for his political life.

  He and other Centre Left members challenged the memberships with a complaint to the party’s state executive – which closed ranks. Wong was on the state executive at the time.

  Ian Hunter, a foundation member of what had previously been known as the Bolkus Left, and now state branch secretary, defended the sudden boost in party membership. It was all within the rules, he said. ‘Whenever you try and put a restrictive rule on this sort of thing around the country people try and get around it … rather than encourage people to break the rules, we will try to keep our rules as simple as possible,’ he said.5 Don Farrell described the ‘rumblings’ as ‘all a pretty normal part of the preselection process’ and predicted that any resulting tensions would soon settle.6 He was wrong.

  There was a disputes procedure within the party, but instead of following that process, the state executive passed a motion declaring the new memberships valid, and followed up by making plans to call a special convention to confirm that validity retrospectively.

  Clarke and his fellows complained to the national executive of the party. The leader, Kim Beazley, was reported to be concerned – but the numbers on the national executive were dominated by the Right and Left.7 By July 1999, both state and national executives made it clear there would be no investigation.

  Ralph Clarke took the only remaining course open to him and launched a Supreme Court action against his own party, seeking injunctions to stop the special convention and prevent the preselections going ahead. It was the first time action of this sort had been taken.8 Conventional wisdom at the time was that party rules were internal matters and not subject to court review.

  Yet on 27 July 1999 the Supreme Court ruled in Clarke’s favour. It would decide whether the 2000 new members had been signed up in accordance with the rules and, in the meantime, the preselection round was frozen. The state conference, scheduled for October, was postponed, and all the candidates for preselection were placed in limbo – including Penny Wong.

  Asked about the branch stacking today, everyone is predictably coy. Off the record, some of the main operatives admit it was a ‘bad look’ but insist that ‘everyone was doing it’. Even Clarke is on the record as admitting to contributing to a slush fund known as ‘Labor of Love’ to pay for memberships and shore up the Centre Left faction in the 1980s.9 The problem, these people claim, was that it just got a bit out of hand.

  What about Penny Wong? Those who were around at the time say that she and Jay Weatherill were not directly involved and ‘very clean’. One of her enemies says, ‘She is far too high and mighty ever to dirty her hands with a stack.’ Others, more friendly, assert that she and Weatherill were deliberately kept out of the ‘dirty business’. It was the factional operatives – Butler and Farrell – who were assumed to be chiefly responsible.

  Butler a
dmits some responsibility. ‘There was a generational change happening at state and federal level and, you know, there’s no question that it sort of got out of control.’ The party was ‘shooting for state government and there was a generational change needed in federal caucus’. It was time to remake the branch, and ‘we had a strong incentive to make sure that we had the numbers to do that … there was a strong motivation for effective recruitment.’

  The resulting controversy, he acknowledges, was damaging and embarrassing. The court decided against the party because the state executive had not dealt properly with Ralph Clarke’s complaint. Asked whose fault that was, Butler says, ‘Well, I guess mine, to a degree. The leadership of the two big groups, Left and Right, I guess.’

  Butler absolves Penny Wong of any responsibility. She was not on the committee that managed the party’s response to Clarke’s complaint.

  Non-aligned Labor MP John Hill later chaired an investigation into the stack, which recommended changes to the party’s rules on recruitment. Penny Wong sat on that committee. It recommended new measures to ensure the bona fides of members, and that full membership rights should only be confirmed after three years – removing some of the incentive for stacking. The investigation found that a single individual was responsible for signing up almost half the new members – but the report never revealed who that was, and when interviewed for this book Hill claimed not to be able to remember. Wong, too, claimed not to know.10

  Penny Wong says today that she was aware of the recruiting drive. She remembers signing up her family and friends. But, she claims, she had no idea of the extent or the egregious nature of the stack. She believes Clarke was right to take the party to court: ‘It was a good lesson for us.’ The fact that the rules are subject to court challenge remains a good discipline on the party, she says, and the rule changes that followed the episode were beneficial.

  What is the difference, in her view, between a recruiting exercise and a branch stack? ‘It’s in the eye of the beholder,’ she says, with not a hint of a smile.

  The Australia Day stack, as it is remembered, was an embarrassment on the road to a long period of success and stability for the South Australian Labor Party. There is little doubt that the Machine resulted in talented politicians being selected at state and federal level. There was a generational change that has helped form the modern party. Penny Wong was preselected for the Senate. Jay Weatherill entered state parliament. Pat Conlon was preselected and became a highly successful state minister. In time, Mark Butler entered federal parliament, and he is now a frontbencher. On the Right, Don Farrell was elected to the Senate in 2007. Most Australians wouldn’t recognise his name, but he is a factional powerbroker and was a shadow minister of state, as well as being one of the ‘faceless men’ who engineered the overthrow of Kevin Rudd and the ascension of Julia Gillard to the nation’s highest office. At state level, Labor won power in 2002 with Mike Rann at the helm. He was succeeded by Weatherill, to make the longest-serving South Australian Labor government. The party was remade, and the power and influence of the Left increased. Meanwhile, the Centre Left disappeared. The South Australian machinations were one of the foundation stones of the current form of the Labor Party at state and federal level.

  But back in 1999 Penny Wong had to get preselected without the additional numbers the stack might have provided. ‘I doorknocked a lot of members and phoned a lot of people,’ she says. She and Dascia Bennett worked as a political team to get a broader union base to support her. When the state convention was finally held, in April 2000, Wong led the preselection vote with 36.4 per cent of the ballot. Linda Kirk, the Right’s candidate, was next in line, with 33 per cent. The casualty was Chris Schacht – a sitting senator and former federal minister, who lost narrowly, by three votes. Schacht was part of the Centre Left, and the Machine’s verdict was that he had had his day. He was relegated to third position on the ticket – a humiliation and, thanks to the popularity of Natasha Stott Despoja as the lead candidate for the Australian Democrats, almost certainly an unwinnable spot.

  When the ticket was announced, with Wong in first place and Schacht in third, she told a reporter that Schacht had been ‘one of the big men of the SA party … but every party must continue to reassess itself’.11

  A few weeks later, typically well organised, Wong applied to revoke her Malaysian citizenship. The revocation was granted in July 2001.12 Years later, when the dual citizenship of some parliamentarians came to light, Wong frustrated journalists by refusing to release the documents proving her claim that she held only one nationality. For a while, the media included her on lists of parliamentarians whose status under the constitution was in doubt. In fact, her eligibility was always crystal clear.13

  Today, Left operatives are unrepentant about the casualties of the deal that saw Penny Wong preselected. The Centre Left, they say, was a faction without a purpose. It had to go. But the execution was ruthless. Wong, the young upstart, had knocked off one of the established figures of the party.

  Schacht was devastated, and not prepared to give up easily. He remembers going to Penny Wong some months after the vote to ask for her campaign help. The only way he had a chance of winning, he said, was if she helped him with a large campaigning effort. He was prepared to put aside any bad feelings and asked her to do the same. They should get out and tour the state, particularly rural areas, he suggested. ‘I remember going to her and saying … we have to campaign, and we have to go around the state. She made the comment to me, “Chris, I don’t think I could do that. People in the country have strange views about Asian people. I don’t think it’s wise for me to do that.” I said, “Penny, you have to face that issue one day. The only way to do it is to see people face to face.”’

  Wong was not convinced, and there was no separate campaigning effort for the Senate team, which did not help Schacht. Today he thinks she was not so much unwilling as ‘very shy. She is very clever. She might be the cleverest person in parliament from South Australia. But you put her into a community arrangement, ask her to go down and meet the waterside workers in a couple of pubs at Port Adelaide, or go and talk to the Country Women’s Association in Naracoorte, she won’t be in it.’

  Schacht admits he is hardly an impartial observer, but he says that Wong, despite her popularity within the party, has not been a vote winner in South Australia. Since the 2001 election, when she was placed first on the ticket, the party has often not done well in the state Senate race. It is a difficult claim to assess. The Senate voting system is complicated, and mainly about votes for party groupings rather than individuals. In South Australia, in the time Wong has been a candidate, the Democrats, then Nick Xenophon and his team (now Centre Alliance) and Family First have stolen votes from the major parties. How much of Labor’s poor showing can be attributed to Penny Wong? It’s hard to say, but the trend is perhaps a small corrective to those in her fan club who believe she would be outstandingly popular if she moved to the House of Representatives. There is so far little evidence that she attracts votes outside a left-wing demographic.

  As for the wider issue of popular campaigning, everyone acknowledges that Wong has got better at it, but she says of herself, ‘I am an introvert.’ She criticises herself for not doing what Bolkus did for her – making an effort to reach out to and socialise with young Labor talent coming through.

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  Sometime around 1999, during the manoeuvring over preselections, Mark Butler invited Penny Wong out to a night of karaoke. It wasn’t her thing, but he persuaded her. Needless to say, she didn’t sing. But it must have been a friendly occasion, conducive to openness. Some time during the night they reflected on the rift between Bolkus and Duncan, and what it had cost the Left before they took action. ‘We must never let that happen to us,’ Wong said to Butler. They must never allow any dysfunction in their personal relationship to become a political dysfunction. ‘If we have disagreements in the future, let’s resolve them,’ she said to him. He agreed. They co
uld not fall out, he said, for the sake of the faction and the party.

  This agreement has held. Mark Butler describes himself as a ‘huge fan’ of Penny Wong. She says of him, ‘Mark’s a friend, a colleague. What sets him apart is both his intellect and that he puts the collective – the party – ahead of himself. We’ve been through many transitions and many fights and many disagreements together. And he has been very supportive and very loyal to me … We trust each other. We don’t always agree. But we’ve dealt with those disagreements properly … now I am senior to Mark, but he has more weight factionally than me. He uses his power thoughtfully, and that’s good because some people use their factional power unthinkingly.’

  One of the parts of the Machine deal was that Mark Butler would at some stage be given the safe seat of Port Adelaide. He entered parliament in 2007 – the election Kevin Rudd won. He is currently shadow minister for climate change – the portfolio that Penny Wong held in the first Rudd government.

  Meanwhile, in the current opposition, Butler and Wong’s longstanding alliance is one of the most powerful and effective in the party. She is leader of Labor in the Senate, the deputy manager of opposition business in the lower house. She is shadow minister for foreign affairs, and he has the portfolios of climate change and energy.

  The influence of both South Australia and the Left faction is greater today than it was when Penny Wong sought preselection, and this is largely the legacy of the generational change Butler and Wong helped engineer. Their political alliance will be important to the future of the parliamentary party.

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  It seemed to Chris Schacht that Penny Wong was unreasonably sensitive to ‘the race issue’. Easy to say. Race, and racism, was an inescapable dimension of her political and personal life, not something she could escape. Politically, her non-Anglo ethnicity could easily have both defined and constrained her. She was the first Asian-born woman elected to the Australian parliament; at no previous time in the nation’s history could someone like Penny Wong have emerged. Yet the decision to run for the Senate was a combination of her belief that she was not a natural retail politician and her fear of racism. Penny Wong’s fan club sometimes talks about her as though, because she is ‘different’, she exists above or outside the dirty business of politics. The circumstances of her preselection, the factional battles of which she was a beneficiary, give the lie to that. She is a politician, in all senses of the word. Of course she is. And yet she is different.