Penny Wong

by Simons, Margaret;

  Sometimes, racism posed a risk to her personal safety. In August 1998 Wong organised and led a large rally in Adelaide, including a march and a candlelight demonstration of solidarity against racism. In the days before the event, she took a frantic phone call from Toby. His drug use, work in hospitality and social circles meant he had connections to the darker side of Adelaide. He had heard a rumour that National Action – the militant white supremist group founded by neo-Nazi Jim Saleam and, at that time, led by Adelaidean Michael Brander – was going to ‘take her out’ at the rally. The organisers took the threat seriously enough to make plans ensuring Penny would always be in the middle of a protective group, difficult to reach or target.

  It is an example of her steely resolve that she went. On the day of the march, about half a dozen National Action members turned up, but police reported no clashes.14

  Race is the undercurrent, the backdrop, the topic that Australia is not comfortable discussing. The topic that, in Howard’s time, could turn elections and was at the centre of the 2001 election campaign.

  In August 2001 the Norwegian freighter MV Tampa, carrying 433 refugees plucked from a distressed Indonesian fishing boat, was denied permission to enter Australian waters. The same day, the Howard government introduced the Border Protection Bill 2001 into the House of Representatives. The asylum seekers were taken to the island of Nauru for their refugee status to be assessed. This marked the beginning of a series of measures that became known as the Pacific Solution.

  When the Tampa crisis broke, Labor leader Kim Beazley initially supported the government, saying that the last thing the country needed was a ‘carping opposition’. Two days later, when SAS troops were aboard the Tampa and Howard introduced legislation giving his government the retrospective power to turn back boats, Beazley decided to oppose the bill – in the full knowledge that this stance might cost him the election. The legislation was defeated in the Senate on the votes of Labor, the minor parties and independents – but subsequent border protection legislation was passed with Labor’s support. In the days that followed, the other elements of the policy that has been part of Australian politics ever since were gradually cobbled together, including the excision of islands from the Australian migration zone, detention centres on Manus Island and Nauru, and use of the navy to turn back boats.

  A few weeks later, the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York sent the world into cataclysm. Terrorism, racism and border security became conflated in the Australian public’s mind. This led to Howard’s famous election promise, splashed on posters and leaflets: ‘We will decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come.’

  In October, at the tail end of the election campaign, senior Howard government ministers alleged that asylum seekers on a boat foundering on its way to Australia had thrown their children overboard to force a rescue. Days later, the government was re-elected with an increased majority. Howard had won a third term, fuelled by One Nation votes returning to the Liberal Party.

  After the election, a Senate select committee found that the ‘children overboard’ incident was a fabrication. No child had been thrown overboard, and the government had known this before polling day. Howard’s election win was what journalists David Marr and Marilyn Wilkinson were later to describe as his ‘dark victory’.15

  The 2001 election was devastating for the Labor Party. It created internal division, pitting progressives against the Right. It ‘knocked us off balance for a long time’, John Olenich, then Penny Wong’s soon-to-be-staffer, recalls. The ‘true believers’ of the Left hungered for power, but could hardly stomach caving to Howard’s agenda.

  During the election, Penny had managed the campaign for the marginal Adelaide seat of Hindmarsh on behalf of local candidate Steve Georganas – a member of the Bolkus Left. Hindmarsh was one of the seats Labor had to win if it was to form government. Georganas suddenly became reluctant to doorknock, which he normally loved. When Wong quizzed him on why, he told her that electors were saying they thought asylum seekers should be shot. This was his community. He had lived in the electorate all his life. He was himself the child of Greek migrants. It was ‘awful’, he recalls today, to see the electorate manipulated on race.

  Wong says that at this time she rejected the idea that there were ‘pull’ factors bringing asylum seekers to Australia. As she saw it then, it was all ‘push’ – desperate people running for their lives. She was therefore among those wanting a softer, more compassionate approach.

  Her view today has shifted. She says that as leader of Labor in the Senate and as a shadow minister for foreign affairs, she has had security briefings that have led her to conclude her earlier views were wrong. There are ‘pull’ factors that encourage people to get into leaky boats and come to Australia. Government policy can’t afford to encourage people smuggling. Given the sheer number of people in the world on the move and seeking a better life, policy has to be tough.

  The problem with the 2001 election, she says, is that Howard fused a challenging policy issue with xenophobia and racism. The legacy, she says, is that ‘the Left reacts to the race issue, and doesn’t want to deal with the border security issue, so everyone gets locked in’.

  So what does a good policy look like? What role will she play in this as shadow foreign minister – and perhaps one day the minister?

  She shares a vision that has been proposed ever since the Fraser government was dealing with the influx of refugees from the Vietnam War – the much-touted but little enacted ‘regional solution’. ‘The core of it is better regional arrangements, removing the incentive for movement from transit countries, but that is difficult,’ she says. She adds that she thinks ‘we can’t have indefinite detention in the way you have had on Nauru and Manus Island’.

  And in the absence of the chimerical regional solution, does she support boat turnbacks and mandatory detention? ‘I support the current Labor policy,’ she says. ‘It’s not comfortable coming to that view. It’s much easier not to.’

  That policy emphasises ‘strong borders, offshore processing, regional resettlement and turnbacks when safe to do so because we know it saves lives at sea’. It also talks of ‘negotiating third-country resettlement options’ to end indefinite detention on Nauru and Manus – and that includes accepting New Zealand’s standing offer to resettle refugees. It commits Labor to increasing Australia’s humanitarian intake of refugees, ending temporary protection visas and funding the work of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.16 While it opposes the use of Nauru and Manus for indefinite detention, it describes them as ‘temporary regional processing centres’ and is silent on whether they would remain open. It is also silent on the fate, under a Labor government, of any future Tampa, or of any boats that evade detection and reach Australia’s shores.

  In 2001, the senators elected from South Australia were, in order: Robert Hill for the Liberal Party, Penny Wong for Labor, Jeannie Ferris for the Liberals, Linda Kirk for Labor, Grant Chapman for the Liberals and Natasha Stott Despoja for the Australian Democrats. Stott Despoja took the seat that Chris Schacht had desperately hoped to win, by a margin of 1 per cent, or a few thousand votes. To this day, Schacht believes a proper Senate campaign in the rural areas could have made the difference and secured him another term.

  Georganas, meanwhile, did not win Hindmarsh, despite a spirited campaign managed by Penny Wong. He lost the contest by less than 2 per cent of the vote – a situation almost unchanged from the previous time he had contested it, in 1998. In the context of a Tampa-driven defeat for Labor, it wasn’t a bad result.

  The same could not be said for Kim Beazley. This was the second election he had lost against John Howard. The implications of that, and the manner of Howard’s victory, were to infect Penny Wong’s first term in parliament.

  7

  A NEW VOICE

  On election day 2001, Toby Wong turned thirty. Ten days later, he died. The death notices described it as a ‘tragic
accident’. It was not for another eight years that Penny Wong publicly shared the truth: Toby’s death was by suicide.1

  ‘We will miss you Tobe,’ said one death notice. Another, ‘fun and free, your gentle heart and kind spirit will live with us always’.2

  In the weeks and months before his death, during the campaign that brought her into federal parliament, Penny had been one of her brother’s main confidantes. He was living in Melbourne and she in Adelaide, but there were long, intimate and challenging phone calls between them as she tried to comfort him, to talk him into a better place.

  Her friends remember the memorial service. They remember the weight of the grief, almost unbearable. They remember Penny reading the eulogy – which she will not share today, because it is too personal. Her friends remember her saying that she felt she had been given twice her brother’s strength: that he was a softer person than she and did not have as many defences. He had found it harder coming to Australia, and the world had not been kind to him.

  Her parents were at the service, along with all the Chapman aunts and many family friends. Remembering it, Wong says she was struck by how well her parents supported each other, and what decent people they were. Love persisted even after divorce. Another who was present describes Penny as seeming to accept the burden of the grief. She gave the impression of carrying her family – being the navigator of their differences, and the ‘captain of the ship in the waters of grief’. Penny, this friend remarks, always steps forward, taking and shouldering responsibility rather than running from it or crumbling under the weight.

  But she must have wished to crumble.

  The topic of Toby’s death cannot be broached without causing further pain to the Chapman and Wong families. It is the topic that Penny Wong was most concerned by when approached about this book. She is fiercely protective of her parents. She will not say more about the loss of her brother.

  She saved her public tribute to Toby for her maiden speech, delivered in the Senate on 21 August 2002. Penny had tried to draft the speech in Adelaide but couldn’t focus. She is a slow writer – the kind who has to be happy with each sentence before moving on, rather than throwing words down and then tidying them up. She flew to Canberra, shut herself away in her parliamentary office and wrote the speech over an intense three days. Then she went to see the Labor leader in the Senate, John Faulkner, to warn him that she was going to ‘go hard on race’.

  Not all of the connections would have been clear to her listeners. She was new to the parliament, and few members knew her personally. Those outside her immediate circle didn’t know that Toby’s death was suicide – although it was implicit in what she said – or that she blamed racism, in part, for his death. But in Penny’s mind it was all linked: the election they had just been through, Toby being thrown off a bus after being racially abused, his phone call warning her about National Action wanting to ‘take her out’ – all the things that had happened to him, and to her, since they arrived in Australia. Penny did not think of herself as damaged by her childhood trauma, although some of her friends, noting her hyper-vigilance to racial discrimination, thought her more affected than she was inclined to admit. In her mind, she had learned to cope by developing a tough exterior. Toby, though, had been gentler, more vulnerable.

  It was this personal context underlying her words that made her speech extraordinary. She was told later that the leader of the government in the Senate, Robert Hill, had leant over to John Faulkner and told him it was not appropriate for a maiden speech to be so angry, so explicit in its targets. The convention was to speak of one’s electorate, perhaps gesture towards social justice or universal values, and keep it civil.

  Sharryn Jackson had been elected as the Labor member for the Western Australian seat of Hasluck at the 2001 election. As the assistant state secretary of the Miscellaneous Workers’ Union, she and Penny had been in each other’s orbit for a while, without having met. On this day, Jackson walked across to the Senate to hear Penny speak. By the end, she was in tears. The two women embraced, and have been friends ever since.

  Jackson, too, had been devastated by the changing mood in the electorate around race. She had doorknocked and heard her electors using language she could barely stomach. ‘Being in a marginal seat, it was very hard to confront people all the time on asylum-seeker issues. It was an awful election, very distressing.’ Yet here was Penny Wong – the first Asian-born woman ever to sit in the Australian parliament, and one of very few Asians ever to do so.

  Standing in the red Senate chamber, Penny looked younger than her thirty-three years. She had yet to adopt her current work uniform of slacks, well-cut jackets, immaculate haircut and simple shirts. She wore a maroon jacket over a black dress, a white necklace and simple pearl earrings. There was little sign of the accomplished, acid-tongued parliamentarian of more recent times. She read from her script, and as she began, her delivery was flat and fast, betraying her nerves.3 Her theme was compassion – and its absence.

  She began by talking about Poh Poh, her beloved grandmother. ‘That her granddaughter is here today would have been a source of pride but also probably some consternation to her. How much the world can change in two generations,’ she began. This family history, she said, was why she believed that compassion lay at the heart ‘of any truly civilised society’. Compassion was the ‘underlying principle, that core value at the heart of our collective consciousness. If not compassion, then what? Economic efficiency? Or the imposition of some subjective moral code, defined by some and imposed on the many?’ To call for compassion was not political correctness, nor weakness, she said.

  It is to assert that those with power should act with compassion for those who have less, and that the experience of those who are marginalised cannot be bypassed, ignored or minimised as it so often is. Compassion is what underscores our relationships with one another, and it is compassion which enables us to come to a place of community even in our diversity. Yet this country in recent times has been sadly lacking in compassion.

  And then she went for it. Referencing Pauline Hanson’s maiden speech – delivered in the same building six years earlier, in which she had talked of Australia being ‘swamped by Asians’ – Wong said that she feared Australia was instead ‘in danger of being swamped by prejudice’. She called for ‘us’ to reclaim the phrase ‘one nation’: ‘I seek a nation that is truly one nation. One in which all Australians can share regardless of race, or gender, or other attribute, and regardless of where they live, and where difference is not a basis for exclusion. We do not live in such a country. We are not yet truly one nation. But it is the task of political leaders to build one.’

  She spoke about the economy and social opportunity – of the need to ensure that globalisation benefited both rich and poor, and of her father’s transformative experience as a Colombo scholar. She spoke, at some length, about educational inequality, including in the suburbs of Adelaide. But finally, and most powerfully, she turned again to race, and to the role it had played in the election:

  Let us speak openly and honestly about race in this country, about what last year’s election signified and about where we are now. Let us speak openly about the damage that has been done … In recent years there has been much preaching from the current prime minister about political correctness – that we have had too much of it. Instead, now we have a climate in which someone who speaks out about injustice, prejudice or discrimination is dismissed as simply being politically correct. Compassion has been delegitimised – instead it is seen as elitism.

  She talked of Samuel Chapman and his journey on the Cygnet, and then about the racial abuse she had suffered in the schoolyard. ‘It used to lead me to wonder, how long do you have to be here and how much do you have to love this country before you are accepted?’

  Then, in the most powerful passage of the speech, she set her sights on Howard. She had by now apparently conquered her nerves: her delivery was controlled, her words slow and forceful. She was stil
l clutching her script: from time to time she looked up. There was a sign of what was to become the trademark Wong glare.

  Never forget that it was this current prime minister who called for a reduction in Asian immigration in 1988 … The Prime Minister premised his arguments on the grounds of social cohesion. You have to ask what effect his own comments had on social cohesion. I know how it felt for me and my family and many like us during this time.

  When Pauline Hanson gave her maiden speech, Howard had defended her. ‘What sort of message does this send to our community? That it is acceptable to rail against people who look different? That these sorts of comments are no different from any other sort of political commentary? Leadership was called for, not to deny freedom of speech but to assert the harm in what she said. Leadership was called for, but it was not provided.’

  She spoke of the Howard government’s reaction to native title, including Howard’s use of a map of Australia on television to provoke fear that backyards were going to be claimed. Then she turned to the Tampa and the election just past:

  Who can forget that most enduring image of last year’s election campaign, that photograph of the Prime Minister, in sober black and white, attempting to look statesmanlike, with the slogan, ‘We will decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come’? This is the statement which epitomises Prime Minister Howard’s vision for this country. This is the core of what he offered us at the last election. It is a statement of self-evident fact. It is not a policy statement. Of course we decide who comes to this country. So why say it? The only reason that you would is if you wanted to strike a chord of discord or if you wanted to foster division.