Penny Wong

by Simons, Margaret;

  On the Children Overboard affair and the government’s failure to correct the record, she was scathing. ‘There may be some who will say I am being too critical. I ask them this: When has your prime minister, John Howard, done or said something that made you feel proud to be Australian? When can you point to a time when he exercised his leadership to bring Australians together?’

  Most Australians were good-hearted, she said. The main things that undermined social cohesion were economic inequality and poor political leadership: ‘People don’t share if they do not have a fair share. They will not listen if they are not listened to.’ There had to be work to create a fair community. Australia must never again go down the path it had taken during the 2001 election, when the fault lines in society were used ‘for base political purposes’.

  She moved on to thank those who had put her into parliament, mentioning Mark Butler, Pat Conlon, Ian Hunter and Jay Weatherill, as well as Nick Bolkus – who was sitting beside her as she gave the speech, gazing up with avuncular pride. She mentioned the unions that had supported her preselection.

  Finally, she came to Toby. She coughed, clearing her throat. Her voice broke. Toby had, she told the parliament, ‘turned thirty on the day I was elected to this place, and died ten days later … Your life and death ensure that I shall never forget what it is like for those who are truly marginalised.’

  She finished with thanks to ‘Dascia, Courtney and Rohan’ – her partner and stepchildren, saying that without their love and support she ‘would never have considered standing for preselection’.4

  After the speech, Jackson remembers walking back to the House of Representatives. People were remarking that Penny Wong was in the wrong house – meaning that she was leadership material. ‘But it was a hard and sad state of affairs in Australia at that time, that the thought of a gay Asian woman being elected to the House of Representatives was just not something that was going to happen,’ Jackson recalls.

  Politics had always been an option for Penny Wong. Nevertheless, the last sentence of her speech crediting Dascia was true. It was Dascia who had helped to encourage Penny to be brave – not to sit on the fence, not to let the bastards win, not to permit other people’s prejudice to limit her potential. Yet, even as she delivered these words, the relationship was in trouble. A few months later, it ended. They had been together for seven years, during which time Bennett’s children had grown into teenagers.

  Theirs had been both a personal and a political partnership. Bennett was known and liked in Adelaide Labor circles. She had thrown herself into the party and its aims. Today both women acknowledge that it was she who helped Penny win over key unions to support her preselection. It was she who would enthusiastically greet union members at social occasions, who would lean on the bar with them and have a beer. She helped Penny to overcome the campaigning disadvantages of her naturally introverted nature.

  Bennett had abandoned her career to accompany Wong back to Adelaide. At first, finances had been stretched – Wong was the main income earner, and on a lower salary as an industrial lawyer than she had been as a political adviser in Sydney. Bennett worked part-time as a consultant for the Australian Student Traineeship Foundation, and had returned to study a Bachelor in Public Policy and Political Science at Flinders University. After she graduated in 1998, Bennett began a career in the superannuation and financial services industry, working her way up.

  Often, when politicians’ relationships break up, their former partner is left bitter. They gave all the support in the early years, only to be left without proper acknowledgement. This is not the case for Bennett and Wong. Today Bennett is the chief executive of Super SA – the fund that covers the state’s public sector employees. She is at the peak of her career, an industry leader and one of the most senior executives in her home state. Yet, interviewed for this book, she described helping Penny to achieve preselection as one of the proudest accomplishments of her life.

  Why did the relationship not endure? Wong will say nothing about this. Bennett, too, is sparing when discussing it. As her career took off and Penny began flying back and forth to Canberra, it was hard to stay connected. ‘I suppose our relationship just came to a point where we decided that she was going to go that way, and I was going to go another.’

  They remain friends. Today Penny’s current partner, Sophie Allouache, and Dascia sometimes sit and drink red wine and gently heckle Penny, just as Mark Weckert and Penny used to prod and tease Dascia at the beginning of their relationship.

  Penny Wong is good at family. When blended families break up, it can be a breach or an expansion. Penny and Dascia made it an expansion. They put family first. So far as possible out of the public eye, they gave priority to friendship and the care and emotional wellbeing of the children. They did all this without any of the social and legal structures that would have supported them in naming what they had – and still have today – as a family. Rohan and Courtney, now adults, regard Penny as their stepmother, and consider Alexandra and Hannah, the daughters of Penny and Sophie, as siblings. When Courtney married in 2016, three people stood up to give her away – her father, her mother and her stepmother, Penny Wong.

  Back in 2002, the hurt and loneliness must have been uppermost. Penny Wong had achieved political success but was weighed down with grief and the end of a relationship. She was revolted and threatened by the election just past – a reminder of the side of Australia that would always reject her. Now her career lay in Parliament House, that cloistered environment both at the heart of national life and profoundly removed from it. Interviewed a few months after her maiden speech, she described parliament as like a spaceship: ‘It’s a very enclosed and high-pressure environment. I’d expected that, but not to the extent that it is.’5

  Asked about all this today, and how she felt, the only comment Penny Wong makes is all the more powerful for its patent and characteristic understatement. ‘It was a very hard time.’

  *

  Penny Wong entered the Australian parliament as a Left, gay, Asian, South Australian woman. Every adjective signalled the likelihood that she would be marginalised – seen as a special case, attended to only when representing the issues those descriptors suggest. She was also one of the most junior members of a party that had been defeated in three consecutive elections. That Penny Wong transcended the adjectives to become one of the most senior politicians in the land, and to today hold a key leadership role in the Albanese shadow ministry, was no accident. Nor was it only because of her undoubted ability. It was also the result of a clear-eyed, hard-headed strategy and campaign, accompanied by competitiveness and, when required, ruthlessness.

  She made an impression in her first two years, emerging as a penetrating cross-examiner in Senate committees, and taking the lead in negotiating Labor Party rule changes that guaranteed more women would enter parliament. Three other extraordinary things happened. She made what she describes today as the worst mistake of her political career. She betrayed one of her chief patrons and, hardest of all, she voted to ban same-sex marriage.

  All this was part of her advancement.

  John Faulkner remembers Penny Wong’s arrival as a ‘breath of fresh air … a lot about her was very different to your average garden variety of senator’. She struck him as articulate and capable – ‘one of those people who can turn their hands to anything: make a speech on policy, go on a committee and make a contribution’. He began sending opportunities her way.

  Faulkner is too loyal a party man to say it, but he was presiding over a low point in the Senate Labor team. In years past, some of the Hawke–Keating government’s best performers had come from that house. Senators John Button, Gareth Evans and Peter Walsh had been high-profile government ministers of intellectual ability and strong policy agendas. In 2002 most Australians would have been challenged to name a member of the Labor Senate team, and the party’s main strength was in the House of Representatives. Faulkner thought the Senate committee system was the perfect
place for Wong to fulfil what she made clear was her ambition – to cut her teeth on a range of issues and wrestle with serious policy. She asked him to consider her for appointment to committees that dealt with the difficult and unglamorous stuff, such as finance and public administration. She resisted being put on those that dealt with social policy because, she says, ‘that’s where they put the girls’. Instead, ‘I threw myself into learning about the financial system and the economy … I wasn’t going to be a person who did a lot of social policy. I made that decision absolutely consciously.’

  She had employed as her senior adviser John Olenich, who was later adviser to Australia’s permanent mission to the United Nations. After the 2019 election, he resigned that post to return to Penny Wong’s staff. When he first met her, he was a young Labor Party member who had come up through student politics in South Australia and gravitated towards Penny Wong and Jay Weatherill because they were, as he recalls, ‘these exciting new figures on the scene. You know, they were smart, they were charismatic, and they had a lot of substance. Adelaide is a place with a lot of pride in its tradition – the state of Don Dunstan. And people saw Penny Wong and Jay Weatherill as the inheritors of that tradition.’ Olenich was convenor of the state’s Young Labor Left factional wing and had been active in student Labor politics at both the University of Adelaide and the University of South Australia. There had been very little Labor Left presence on these campuses when Olenich and his friends began their work, but he ended by being elected president of the University of South Australia Students Association and head of the National Organisation of Labor Students. It was evidence of superb organising and strategic capabilities, and Penny Wong noticed.

  Olenich had been recruited to work with Wong as a ‘jack of all trades’ when she was managing the campaign for the marginal seat of Hindmarsh in 2001. Afterwards, she asked him to join her staff when she took up her Senate position. ‘I was quite stunned because of course she was a rising star and everyone wanted to be in her orbit. And I didn’t hesitate.’ Like her, Olenich is gay. He also came from an immigrant family. ‘I thought she represented a future vision of Australia: assured, capable, diverse. Her own identity was metaphorical – herself an immigrant but also having roots back to proclamation – she expressed the progression to a more contemporary Australia. She clearly had the makings of an iconic Labor figure, and could give voice and visibility to a significant part of the community who had never seen themselves represented in Australian politics.’

  Olenich and Wong – supported with advice from friends and political allies such as Lois Boswell and Don Frater – set about transcending the adjectives that threatened to limit her career. They had an exemplar of what not to do in Senator Natasha Stott Despoja, Penny Wong’s foil and the woman who had out-campaigned her at University of Adelaide Students’ Association elections eleven years before. Stott Despoja had been elected as a senator in 1995 and entered parliament on a wave of media enthusiasm. The media profiles were effusive, and focused on style over substance, routinely mentioning her Doc Martens, her attractiveness and her youth. She became leader of the Australian Democrats in April 2001, but by the time Penny Wong entered parliament she was on the way down – forced to resign as leader in a party-room revolt. Stott Despoja retired from parliament in 2008 when her term expired. Penny Wong deliberately set a different course. As Olenich puts it today, ‘There were lessons there for us. We had great respect for Natasha – she was ethical, thoughtful, had awesome political gifts and was a pioneer in many ways. But we saw the way her depiction as the voice of youth unfortunately limited her reach; self-evidently you can only be the youth candidate for so long.’

  Very early, in the weeks before Wong’s maiden speech, she and Olenich were debating ‘how to deal with the sexuality issue’. The discussion was about how to get it out of the way, rather than devising a plan to advocate on gay rights. As part of her determination not to be marginalised, Penny had decided to shun personal media, although it was an easy way to raise her profile. She recalls, ‘I knew I could get a lot of soft media if I talked about myself and my relationships, and I made a political decision to avoid that and not to do it … it was not the kind of lift I wanted.’ Nevertheless, Olenich felt it was important to make some sort of public declaration in a way that she could control. He recalls her protesting that she had never been in the closet and therefore could hardly ‘come out’, but in the end he persuaded her. They decided to talk to an old connection – Penny Wong’s acquaintance from university days, Samantha Maiden – who was now a political reporter at the Adelaide Advertiser.

  The result was a profile of Wong and the other new Labor South Australian senator, Linda Kirk. Maiden made ‘difference’ a theme of the piece. She began by recapping the sexist ‘lipstick warrior’ headlines that had accompanied their election – a reminder, as she put it, that women in politics were ‘still regarded as colourful exotica’. The article moved smoothly on to state that ‘difference had always been a part of [Wong’s] life’ before summarising her family history. There followed a single internally contradictory sentence that has, ever since, been referred to as Penny Wong’s ‘coming out’: ‘In Labor circles, it is also well known Senator Wong is gay, a fact she would prefer to leave as a private matter.’

  A non sequitur followed. ‘It was not an issue during her preselection to Labor’s highest ranks.’6

  The tactic worked. Penny Wong’s sexuality was simultaneously ‘out’ yet also dismissed as defining. A few weeks later, Maiden was writing about Penny Wong again, but this time there was no pussyfooting around the personal. Wong, Maiden wrote, had emerged as a ‘future star’ and a ‘key dealmaker’.

  The context was affirmative action within the party. Simon Crean had replaced Kim Beazley as Labor leader in the wake of the 2001 election defeat. He made reforming the party one of his priorities, and now there was to be a special conference on party rules. The main issue was a hotly contested proposal to dilute unions’ influence by reducing their quota of delegate representatives. Crean was successful. The so-called 50:50 rule was adopted, providing for equal numbers of delegates for trade unions and ordinary party members. It was a more substantial change than any previously advocated by a federal leader since Gough Whitlam.7 Another item on the agenda was the anti-stacking rule changes resulting from the Ralph Clarke affair. Penny Wong had had a role in devising those, but now she was involved on a different front. Labor had adopted an affirmative action rule in 1994 that committed the party to preselecting women for at least 35 per cent of winnable seats by 2002. Now that date had arrived, and the rule was up for revision. The Left wanted a commitment to 50 per cent preselected women in winnable seats by 2012, and Penny Wong and Sharryn Jackson had been appointed to negotiate on the change.

  Jackson remembers, ‘The blokes were all focused on the union power issue. We didn’t get much media at all.’ They were junior parliamentarians – virtual unknowns. Nobody gave them a chance.

  Undaunted, months before the October 2002 conference they set about gathering support from the state delegates, starting at the top. Penny contacted Queensland premier Peter Beattie, who became one of the first to back the rule change. She approached Geoff Gallop, premier of Western Australia, who opposed it – which, says Wong, means she has never been a fan of his. ‘One remembers these things.’

  There was hostility and support across the factions. Wong remembers briefing one ‘very senior member of the parliamentary Left’ and being shouted at and told the proposal was ridiculous. ‘I said to him, “You misunderstand why I am here. I am not consulting you. I am telling you where we are at.”’ Her relations with this colleague – many years her senior in the parliament – have never recovered.

  Wong was the expert negotiator with the factional chiefs. Jackson concentrated on organising women across the party. Wong was ‘incredibly considered, very patient and very sensible’ in explaining how the change would work in practice, recalls Jackson. A winnable seat was defin
ed as having a margin of 5 per cent or less. She assured the men of the party that there were many ways the change could happen without threatening those of talent among them.

  On the day of the conference, Jackson and former Victorian premier Joan Kirner had organised a showy, sequinned, purple-clad female marching band, armed with arrows pointing up to indicate a growth in female political representation. It caused a stir, but they still didn’t have the numbers. Then, on the conference floor, there was a shift: the remnants of the Centre Left split on the issue. Now it was impossible to predict how the vote would go. Faced with possible defeat, the Right was suddenly interested in negotiating. Crean indicated he would back a watered-down proposal for a 40:40 split between the genders, with the remaining 20 per cent unallocated. Wong was thrust into backroom talks with the senior men of the Right, including Senator Robert Ray. According to one observer, the discussions began with Ray dismissive, but in the end the deal for female candidates in 40 per cent of winnable seats by 2012 was voted through unanimously. Wong, Samantha Maiden wrote, had ‘blazed a trail for women MPs’ and emerged as ‘a politician to watch’ after just a few months in parliament. Nick Bolkus was quoted saying that Penny Wong would definitely be a minister and ‘I think she will be one of the best ministers to come out of South Australia.’8

  By 2003 Penny Wong was using her cross-examination skills in Senate Estimates, grilling public servants on the details of funding for the environment and the issue of permits for land clearing in Queensland. Because she was a junior member, the outcomes of her questioning were contained in media releases by the relevant shadow minister, Kelvin Thomson,9 but her work was acknowledged and drew attention within the party. Later that year she became the leading questioner as part of a Senate select committee inquiring into ministerial discretion in migration matters. Labor had accused the minister for immigration, Philip Ruddock, of granting visas in exchange for electoral donations, including one by a Filipino businessman, Dante Tan, who had been given a business visa and then Australian citizenship despite being a fugitive in the Philippines. Tan had contributed money to Ruddock’s 2001 re-election campaign. There was a ‘black hole’ in accountability, the committee report concluded.10 Meanwhile, in South Australia Penny Wong concentrated on two popular and pressing local issues – the Howard government’s proposal to site a nuclear waste dump in the state, and the condition of the lower Murray River, on which Adelaide depends for its water supply. Olenich worked hard at getting her statements into the local media, and soon The Advertiser was running her articles on its opinion page. She was finding her feet and building her profile.