Penny Wong

by Simons, Margaret;

  *

  On 2 December 2003 Simon Crean resigned the Labor leadership after senior party figures told him he had lost his colleagues’ support – the result of months of undermining by Kim Beazley’s supporters. In the ballot to replace him, Mark Latham defeated Beazley: forty-seven votes to forty-five.

  Penny Wong voted for Mark Latham.

  Asked about this today, she puts her head in her hands and bends over with a groan.

  In 2019, with Mark Latham representing One Nation in the New South Wales parliament and a long history of misogynistic public statements behind him, it is almost impossible to understand how Penny Wong, the feminist anti-racist, could have supported him.

  John Olenich remembers the thinking in her office at the time. They respected Beazley, but Latham showed signs of being able to set the debate. ‘At that point we had been on the back foot for a long time, constantly wedged … Latham seemed like someone who could actually win and take the fight to Howard. Obviously time has shown that to be a huge misjudgement and one we learned from.’

  Penny had read some of Latham’s considerable work. She didn’t agree with all of it, but she thought he had correctly diagnosed Labor’s challenge. She says today: ‘Class, as a marker of identity and as a driver of voting behaviour, was being weakened … Labor needed to grapple with those issues, and he seemed to be doing that … It’s hard now to think back without being tinged by the way he has unravelled since. But there was a brilliance to him.’

  She was far from alone in that view. At the time, Latham seemed to offer hope for a Labor Party repeatedly wrong-footed by John Howard. He had written impressive books on progressive policy.11 In the 2002 Menzies Lecture, he had offered a penetrating diagnosis of how Howard had managed to fracture Labor’s support base – the alliance between the working class and educated progressives that had held since Whitlam. The modern political spectrum, he argued, was best understood as a struggle between insiders and outsiders, ‘the abstract values of the powerful centre versus the pragmatic beliefs of those who feel disenfranchised by social change’. He talked about how identity politics was trumping the politics of class: ‘People see their place in society as a reflection of their access to information and public influence.’12 It was a powerful and prescient analysis, made before Trump, before Brexit.

  Wong had not worked directly with Latham, and didn’t know him well. The Left had split on the issue of leadership. Julia Gillard and the ‘soft Left’ – with which the South Australian Left was usually allied – backed first Crean, then Latham; the ‘hard Left’, led by Anthony Albanese, consistently backed Beazley.

  Albanese remembers the leadership ballot as one of the few occasions on which he rang people ‘pleading with them to vote in a certain way’ on a leadership issue. He had grown up with Latham in New South Wales Labor, and knew him well. He thought Latham unfit to lead the party on character grounds. Penny Wong was not one of those Albanese rang. He assumed, correctly, that she would vote along factional lines with the soft Left. But he did ring Mark Butler, her factional ally.

  Butler was in a supermarket checkout queue when he took the call. He recalls, ‘Albo was frantic … He was saying, “What the fuck are you doing? He’ll win, and it’s a fucking disaster,” and I said, “He won’t win, nobody is saying he’ll win.” And Albo said, “He’ll win.” Albo is the best vote counter.’

  Butler says today that ‘smart people’, including Nick Bolkus and Laurie Brereton, were arguing that Beazley’s supporters should not be easily rewarded for their campaign to undermine Crean’s leadership. They had convinced people that Latham would not win, and that Beazley would be the leader – but a strong vote for Latham would teach them a lesson. This, he now thinks, was calculated and ‘Machiavellian’.

  Butler doesn’t recall giving Wong any advice, although he is sure they would have discussed it. ‘My view was she should make up her own mind.’ Sharryn Jackson, on the other hand, remembers detailed conversations with Penny about the leadership. They talked long into the night in their parliamentary offices. Jackson supported Beazley as a fellow Western Australian and a potentially fine prime minister. Latham, on the other hand, ‘had this element of ruthlessness about him that I wasn’t comfortable with’. Penny was not convinced. ‘I think she genuinely felt that we couldn’t go back to Beazley, that he could not defeat Howard … Penny and I agree on a lot of things but we have disagreed on a lot of leadership issues,’ Jackson says.

  The deciding factor for Penny Wong was that Julia Gillard, a leader of the parliamentary soft Left, was rallying other Left women to support Latham. In the end, Penny followed her lead. Today she describes her support for Mark Latham as ‘one of the worst mistakes of my political career’.

  *

  In the dry, sometimes claustrophobic near city-state of Adelaide, it can be all too easy to obey the dictum of Sun Tzu and Al Pacino: keep your friends close and your enemies closer. Within Labor factional circles, you don’t have much choice.

  Nick Bolkus remains an integral part of Adelaide life. He entertains in the coffee shops of Hutt Street, greeted regularly by former constituents and friends, the very image of the respected Greek senior. Penny Wong runs into him sometimes at Labor Party functions, and they are civil to each other – but that’s as far as it goes. Despite the fact that she rose within the sub-faction that carried his name, despite his early promotion of her and his pride in her advance, the two are not friends. In early 2004 she – in collaboration with Mark Butler and Jay Weatherill – was part of a piece of ruthless internal party politics that ended Bolkus’s career.

  Today all the participants shift uneasily when asked about this rift. The Advertiser has written it up as one of ‘South Australia’s 10 most poisonous political feuds’.13 The main players can’t avoid one another. They get by, it seems, by not talking about it.

  In March 2003 Nick Bolkus announced that he wanted to seek another six-year term at the 2004 election, assuming that he would again be preselected as part of the Machine deal between Left and Right. This would have capped his 23-year-long parliamentary career. Bolkus assumed that his experience, seniority and record of nurturing talent within the party gave him the right to depart parliament at a time of his choosing. Within the Left it was understood that he planned to retire mid-term, in the expectation that his position would be taken up by Pat Conlon, then a minister in South Australia’s Rann government. Conlon was close to Bolkus. So was Mark Butler. Conlon and Butler had shared a house and an office back in university days. Now, Conlon put both Butler and Bolkus on notice that he wanted a federal parliamentary career.

  Bolkus claims he consulted Mark Butler before making his announcement. If so, Butler does not remember it. To Bolkus’s former protégés, and to his enemies within the party, it seemed as though he was taking his Senate position for granted. Meanwhile, Conlon was an important state minister at a time when Labor was in minority government. The faction didn’t want to lose him from state parliament.

  The opposition to Bolkus and concerns about Conlon’s move came together in a wave of opposition to Bolkus’s preselection. Bolkus claims his one-time protégés never confided their concerns or made it clear to him that he had lost their support. Instead, he went through a process of ‘slow water torture’ in which they froze him out: ‘Gradually I had to piece it all together.’ At the time, the betrayal was excruciating.

  In all this, Penny Wong’s opinion, and the need to protect her emerging career, was crucial.

  Conlon was not inclined by either temperament or ambition to be a backroom operator or part of anyone’s support team. If he went into federal parliament, it was expected that he would want a frontbench position. The South Australian Left could only expect one frontbench position – either Wong or Conlon, not both. Given Conlon’s deep cross-factional connections with the powerful men of the party, there was no guarantee that Wong would win the inevitable battle. Even without this competition, Penny Wong and Pat Conlon did not get on. Ha
ving them both in the Senate was a recipe for instability.

  Today Mark Butler says that if Conlon had indicated his interest earlier, things might have been different. Perhaps he would have been preselected instead of Penny Wong – although that would have raised issues with affirmative action quotas. But by this time, the faction had already chosen Wong as part of its path to power, and she was doing well.

  She must have thought it a bit rich for Conlon to expect to muscle in now. Her opinion was asked, and she made her position very clear. As well, Butler made what he thought was the only sensible political decision – no matter how difficult it was for him personally. He was backing Penny Wong.

  Bolkus was vulnerable. He had got caught up in allegations involving Dante Tan – the same Filipino businessman who had featured in the cash-for-visas scandal on which Penny Wong had been pursuing immigration minister Philip Ruddock. Bolkus had taken nearly $10,000 as a political donation from an associate of Tan’s and not declared it, instead making a donation in his own name to the campaign for the marginal seat of Hindmarsh at the 2001 election – the campaign Penny Wong had managed.

  The scandal blew up in parliament in June 2003, with Bolkus accused of ‘laundering’ the money into a Labor account. Bolkus said that the donation had been for raffle tickets. He had met Tan and one of his associates to discuss his visa issues. Bolkus declined to give any immigration advice, and then, ‘He wanted to make a donation. I said, “Well, we’re running a raffle.” [I] had the books with me at the time, so he said, “I’ll buy some tickets.” So, fair enough, I thought, maybe a grand. He bought close to $10,000 worth.’14

  Questioned by journalists, both Penny Wong and Hindmarsh candidate Steve Georganas reportedly said they couldn’t remember the raffle. Wong commented, ‘I recall being told we did raffles, but didn’t have any involvement at the time.’15

  In June the South Australian branch of the party announced it would make a ‘correction’ in Australian Electoral Commission records, amending to note that the generous donation was from Tan, and Bolkus apologised for not correctly reporting it. Investigations by both the SA Police and the Commissioner of State Taxation followed, and by early 2004 Bolkus had been cleared. He later successfully sued newspapers for suggesting he had behaved improperly.16

  But the damage had been done to his political standing. In June 2004, after it became clear that his faction was not going to back him, he announced he would retire from parliament after the election due later that year.

  The move against such a senior Labor figure split the South Australian Left. Pat Conlon, one of the earliest and most important members of what had been known as the Bolkus Left, considered leaving the faction – which he eventually did, though years later. Butler and Conlon had been close, but this strained the friendship – although Butler says they have since overcome their disagreements and remain friends.

  Interviewed for this book in early 2018, Bolkus took care to deny that Penny Wong had any involvement in, or knowledge of, the Tan donation. He was not quite so careful with his words in the interview he gave for the National Library of Australia’s oral history project in 2010. There, he said he had taken the money as a result of Penny Wong as campaign manager ‘desperately needing money to win that seat’ – though he did not claim she knew about Tan. He told the National Library interviewers:

  Now I came back to Adelaide, they ran the raffle, there were witnesses there. It’s just that a couple of the critical people who wanted to get me out of politics had memory lapses. People like Steve Georganas, for instance, he was there holding the hat, but he couldn’t remember being there when everyone else could remember Steve being there. So I think the sort of treachery of some of my former colleagues made it much worse than it was ever going to be.

  The scandal, he said, had been used against him when it came to his preselection, and he blamed Wong squarely. ‘I think Penny Wong, for instance, may have been worried that if Pat Conlon had come to Canberra he would take her position on the frontbench. So she was a major opponent.’17

  With Bolkus out of the way, the Left instead backed Anne McEwen for the Senate vacancy. Today Butler says this was largely because she had a ‘warm, close and personal relationship with Penny’. Anne and Penny had known each other since their student days at the University of Adelaide. Butler says it was felt she would be a ‘good support’ for Penny, rather than a rival. And that is how it worked out. McEwen was elected to the Senate in 2004 and went on to be chief whip while Wong was the government’s leader in the Senate. Conlon, meanwhile, continued as a senior minister in the Rann and Weatherill state governments until his retirement from parliament in 2014. Bolkus left parliament at the expiry of his term in 2005.

  Today, Bolkus claims he holds no grudges against Penny Wong and Mark Butler. At the time, he felt they had betrayed him. Now, he thinks they made the right decision. ‘My time was over. They were right,’ he says.

  After he left parliament he went into business with Ian Smith, the husband of Natasha Stott Despoja, and former political foe Alexander Downer. They launched a lobbying firm, Bespoke Approach. Bolkus has been chief fundraiser for the Labor Party, a lobbyist for businesses that require government-approved developments, and a director on numerous company boards.

  But the events surrounding Bolkus’s demise still rankle in Adelaide Labor. Steve Georganas had worked for Bolkus in the mid-1990s. There is no doubt, he says, that ‘Penny wouldn’t be where she is without Nick, and nor would I. He was a great mentor to us both … He could see things in Mark and Penny well before they got into the parliament.’

  Georganas, like Bolkus, is from a Greek background. During his early years in the party, Georganas says, ‘Nick was special for us … to have a cabinet minister of Greek descent was pretty big … He’d have Whitlam coming to our Greek events, which was unheard of, a prime minister going to an ethnic event.’

  When Butler and Penny Wong moved against Bolkus, says Georganas, it was a ‘very sad time’. Meanwhile, he was worried about his own preselection. He felt he had to support them. For a period, his own relationship with Bolkus was fractured, but he says they are ‘all right’ now. ‘He understands I really had nothing to do with it.’

  Georganas says today that he does remember the raffle. He says he drew it, and even remembers who won.

  So were Penny Wong and Mark Butler right to move on Nick Bolkus?

  Georganas pauses. He is worried about getting into trouble, counting himself a friend of both Bolkus and Wong. ‘It would have been nice to see Nick go in his own time,’ he says carefully. ‘He had earned that right.’

  Asked about this history, Penny Wong is defensive. ‘I’m not going to talk to you a lot about this, I would just say two things. In that and in other things … I was motivated by what I thought was the right thing for the group and for the party.’ It is difficult, she acknowledges, to fall out with former allies and friends. ‘I am quite emotional. That emotion is probably what drives me. But I try to make political decisions on a judgement of what I think is right. It wasn’t about whether I liked [Nick Bolkus] or not.’

  She also denies responsibility for the choice over Bolkus’s preselection. It is true, she says, that her opinion was asked, and she gave it – but in the end she did not have a vote. ‘The decision ultimately had to be made by those people who were responsible for the majority of votes inside the Left. And that was not me. It has always interested me – on a number of issues – how much power people think I have.’

  What she says is true, but also disingenuous. One of the main issues was protecting her position. Nobody else who was involved doubts that her opinion – and her encouragement to Mark Butler to make tough decisions – were crucial to what happened. And, while it may have been for the good of the party, it was also important to her own political career.

  Asked whether the relationships have been repaired, Wong is uncertain. She saw Nick Bolkus a few evenings before our interview. They were polite to each other.
Told that Bolkus said that she and Butler made the right decision in 2003, she is taken by surprise. ‘That is a nice thing for him to say.’

  *

  From the beginning of 2004, after navigating her first eighteen months in parliament, Wong made a determined effort to lift her profile and develop her media skills. Dealing with the media was the part of the job that she found hardest, but if she was to become a minister, it was important to show she could perform in the media. The priority was to build her profile beyond what she was already known for – her Senate committee cross-examinations skills and backroom policy smarts. She worked hard over several months, practising speaking more concisely, learning to appear less of a ‘turgid intellectual’.