Penny Wong

by Simons, Margaret;

  An important opportunity – and a marker of how much she developed as a media performer over this year – was the ABC Sunday morning television program Insiders. At that stage it included a regular item at the end of the program called ‘The Adjournment Debate’, the name a nod to the parliamentary procedure by which members are entitled to raise any matter they wish. In this segment, a backbencher from either side of politics was given a fifty-second piece to camera, giving their take on a topic of the day.

  The first time Penny Wong appeared, in February 2004, she was shown walking around the internal courtyards of Parliament House. She was a stilted performer, her speech sing-song, her gestures stagey. She returned to the themes of her maiden speech, saying that John Howard’s election motto, ‘For all of us’, came with the small print that it did not apply to those dependent on Medicare or public schools. ‘The Howard government thinks like the membership of one of those exclusive clubs – certain people need not apply,’ she said.18

  Her next performance, just a few weeks later, was more accomplished. She emerged from the emergency department of an Adelaide hospital and spoke to camera with a critique of the recently announced Extended Medicare Safety Net. It was not so much a safety net as a ‘safety pin to hold together the fraying threads of the health system until after the election’.19

  Wong appeared again after tax cuts were announced in the May federal budget. She strode through a childcare centre full of children at play and said that childcare workers – as well as nurses and teachers – were among ‘Howard’s forgotten people’: denied a pay rise and overlooked in the budget provisions. She pointed to the camera. ‘Chances are he’s forgotten you too.’20

  Olenich comments that Wong always wanted to be a policy reformer, rather than a celebrity. ‘But she knew she would never make an impact without a public profile.’ Over time, he says, she learned to show ‘her authentic self, and the warmth and sass her friends knew her for. It was partly an intellectual exercise for her, learning to adapt to an unnatural setting.’

  Penny Wong’s final performance on Insiders for 2004, in the lead-up to the election campaign, was shot inside Adelaide Central Market. She walked between market stands and talked about ‘big issues’, including climate change and dental care, and accused the Howard government of attempting to ‘buy its way back into power’. Now, she was calm, confident and likeable in front of the camera. In particular, she had learned to use her face to convey meaning and emotion. There were her dimples, when appealing to the good sense of her audience – and those eyebrows, raised when skewering the Howard government.21

  She had found herself as a public performer, and become the Penny Wong the public sees today.

  8

  STAYING IN THE ROOM

  In August 2004, Penny Wong made one of the most painful moves of her political career. She voted in favour of legislation that banned same-sex marriage. Those who hero-worship Penny Wong, who identify her chiefly with the successful reform of the marriage laws in 2017, or who remember her tears when the postal survey result favouring the legalisation of same-sex marriage was announced, are often puzzled by this part of her history. Some condemn her as a hypocrite. The Greens’ Christine Milne cites this episode as evidence that Penny Wong is ‘just a machine Labor politician’, prepared to compromise principles in the interests of her political career and her pursuit of a frontbench position. Penny Wong’s stance hurt those in the gay community who looked to her as a role model, says Milne. What was she doing?

  Penny Wong was openly gay. That alone was a political statement. Yet, in 2004, there was no sense in which she could legitimately have been tagged as a campaigner for gay rights, at least in the public sense. Even within the Labor Party, she was not the leading voice, although she supported reform behind the scenes. By the early 2000s a group of gay-rights activists with the party had begun to organise what eventually became Rainbow Labor – now an officially recognised policy caucus of the party in most states. John Olenich, Penny Wong’s key staffer, was centrally involved, and Wong supported his involvement from a distance. According to Olenich, most in the party simply didn’t want to be bothered with gay rights. ‘People in the party were supportive in the sense that they were not against us … but it was so far from the front of mind, and indeed it was seen by many as unhelpful in the Howard culture-war era … There just wasn’t the political capacity to take that issue head on in those days.’

  The Labor parliamentarian who had made the most headway on gay rights was the leader of the ‘hard Left’, Anthony Albanese, for whom the issue had been a personal crusade since entering parliament in 1996. Albanese introduced a private member’s bill in 1998 that would ensure federal equality for same-sex couples under superannuation law. He was to try nine more times over the next decade without success, until the Rudd government in 2007 saw the bill passed into law. Today Albanese remembers that when he first spoke on the bill in caucus in 1998 ‘people shifted in their seats uncomfortably, because it was not the thing for people to go into the caucus and talk about sexuality. It just wasn’t a mainstream issue … People were saying, “Why are you raising this?”’ He heard on the grapevine that people were saying they hadn’t realised ‘that Albo was gay … They couldn’t understand why I would be raising it otherwise, whereas in fact I have always thought it was easier for someone who wasn’t gay to pursue this issue than [for] people who are.’

  Penny Wong was not yet in parliament, and Albanese did not know her well. Nevertheless, he remembers her being ‘generally supportive’ in party forums. He says she understood the strategic nature of the change he was pushing for. Even those opposed to equality on the basis of sexuality could be convinced by the argument that people should be able to allocate their money to their partner if they wished. ‘It was an issue that appealed to individualism as well as collectivism, so it was a good place to start,’ he says.

  Until this time, advances on gay rights had been achieved mainly by state Labor governments. Homosexuality had been decriminalised: firstly by South Australia in the 1970s with other states following – Tasmania last, in 1997. From 1994, some states had begun to recognise same-sex couples on the same basis as de-facto heterosexual relationships when it came to wills, licence fees and state superannuation. Little had been done at the federal level, and progress stopped decisively with the election of the Howard government in 1996. Howard’s aspiration of making Australians ‘relaxed and comfortable’ meant reasserting the centrality of Christian values, including traditional heterosexual families.1

  Before Howard, same-sex marriage was barely on the political agenda. Albanese recalls that in all his years of activism on the issue ‘nobody had ever rung me saying they wanted to get married and asking for the law to change. It just wasn’t an issue.’ Howard changed that. In May 2004, the government introduced a bill to change the Marriage Act 1961 (Cth), which until then had not defined marriage. The key amendment would insert words mandating that marriage be recognised exclusively as a union between ‘a man and a woman’. The bill would also prevent the recognition of same-sex marriages lawfully entered into in foreign jurisdictions.

  It was another example of ‘wedge politics’: dividing progressive Labor voters from socially conservative and Catholic supporters. It was also designed to cause mayhem within the Labor Party. In South Australia, for example, Don Farrell, from the socially conservative Right, was vehemently opposed to same-sex marriage.

  With weeks to go until the election, Labor announced that it would support the Howard amendments, but would also commit to reforming all federal laws that affected de facto relationships, to make sure that same-sex couples were treated equally. The announcement was effectively made by shadow attorney-general Nicola Roxon without caucus consent, and backed by Latham. The caucus agreement had been to pass the amendment in the lower house, then refer it off to a Senate Committee.2

  In June, there was an anguished caucus meeting. Carmen Lawrence spoke against the amendments bu
t also urged her colleagues not to ‘confuse politics and principle’. Marriage, she said, was only about property. She argued unsuccessfully for a conscience vote on the issue. Penny Wong recalls the meeting. She had accepted that with Roxon and Latham having already committed the party, there was no changing direction. ‘I figured, we have five years to make this change, and it’s not going to happen now. So I have to do a few things in this meeting to set it up for change in the future, and one of them is to make people feel ashamed of themselves. That sounds harsh, but I wanted to make them understand what they were doing. So I gave a speech about my parents being married under the White Australia policy, and how in the 1950s in the USA some states would have banned their marriage, and how nobody in that room would consider discriminating in that way, or against a disabled person marrying, or people of different ages. But because it’s about gays, we are doing it. And I considered that speech an investment in shaping hearts and minds.’

  This, she says, was the first step in a considered strategy. Marriage was ‘totemic’ so would come last. First was to remove other kinds of discrimination against gay couples.

  As is the way in Canberra, some of her speech leaked to the media – but bled of its power. She was reported as having compared banning same-sex marriage to the 1950s laws against interracial marriage in the United States.3

  Caucus backed the compromise deal. Penny Wong, according to Olenich, had front of mind the 2001 election and the Tampa affair that dominated it. ‘She was scarred by that, as all of us were. I think she was determined not to let Howard weaponise anti-gay sentiment to win an election as he had done with anti-immigrant sentiment. She wanted to head that off at the pass.’

  The amendment to the Marriage Act passed the lower house on 24 June, and came before the Senate on 12 August. Natasha Stott Despoja gave a passionate speech attacking both Labor and the government, noting that she was the only senator from South Australia opposing the legislation. Labor was adopting a small-target strategy, she said. ‘If they are wanting another three years on the opposition benches, their continual kowtowing to the government’s agenda will ensure it.’4

  Penny Wong’s speech picked up on the Tampa theme. The bill should be seen in the context of Howard’s history of using division, particularly attacks on asylum seekers, for political advantage, she said. ‘The prime minister would happily make lesbian and gay Australians the asylum seekers of this election. He would dearly love this to be the new Pacific Solution,’ she said. She believed that the legislation would have minimal real effect. ‘It reaffirms the existing common law and statutory definition of marriage. It does not change the legal definition.’ It was a ‘dog whistle: an appeal to people by implication rather than explicit meaning … Nobody has a monopoly on commitment and love, nobody has the right to judge the worth of another person’s relationships.’ It was an odd speech – made in the knowledge that she was going to vote for the bill, yet avoiding saying she supported it.

  Wong voted with her party, in favour of the changes that explicitly removed her own right to marry. There were only six votes against – those of the Greens and the Democrats.

  Parliament rose that night, and Penny Wong flew home to Adelaide for the weekend. She had an appointment to catch up with a friend – the University of Adelaide political scientist Carol Johnson and her female partner. They were going to see a film and have dinner.

  Wong and Johnson had known each other since Penny was involved in student politics and Johnson was a junior politics lecturer at the University of Adelaide. As the years went by, they had become friends. Johnson had developed a speciality in writing about the Labor Party and progressive policy, including gay rights. She had followed the debates over the Marriage Act amendments closely and had read Penny Wong’s speech. ‘Naturally, I was keen to talk about it,’ she recalls.

  Johnson says that Wong swore her to secrecy about their conversation that night. She was in pain and needed to confide in a context where she would not be accused of breaching party solidarity. When approached to be interviewed for this book, Johnson asked Wong if she could be released from the promise of secrecy. She wanted to put her recollections on the record to scotch any suggestion that Penny Wong was once in favour of discrimination against same-sex marriage.

  That night Penny Wong had been in anguish. She told Johnson she was in an impossible position, that she felt she had done the best she could. ‘Basically she felt bound by party policy, and that leaving the party wasn’t really an option because what would it achieve?’

  Wong told Johnson that evening that she would commit herself to changing Labor Party policy on same-sex marriage. Having spent her first years in parliament working hard not to be dismissed as ‘the gay candidate’, she would now step up and make the issue her own.

  Johnson thought the Labor Party didn’t fully understand what it had done to Wong in forcing her to choose between her personal beliefs – her very identity – and her political allegiances. ‘I don’t think it would have occurred to most of her colleagues just how difficult it was to ask this woman to basically vote for her own oppression … Penny was prepared to do that because she knew that if the law was ever going to change, you need to work with the major parties … that it was a longer-term political project. But it was incredibly difficult and distressing to her.’

  Today, asked about her vote for the banning of same-sex marriage in 2004, Penny Wong is defensive and combative. I asked about the Liberal MPs who crossed the floor in 1988 to oppose Howard’s discriminatory immigration policy. Did they do the right thing?

  ‘Of course they did,’ she said.

  So should she have crossed the floor in 2004?

  It is, of course, an unfair comparison. The Liberal Party rules, in theory at least, allow parliamentarians a free vote – though the reality is that there is a heavy political cost to crossing the floor. Labor’s rules make national conference and caucus decisions binding on MPs. If Penny Wong had crossed the floor to vote with the Democrats and Greens against the changes to the Marriage Act, she could have been expelled from the party. At the very least, her rise would have come to an abrupt halt. She certainly would not have made the frontbench so quickly, if at all.

  In any case, she says, the comparison is false on principle. Howard’s immigration policy in 1988 was a fundamental change both to his party’s policy and to the history of bipartisanship on immigration in Australia. The changes to the Marriage Act were merely a restatement of the status quo – a political tactic.

  And then she displayed her trademark lawyer combativeness. ‘With all due respect,’ she said, ‘I’m a little tired of slogans from people who’ve done nothing very much to achieve equality in this country. I have had to put myself on the line. I had a decision to make at that time that I could either resign in a blaze of glory or I could stay and fight. And I did make that decision in 2004 – that I would make sure that we changed the party platform one day, and that ultimately we would change the country.’

  It is tempting to think that Penny Wong is applying hindsight. Was she really as committed, and as strategic, as she claims today?

  A number of sources confirm that from that date on Wong involved herself actively in building the momentum for change within the party, while publicly continuing to support existing policy. Her key staffers were increasingly involved in Rainbow Labor with her urging and encouragement. The long process of winning hearts and minds had begun, and she was integral to it. In the years ahead, Penny Wong was accused by gay activists of betraying their cause. Within the party, nobody regarded her that way.

  In 2004, Wong chose to stay ‘in the room’ – to compromise herself personally and on principle in the interests of remaining part of the conversation, part of long-term change. In the years that followed there were twenty-three bills dealing with marriage equality or the recognition of same-sex marriages introduced into federal parliament, most of them sponsored by minor parties. Four came to a vote, three in the Senate.5 Ironic
ally, Howard’s attempt at wedge politics had made same-sex marriage a parliamentary issue. It was almost constantly before the parliament from then until 2017, when marriage equality was finally achieved.

  In November 2008, Wong again voted against marriage equality when both major parties in the Senate voted down a Greens amendment to Rudd government laws removing other kinds of discrimination against same-sex couples. She absented herself for two other Greens-sponsored votes in February 2010 and July 2011. Through all this time, she kept her loyalty to the party. She trod a difficult line in her public statements, avoiding explicitly supporting marriage discrimination but not openly opposing Labor policy. That was until, thanks largely to her work and persistence, the party platform changed in 2011.

  *

  For the first few months as leader of the opposition, Mark Latham seemed to be vindicating the judgement of his supporters. Until March 2004 Labor had a strong lead in the opinion polls, and Howard seemed rattled. But as the year wore on the polls began to turn. Howard announced the October election date in August. The contest, he said, would be about who voters could trust.6 Despite the government’s own record of dishonesty over the Children Overboard affair, it was a message designed to exploit voter concerns about Latham’s character – a persistent feature of the campaign. Yet for much of the campaign the polls showed the contest was too close to call. On election eve it was far from clear, even to senior political journalists, that Labor was beaten.

  Meanwhile, Penny Wong was once again managing the campaign for the marginal seat of Hindmarsh. The sitting Liberal member, Christine Gallus, had retired, and returning Labor candidate Steve Georganas was up against a first-time contender, thirty-year-old Liberal political staffer Simon Birmingham. Once again, this was a seat Labor needed to win if it was to form government.

  Hindmarsh was a sprawling electorate, taking in the largely working-class western suburbs of Adelaide as well as the wealthier beachside suburbs. It also had one of the oldest populations of any electorate in the country, meaning health and aged care were key issues. Wong, always a shrewd strategist, directed that everyone in the electorate over the age of sixty-five should receive direct mail on Labor’s Medicare Gold policy, under which the party promised to end waiting lists and subsume all hospital costs for those aged over seventy-five. She dispatched Georganas to do targeted doorknocking of older constituents.