Penny Wong

by Simons, Margaret;

  In the last week Wong insisted that Georganas make phone calls to voters who had been identified as undecided. He remembers, ‘She sat me down and put a whip to me and made me ring a thousand of them.’ He had completed the task by the Thursday evening before election day. After a six-week campaign, he was exhausted. On Friday he was thinking of the campaign as effectively over when Wong gave him another list of 240 swinging voters and told him to call them. Fighting exhaustion, he complied. He was on the phone until nine o’clock on the Friday night, by which time he was so tired he could barely speak.

  It made all the difference. Georganas won the seat by just 108 votes (two-party-preferred). Without Wong forcing him to make those calls, he believes, he would not have been in parliament. (His opponent, Simon Birmingham, would enter the Senate in 2007.)

  But the campaign for Hindmarsh was a rare bright spot in a devastating national loss for Labor. The party had gone backwards, losing a net four seats in the lower house. A few days later, it became clear that when the new senators took up their positions in July 2005 Howard would also have control of the upper house – the first time since Malcolm Fraser’s prime ministership that a government would have control of both houses.

  One of the lower-house seats lost was Hasluck, held by Penny’s closest friend in parliament, Sharryn Jackson. The two women, in their late-night discussions when Latham and Beazley were vying for the leadership, had talked about whether Latham would be good for marginal-seat holders such as Jackson. Penny had been wrong. Latham had proven a disaster – the first Labor opposition leader for nearly a century to make no headway against a government in his first election. Penny was, says Jackson, ‘devastated’, politically and personally, by the scale of the defeat.

  Yet Latham was good for Penny Wong. As he considered his frontbench after the election, he wrote in his diary that his ‘first priority [is] to promote progressive young women such as Penny Wong and Tanya Plibersek. All the talented Labor women are in the Left.’7 On 22 October it was announced that Penny Wong would join the Labor frontbench. Given she had been in parliament for just over two years, it was a considerable promotion. Her hard work on policy, her impressive fierceness in the Senate, her deal-making abilities and the building of her public profile had all paid off.

  Her elevation made the international media. Agence France-Presse described her as ‘the first openly gay member of a national leadership team’.8 In Sabah, the local media called Penny Wong’s father. Francis fondly recounted how he and Penny had climbed Mount Kinabalu together, and said how proud his mother would be if she were still alive. ‘I want to say, “Well done, Penny, I am very proud of you.”’9 The Chinese media reported that the country once known for the White Australia policy now had a woman of Chinese ethnicity rising through the political ranks.10

  Locally, the response was not universally rapturous. News Limited columnist Andrew Bolt described the new Latham frontbench as a ‘disaster’, incorporating the ‘gay rights activist Penny Wong and Israel basher Tanya Plibersek’.11 His descriptor was insultingly dismissive, but also unintentionally ironic, given the compromises Wong had made on gay rights just weeks before. Former Labor politician Stephen Loosley described Wong as ‘excellent new talent’ but said she and the other new frontbenchers were ‘effectively on probation’ and would have to face new levels of scrutiny and accountability.12

  A few days later, it was announced that Penny Wong would take on the shadow portfolio for corporate governance and responsibility, and for employment and workforce participation. She was interviewed by a journalist from The Australian, and asked a question that she would never forget. ‘He asked me how an Asian lesbian could represent the people of Adelaide’s northern suburbs. I was actually lost for words. It was so unexpected and so personally aggressive … You know, that was just an example of the little indignities, the way in which people just undermine you.’ She reflected that she should have responded, ‘How can John Howard represent women?’ but she didn’t think of that quickly enough.

  The resulting article, headlined ‘Gay senator prepared for when it gets personal’, started by reassuring readers that ‘Canberra’s only openly gay frontbencher is well prepared for the potential personal abuse that comes with political office’. Without apparent irony, it quoted her as saying that she preferred not to bring her personal life into the public spotlight.13

  In January 2005, after weeks of leadership speculation and bouts of pancreatitis, Mark Latham suddenly announced his resignation from the leadership, and from federal parliament. The resulting contest for the Labor Party leadership shaped up between Kim Beazley and Kevin Rudd. At the last minute Rudd withdrew because it became clear that he would not win.

  Penny Wong was key in Rudd’s decision to withdraw. It was when she announced her support for Beazley that the fall of the numbers became clear, and Rudd’s defeat became a certainty. Julia Gillard had also been doing the numbers. Wong’s declaration helped to scupper that attempt as well.14 Wong said at the time that she regarded Gillard as ‘one of our star performers’ but that a steady hand was needed at the wheel: ‘I have simply come to the conclusion that Kim Beazley is the leader that can unite the party.’15 Having backed Latham in 2003, Wong from that date on put a high value on leadership stability. She stayed loyal to Beazley and, in particular, to his deputy, Jenny Macklin, for as long as it was an option.

  Wong claims today that the potential for rivalry between Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard was already apparent to her in 2005. In that context, she judged that Beazley and Macklin were the more stable leadership team. She thought Rudd was ‘brilliant … he had an extraordinary vision, was extraordinarily bright and had an ambitious and progressive agenda’. Nevertheless, in 2005 she did what she could to swing the numbers against him by declaring for Beazley publicly.

  Beazley left Penny Wong in her two shadow portfolios – corporate governance and responsibility bracketed with employment and workforce participation. The latter, in particular, was important. Now with control of the Senate, Howard planned radical changes to welfare and working conditions, including the weakening of unfair-dismissal laws. With hindsight, it is clear that Howard gifted the Labor Party the perfect issue: deregulation of the industrial relations system. Latham was later to describe the defeat of 2004 as the darkness before the ‘false dawn’ of the Rudd Labor government.16 Howard had repeatedly divided Labor with his wedge politics; now his changes to workplace rights united the party’s traditional supporters in opposition to his government.

  In early 2005, though, none of this was clear. The Labor Party was in an agony of self-flagellation and reflection. Beazley might have represented stability, but he had also repeatedly failed to beat Howard. There was an aura around Howard, as though he would never be defeated. For a career politician such as Penny Wong, the election defeat was a heavy and seemingly defining blow. Would she always be in opposition? Had the excoriating compromise been for nothing? There were meetings of Labor Party insiders, including Wong, Carmen Lawrence, Lindsay Tanner, John Cain and ACTU head Sharan Burrow, at which everyone agonised over, as one participant put it, ‘where in the fuck do we go from here?’

  In the meantime, Wong made the most of her frontbench position. Her corporate governance portfolio meant she was at the forefront of Labor’s campaign against James Hardie, the asbestos manufacturer, and its meagre compensation for asbestosis and mesothelioma victims. On Senate committees she attacked the Australian Securities and Investment Commission’s decision not to prosecute Steve Vizard, the Telstra director accused of insider trading. Meanwhile, she was taking every opportunity to talk to the media. Olenich remembers a punishing routine: he would rise at four in the morning, collect the papers from a service station on the way to work and try to spot opportunities in the day’s headlines for Penny to make a statement, then write briefing notes for her to read as soon as she arrived at the office. When parliament was sitting, she began to do what is known in the bizarre world of Canberra media as
‘the doors’, the heavily stage-managed ritual in which a politician wanting to get media pretends to be walking into Parliament House so they can be approached by journalists gathered for the purpose. Penny Wong was now a comfortable performer, adept with the one-liner and confident in handling questions.

  Employment and workforce participation were at the centre of national debate. The government’s Welfare to Work program increased the number of people required to look for and accept work, and targeted parents caring for young children, people with disabilities, older jobseekers and the long-term unemployed. Welfare became conditional on the idea of mutual obligation: jobseekers were expected to work for the dole, do voluntary work or undertake training, education or an apprenticeship. Elements of the policy, particularly Work for the Dole, had been in place for years, but the 2005 federal budget changed parenting payments so that single parents with children older than eight were no longer eligible for the parenting payment, and restricted new claims for disability support.17 WorkChoices, meanwhile, was to remove unfair-dismissal laws for companies below a certain size, curtail the right to strike, and privilege individual workplace agreements over union collective bargaining.

  Wong and Olenich together agreed on an angle of attack. Howard’s message – that welfare should come with a requirement to seek employment – was electorally appealing. They decided not to combat it directly but rather to question whether jobseekers were receiving the support they needed to get off welfare. Olenich recalls: ‘At that point, the labour market was very tight – many of those that were on income support had been for a long time, and it was clear that existing interventions weren’t really working. Genuine investment in capacity was needed. All our work with the sector and all the research showed – as does common sense – that it was not enough to make people look for a job, they needed to have the skills those jobs demanded.’

  The day after the 2005 budget, Wong ‘did the doors’ and told the media that 1.4 million welfare recipients would have to fight for 136,000 training and support places, and that only one in seven parents about to be subjected to welfare cuts would have access to support to find a job. ‘What this shows is the government is not interested in training and support. What it’s interested in is moving people from one welfare payment to a lower welfare payment. This package is not about welfare to work, it’s about welfare cuts,’ she said.

  She kept hammering the themes in regular media releases – sometimes several in a week – throughout 2005 and 2006. Olenich recalls that, in accordance with protocol, he would ring Beazley’s office when Penny was ‘doing the doors’ to get the agreed talking points for the day. At first he got a puzzled response. Why was Penny doing all this? What were they up to? Olenich’s reply was that nobody from the Labor Senate team was taking the battle up to Howard directly in the media.

  Increasingly, this became recognised as Penny’s role. She discussed the finer points of what had emerged in the often long and underreported wrangling before Senate Estimates, distilling it into soundbites: that parents would be forced to take a job even if the effective return was only $25 a week; that the government had deemed homeless people not ‘exceptionally vulnerable’ and would therefore deny them income support if they were penalised for non-compliance with jobseeking tests.18

  In late 2006 she gave a speech at her alma mater, the University of Adelaide, on the topic of values and politics. She used it to bring her by now well-worn rhetoric on racism together with a condemnation of Howard’s workforce policies and the idea of mutual obligation in welfare. She attacked Howard for his response to race riots at Cronulla in Sydney in 2005. Howard had said he didn’t like ‘hyphenated Australians’; in this, she said, he had once again set citizens against one another:

  A hyphenated Australian, presumably being someone who might describe themselves as a Greek-Australian or a Chinese-Australian, or in this context presumably a Lebanese-or Muslim-Australian, is cast in contrast to an ‘Australian’. Just what a non-hyphenated Australian is, is not articulated. But it doesn’t need to be in order for this statement to serve its political purpose. The assumption that most of us would immediately make, and the context of the racial conflict that drove the Cronulla riots, is that the non-hyphenated Australian is the white Australian. And that this is the type of Australian that the prime minister likes.

  She acknowledged the concerns that Howard was speaking to – the fears of difference: ‘We are more connected to the world, and we feel more exposed.’ Unity, she said, did not come from sameness but from ‘a sense of belonging – of being part of a greater whole … and unity can encompass difference’. There was an agreed framework of values within which diversity could be embraced. The debate should be about the elements of that framework.

  Howard speaks of the spirit of a fair go, while putting in place industrial relations laws that strip away rights and remove conditions. He speaks of compassion for those in need while cutting the incomes of some of the most vulnerable Australian families by pushing many people with a disability and sole parents onto the dole. He speaks of tolerance, then attacks hyphenated Australians. His hypocrisy is breathtaking.

  Australian values are not the possession of any politician. They are not held under lock and key in the prime minister’s office. They are the heart of our nation. They are the unwritten rules that ordinary Australians live by. They speak to the New World’s passion for democracy and justice; they acknowledge the lessons of our past. When a politician talks to you about values, ask them not to express their values in words but in their actions. Better still, ask them to express your values in the decisions they make every day in your name.19

  The culmination of Penny Wong’s work on welfare policy was a discussion paper, released in November 2006. Titled Reward for Effort: Meeting the Participation Challenge, it was classic Wong: both careful and clever in its politics. The aim, Olenich recalls, was to ‘move the ball forward, but be very, very cautious about it’. The risk was that Labor would be seen as reckless – as a friend of so-called welfare cheats.

  The paper opened with an acceptance of the principle that ‘people should work if they can’ and adopted the government mantra that the best form of welfare was a job. Labor wanted to ‘bring obligation and opportunity together’, it was stated, ‘Participation is good for people … People need to feel that they are contributing, like they are helping others and that they can rely on themselves and their loved ones to get through life. Work is one of those essential things, like family, that gives meaning to our lives.’ The argument then zeroed in on what Wong had detected as the weakness in the Howard government package – the measures designed to increase workforce participation. The chapters that followed included an analysis of the Australian labour market, accusing the government of failing to invest in developing the skills of the workforce, and of the jobless in particular. The paper analysed the impact of the policy changes on those who found work but went backwards in terms of total income. At ninety-six pages, it was detailed and wonkish, but delivered with a powerful spin and a saleable political message. Wong told the media upon its release that her focus was on ‘making better use of mutual obligation’.20 Labor committed to redefining mutual obligation so it would include capacity building, education and training. Labor would invest in that.

  The reception for this detailed policy work was muted, because the media were distracted by yet another leadership convulsion in the Australian Labor Party. Just ten days after Reward for Effort was released, Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard challenged Kim Beazley and Jenny Macklin for the leadership and deputy leadership. Gillard had become convinced that Beazley could not beat Howard and, recognising that she didn’t have enough support to contest the leadership herself, had thrown in her lot with Rudd, mounting the challenge as his deputy. ‘I worried that the fire to succeed was not burning strongly enough in [Beazley],’ she wrote in her memoir. ‘My fear was that in the final ballot-box judgement of Australians, Kim would not be chosen.’ Rudd, she
judged, would be the ‘embodiment of safe change’ and thus acceptable to the Australian people. With the wisdom of hindsight, she asked, ‘Was I wrong in my judgement of Kim Beazley in 2006? I fear I may have been.’21

  In this contest, Wong was one of Beazley and Macklin’s most vocal supporters. Macklin, especially, had been a mentor and, as an ‘encyclopaedia of knowledge’ on welfare policies, had helped her in those first days in her shadow portfolios. Today, Wong describes Macklin as one of the party’s best policy thinkers. It was to her, more than Beazley, that Wong felt personal loyalty. Macklin had no leadership ambitions, so she and Beazley represented a safe team. Meanwhile, she barely knew Kevin Rudd. She regarded him as a risk. Gillard had persuaded her to back Latham as the exciting and untested candidate in 2003 – a decision everyone involved now bitterly regretted. Wong was determined not to make a similar mistake.

  An atmosphere of dread prevailed in Wong’s office over the weekend preceding the leadership spill as it became clear that Rudd and Gillard had the numbers. On Monday 4 December, Rudd won against Beazley by forty-nine votes to thirty-nine. Macklin withdrew, allowing Julia Gillard to be elected deputy leader unopposed. For some days, Wong was unsure whether she would be punished. She was mentioned in a media report of the first Rudd press conference as ‘glumly observing the new regime’ from the sidelines.22

  Several credit John Faulkner with persuading Kevin Rudd to keep Penny Wong on the frontbench. An insider says that Faulkner ‘explained to Rudd, who didn’t have the foggiest idea of how the Senate worked, that we needed to keep on Penny … That she was one of the heavy hitters, and we needed that, particularly with Howard trying to get all this contentious legislation through.’ A full week after the spill, it was confirmed that Penny Wong would not only retain her two existing portfolios, but would acquire another – public administration and accountability.