Penny Wong

by Simons, Margaret;

  It was a portfolio in search of a definition, but for that reason filled with opportunity.

  But first came an indication of what life under the new leadership regime would be like. Just before Christmas, utterly exhausted by a difficult year, Penny Wong and her staff were attending the wedding of a colleague in Vietnam. Rudd called. The holiday, Wong told her staff, would have to be interrupted. Rudd wanted policy papers on each of their portfolios within twenty-four hours. There was no question of pushing back. She and her staff took to their hotel rooms and wrote the papers over a frantic, sleepless twelve hours. So far as they know, Rudd never read the results.

  *

  On their return to Australia, Wong and Olenich sat down to plan her approach to the new job. It was, as Olenich remembers, a ‘wet-cement moment – an election year’. With the hard work on workforce and welfare policy already done, the new portfolio allowed Wong to range far and wide, needling the Howard government.

  From early 2007 until the election campaign began in October, Penny Wong hammered the government on ministerial accountability as a series of minor scandals engulfed Howard’s frontbench. She and Rudd zeroed in on the amount of taxpayer money being spent on advertising in this election year and promised that Labor would introduce new rules to stop the rorting.23 She ‘did the doors’ to embarrass Centrelink over the case of Matthew Pearce, a young leukaemia sufferer who had been denied the disability support pension. Wong and the man’s local member, Kim Wilkie, launched a petition to support him, forcing the government to back down. This was the face of Howard’s ‘extreme welfare measures’ and gave the lie to the claim it looked after ‘the battlers’, said Wong.24

  As the election approached, she dabbled in populism. In May 2007 she issued a media release asking why John Howard’s office had spent almost $200,000 on ‘posh chairs’ for cabinet. Attached to the media release were extracts from the Officeworks catalogue, showing much cheaper chairs. ‘It would have been a lot quicker and cheaper if the PM’s staff hired a ute and drove down to Officeworks in Fyshwick or Braddon,’ the release said. The chairs, like their occupants, had ‘passed their use-by date’, but in the meantime ‘the Byron High Back leather chair with one-touch gas-lift height adjustment is a good choice at $99 a pop’.25

  The next day, doing the doors, Wong described Howard as ‘Lord of the ads’, saying that his pre-election advertising was ‘the biggest epic since Lord of the Rings’.26 Two days later she shifted genres, using the thirtieth anniversary of the first Star Wars movie to attack Howard’s taxpayer-funded election advertising: ‘George Lucas’ efforts have been dwarfed by John Howard’s taxpayer-funded re-election advertising epic. A key difference is that people can choose whether they want to watch Star Wars.’27

  The next month she was attacking assistant treasurer Peter Dutton for spending more than $10,000 a day on a trip to the United States. ‘Peter Dutton seems to be more interested in living the life of a supermodel than getting results for working Australians,’ she said. ‘Who does he think he is? Linda Evangelista?’ The comment made front-page headlines.28

  But by far her most successful media hit was what jokingly became known as the cash-for-canapés affair. Penny Wong’s office was combing through the costs to taxpayers of Howard’s decision to live at Kirribilli House, rather than at the Lodge in Canberra. They found out that in June 2007 he had used Kirribilli as the venue for a Liberal Party fundraiser. Attendees had paid more than $8000 each, and there had been no charge to the Liberal Party for the venue. Howard claimed that the food had been paid for by the party. Wong went through the figures. The cost of food had been just $9.46 a head. In the Senate, she ridiculed this. ‘You would struggle to pay less at your local pub for a fisherman’s basket and a pint of beer.’29

  Meanwhile, in the House of Representatives, Anthony Albanese asserted, ‘The only way that the food at Kirribilli could have cost $9.46 a head was if guests leaned over the fence … and fished it directly out of Sydney Harbour.’30

  It was the kind of story that seized the popular imagination, and it ran and ran through the weeks ahead. Penny Wong, policy nerd, had emerged as one of the opposition’s most successful attack dogs, able to translate dry work on the figures into political hits.

  A few weeks later, it was announced that Penny Wong would be the spokesperson for the 2007 Labor election campaign. Any suggestion that she might be sidelined for supporting Beazley had long since been forgotten. The media reported that the ‘popular and eloquent South Australian senator’ had become a key member of ‘Team Rudd’.31

  Wong remembers taking the call from Tim Gartrell, the Labor Party national secretary, in which he suggested she should take on the role. As usual, she was nervous about prejudice and its effect on Labor’s prospects. She recalls, ‘So Gartrell rings me, and says he was wondering if I would be campaign spokesperson. And I said, “But Tim, I’m an Asian lesbian. How will that play?” He laughed and said, “You have no idea how much we need that demographic.”’

  It was a ‘huge jump’ in responsibility. Today she credits Gartrell for giving her the opportunity that propelled her onto the frontbench in a Labor government.

  She spent most of the campaign in the Sydney office. The day would begin early, with strategy meetings, after which she would do morning radio, pressing whatever had been decided as the message of the day. Her secondary role was to ‘take the poison, to do the difficult things … to protect the leader and allow him to stay on message’. If there was a delicate issue or a negative story, she would try to get out and deal with it before Rudd’s first media encounter of the day.

  Wong was chosen by the ABC’s Mark Colvin to represent Labor in a regular weekly spot on the Radio National PM program, debating policy against Liberal Marise Payne. She appeared on Insiders – not in the fifty-second ‘Adjournment Debate’ segment but as the main event, in an interview with the presenter, Barrie Cassidy.32 The Wong who emerges from these transcripts is more accomplished than the wooden, nerdish media performer of early appearances. She laughs, she pivots, she skewers. She would never be, as one of her colleagues put it, ‘warm and cuddly’. Hers was a different kind of charisma. But Penny Wong, as an attack dog and a spokesperson for the campaign, was dangerous to the government and a tonic for Labor.

  Wong says it was from this campaign, and from working closely with Gartrell, that she learned about political framing and came to understand that winning elections was not, whatever she might wish, about rational debate, but rather about ‘which frame wins … which understanding of the issues wins’. She also learned a vital lesson. It was not enough to hate what Howard was doing to the country in order to beat him. Hate had to be set to one side. ‘It’s a characteristic of Left politics that we think our emotional response to an issue or a person is enough, and it’s not. It really isn’t. So I learned that you have to take people with you. Just because you really hate patriarchy, it’s not going to make patriarchy go away.’

  In the decade since Howard had come to power, ‘we had fought him with all of the emotional energy associated with our view. We had fought him out of hatred of what he was doing to the country and what he was doing to race politics in Australia … and what we had to realise was that we were not going to get others to think like that. We had to find another way to get them to not vote for him. And WorkChoices was critical because it broke the idea of the Howard battlers. We were able to frame him with it, saying that he wasn’t really on the battlers’ side after all.’

  Rudd came to power thanks to an effective alliance between between Labor and the trades unions, fighting against WorkChoices. Rudd presented himself as a safe change – a ‘fiscal conservative’, his main points of difference from Howard being opposition to WorkChoices and a commitment to action on climate change.33 On both issues, Labor was able to frame Howard as out of touch. Rudd described Howard as running a government ‘full of climate-change sceptics’ and followed up by continuously rolling out initiatives to address climate chang
e, in the midst of a nationwide drought that helped drive the issue to the forefront of public concern.

  Penny Wong’s most prominent public role was at the wonkish end of policy – a continuing assault on government accountability and waste. With the shadow minister for finance, Lindsay Tanner, she announced commitments to cut ministerial staff numbers by 30 per cent, to reduce spending on media monitoring, and to reduce ‘abuse of government advertising’ by requiring that all advertising campaigns over $250,000 be vetted by the auditor-general or their delegate.34 She appealed to the Westminster traditions of public service independence and neutrality. If elected, she said, Labor would not purge the senior ranks of the public service, and would adopt a code of conduct to reinforce the principle of ministerial responsibility – which, she argued, had been compromised under the Coalition.35

  As campaign spokesperson, she dealt with the dirty stuff – such as tangling with the Liberals’ Andrew Robb over fake documents distributed in the seat of Lindsay, asserting that Muslims wanted people to vote for Labor. She accused senior Liberals of being involved, and called on Howard to ‘front up and disclose all that he knows and all that the Liberal Party knew about this scandalous affair’.36

  Meanwhile, behind the scenes, she was part of the preparation for government. This was quiet work. The polls gave them every hope of success, but they were careful to keep it low-key, aware of the risks of hubris.

  Labor mounted an effective election campaign in 2007, Penny Wong contends, because after fighting the prime minister in successive elections ‘with all our disgust, all our passion, all our hatred for what he was doing to the country’, in 2007 ‘we stopped trying to make people hate Howard. That was important. People were not going to follow us into that.’ Instead, ‘we framed him as WorkChoices, we framed him as at the end of his tether.’ This she learned from Gartrell. It was a lesson of lasting importance.

  Gartrell, says Wong, was an amazingly good campaigner. When the referendum for marriage equality began in 2017, he was ‘the obvious person to run it’. She realised that either same-sex marriage could be framed as a departure from tradition, contrary to how most Australians lived, or it could be framed as about love and commitment. ‘I learned that, the importance of framing, from him. It was a very important lesson.’

  On election day, 24 November 2007, Labor won in a landslide. The following Monday, The Advertiser predicted that Penny Wong was about to become South Australia’s most powerful political figure.

  The portfolios were announced at the end of that week. Penny Wong was to be the minister for climate change and water. It was not an area in which she had had any previous involvement, other than as part of shadow cabinet. As one of her first duties she was to accompany Rudd to Bali, where Australia would at long last sign the Kyoto Protocol on climate change. It was an enormous promotion, and a hugely challenging set of portfolios.

  The story of Penny Wong’s elevation was again international news. Sabah’s chief minister told his citizens that her appointment was a great honour for their state. All Malaysians should aspire to be as successful as Penny Wong.37 The British Daily Telegraph’s first paragraph proclaimed that ‘a former rock star and a lesbian barrister’ were among the ministers of the new Australian government.38 The ‘rock star’ was, of course, Peter Garrett, formerly of Midnight Oil, who had been recruited by Mark Latham in 2004. The more serious journalists noted that Garrett had been given the environment portfolio but not climate change. Other media noted that Penny Wong was the first ethnic Chinese, and the first lesbian, to be a cabinet minister.

  Journalist Annabel Crabb penned a ditty about the new cabinet:

  The Ruddbot, from the captain’s deck, proclaimed his final crew:

  There’s Gillard who’s so good at jobs she took not one but two!

  And Garrett (who when told the news was sure he’d heard it wrong:

  He’d kept the name but lost the game to canny Penny Wong).39

  Political commentator Mungo MacCallum described Penny Wong as a symbol of fundamental change in Australian politics. ‘A year ago, did you imagine that the Prime Minister would be sending an openly gay woman of Chinese ancestry to Bali, to ratify the Kyoto Protocol on Australia’s behalf?’40

  Just five years before, Wong had been one of the most junior members of the Labor Party in parliament – highly intelligent, yet sometimes a stiff media performer, always on the alert for moves to demean her, always vigilant for victimisation and prejudice. Now she was carrying two of the most important and challenging portfolios in the new government, loaded with all the symbolic baggage and expectation that her difference – female, lesbian and Asian – brought with it.

  In the new year, The Advertiser ran a profile of her headlined ‘Minister for saving the world’. The lede read, ‘Political powerhouse Penny Wong has had an incredible rise – but can she save the world?’41 The answer, of course, was no.

  9

  PENNY WONG FAILS TO SAVE THE WORLD (PART 1: WATER)

  The fifth interview with Penny Wong for this book took place at her Adelaide electorate office in early March 2019. It was a little more than two months before the federal election, which was expected to bring Labor to power and restore Wong, as leader of the government in the Senate, to the position of third-most-senior politician in the land. So it was fitting to speak about 2007, the previous time that Labor was preparing to form government. Like today, the country was in the grip of a punishing drought. The Murray– Darling Basin was in crisis, with millions of native fish dying from lack of oxygen in polluted, saline water weeks before our interview. Like today, action on climate change was an important, potentially defining, political issue.

  Penny Wong was twelve years older. There were lines around her eyes, and her hair, black in 2007, had turned pepper-and-salt. She was a mother. She was also a veteran of the long, sad farce of the Rudd–Gillard leadership battles and all the disappointed dreams.

  The Rudd and Gillard governments have been characterised by journalist and historian Paul Kelly as over-promising and under-delivering – as offering the lesson that Australia’s political system is failing to deliver the results the nation needs. They are, he suggests, an exemplar of the dilemma in Western democracies: the political decision-makers’ inability to address the problems of their nations. The causes of this, he says, are deep-seated and of longstanding: ‘The business of politics is … decoupled from the interests of Australia and its citizens.’ There is a malaise in political decision-making, he says. Reform is nit-picked by the media and attacked by oppositions. An inability to build consensus has eroded the capacity for change. The political dialogue is debased: ‘A country that cannot recognise its problems is far from finding a solution.’1 His judgement on Labor in government is harsh. In saying it under-delivered, he puts to one side, perhaps too easily, the reforms and initiatives – disability insurance, school funding, demand-driven higher education, the apology to the Stolen Generations, the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, a contribution to international action on climate change, the legislation that established the Murray–Darling Basin Plan and putting a price on carbon. The latter came late, which made it relatively easy for the Abbott government to dismantle it. But Kelly’s judgement is also surely correct in its thrust. The political scientist Rod Tiffen distils this history: ‘Any policy achievements of the Rudd–Gillard governments pale before the political carnage they inflicted on themselves.’2

  Writes Kelly, ‘The Rudd–Gillard–Rudd era saw Labor buckle in government … Neither of its prime ministers nor Labor as an institution was able to hold the line and assert sustained policy authority over a period of years.’3 That conclusion is hard to argue with, and in that story Penny Wong was an actor.

  Wong was a cabinet minister. She can’t be absolved of her share of responsibility for the government’s failures. Nor is she entirely to blame. The problems she dealt with had deep and tangled historical roots. There was the long, dra
wn-out farce of a dysfunctional cabinet. There was the Liberal Party’s hard turn to the right. There was the Greens, not prepared to give Labor an even break. Indeed, ‘the counterfactual’, as she would put it, suggests some things might have been worse if she hadn’t been there, and others might have been better if her advice had been heeded at key points.

  In previous interviews I had asked Penny Wong about the machinations between Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard. She said that she had read or seen only sparingly the many books and documentaries about those years – the ones by journalists, the memoirs of Kevin Rudd, Julia Gillard, Wayne Swan, Greg Combet, Peter Garrett, Bob Carr and the rest.4 It was too painful. She couldn’t bear it. She said she is the kind of person who tends to look forward, rather than back. I remarked that this is a characteristic of an activist, and she liked that.

  I asked her what, given her fierce protection of her family’s privacy, it would be possible to say in this book about her present partner, Sophie Allouache. She bridled. ‘Well, she’s lovely,’ she said, as though that closed the topic. Then: ‘We’ve been together for twelve years. We have two children and a mortgage. What more do people need to know?’

  So how did she meet Sophie?

  ‘I’m not going to go there,’ she said.

  Not even in general terms? Through mutual friends? Online?

  ‘Oh no, not online. Nothing like that.’ She relented. ‘Well, we both did a lot of yoga.’ And then she laughed. ‘Is that a lesbian thing to say?’