Penny Wong

by Simons, Margaret;

  I had met Sophie Allouache in the foyer of Penny Wong’s office. She shook my hand and, when asked, confirmed emphatically what Penny had already told me – that she was not prepared to be interviewed for this book. I had also seen Penny and Sophie’s youngest daughter, Hannah, on a day when the family juggle meant she was being cared for in the office for a few hours. Penny was reading her a picture book when I arrived.

  Sophie Allouache, Wong has said, is ‘the calmest and most grounded person I know’.5 They met in late 2006, were separated for a while when Sophie travelled, and became a couple in 2007. Their relationship was formed with foreknowledge of the impending burden of government. ‘Poor Sophie,’ sighed Wong.

  Allouache, seven years younger than Wong, has a French father and an English mother. Like Wong, she was involved in student politics at the University of Adelaide – part of the next generation of campaigners against the abolition of compulsory student unionism. She was women’s officer in 1997 and Students’ Association president the year after that. Wong remarks, ‘She is not at all a public person, so it’s strange in one way she was Students’ Association president. But she says she liked the work.’ Allouache graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in 2000, worked as a volunteer coordinator with women’s services in South Australia and then managed a women’s information and referral service. At the beginning of 2009 she joined the South Australian Department of Health and worked on Aboriginal early childhood health projects. Today she works part-time in the Department of Human Services and is the main carer for their children.

  Penny Wong’s friends say that her family is crucial to her. It keeps her sane and grounds her. She protects them from public scrutiny for their sake, but also for her own. These relationships are a retreat from public life. Hence the staunch refusal to allow any interviews with Allouache. ‘That’s not going to happen,’ said Wong when I first asked. As a result, Sophie Allouache remains an enigma. She is also a pioneer, in her way. When Penny Wong went to Government House in 2007 to be sworn in as a minister, Allouache was there – the first time a same-sex partner had been in that position. Her story, too, has become in part a political issue. But Allouache does not want a public life, and Wong is happy for it to remain that way.

  *

  Today, Penny Wong agrees that it was a mistake for her to have been given both the portfolios of water and climate change. Either alone would have been challenging; managing both as well as she wanted to was a near-impossible task. Both involved policy problems with lots of costs, no easy solutions and many traps. Like the battle over the forests in her early career, the issues were environmental but also economic, and enmeshed in ideology and identity. Her big promotion from junior shadow minister to such high-profile, key portfolios was evidence of Rudd’s regard for her ability. She had been, with John Faulkner and Robert Ray, part of the team preparing for government while Rudd focused on campaigning. She had impressed. But Wong, only thirty-nine and in parliament for five years, was also lacking the clout to insist on the support of her fellow cabinet ministers, or to sway cabinet on her own. She had never been a minister.6

  Rudd had announced during the campaign that he would choose his own ministry rather than heeding the Labor tradition of selection by caucus, in which ministers were effectively chosen by the factions.7 The fact that he loaded Wong up with two such difficult portfolios is, in hindsight, perhaps further evidence of his well-documented shortcomings as a manager of government business and of people. Of course, he intended to be closely involved himself, particularly with climate change – the defining issue of the election campaign.

  Wong says that she pushed back against Rudd’s urging that she take both portfolios. She thinks now that she should have pushed back harder. But she is also nothing if not ambitious. Her friends say she never runs from responsibility. Rather, she is only too ready to step forward and take it on.

  Climate change was to become central to the government’s trajectory and to Rudd’s fate. It was a drawn-out agony – strong evidence for Kelly’s assertion that Rudd crumbled in government.

  And then there was water. In 2007, as in 2019, the most pressing issue was the health of the nation’s food bowl – the Murray–Darling Basin.

  In 2018, the Murray–Darling Basin Royal Commission was set up in Penny Wong’s home state of South Australia. It reported in early 2019, during the period in which Wong was being interviewed for this book. The appointed commissioner, Bret Walker SC, wrote in his report that the ten years from 2008 had been a time of ‘outstanding idealism and … egregious shortcomings’, with the health of the river system now desperately bad. It was a record, he said, that could only leave a sour taste. In this assessment he excoriated the Abbott government, but also the period when Labor was in government.8

  Meanwhile, since Wong held the ministry it has become clear that water is most likely being stolen by irrigators in upstream states, with regulators apparently compliant or uncaring. There are inquiries into allegations in three states and at Commonwealth level, as well as prosecution proceedings in New South Wales and Queensland.9 The evidence before the South Australian royal commission included claims of state government corruption, systemic problems with regulatory authorities and a collapse of public confidence in the system.

  In 2007, in the tenth year of what became known as the Millennium Drought, the visible crisis in the Murray–Darling Basin was due to the condition of the wetlands of the Coorong and the complex of lower lakes where the river reaches the sea. The mouth of the Murray had silted over. The soils were acidifying; the Coorong was increasingly saline. In May 2008 an expert scientific panel stated that the Murray’s southern reaches were almost beyond recovery, with wetlands dried up and native fish populations wiped out. Similar problems were occurring right along the river system, but the publicity to which Penny Wong was forced to respond in her home state concerned the Lower Lakes. The only way to save the Lower Murray was to reduce water use by farmers – but that would bring ruin to rural communities. Wong was reported to be taking expert advice. She resisted releasing it. The media speculated that this was because the news was too bad to be easily digested.10 She later told a Senate committee that the advice revealed there were ‘no easy options, only hard choices … there is simply not enough water in the system to do everything we want and my view is that … we have to give priority to Adelaide’s water supply and that of other towns which rely on the river.’11

  In August the following year, she was booed by protesters at a demonstration at Goolwa, the South Australian town at the mouth of the Murray, because she had declined an invitation to speak. The demonstration observed a two-minute silence for a river system that was dying. Senators Nick Xenophon and Sarah Hanson-Young criticised Wong for claiming that no extra water could be found upstream to save the lakes. ‘I say, Penny, “Look harder,”’ said Xenophon.12 Easy to say.

  The crisis in the Lower Lakes was, in Penny Wong’s first year as the minister for water, as visible, divisive and urgent as the Darling River fish kills in 2019. So what did Penny Wong do about the state of the Murray–Darling Basin?

  *

  Water connects people. Rivers are often referred to as arteries. The metaphor is a cliché, yet exactly right for the Murray–Darling. The first settlers thought Australia must have an inland sea because all the rivers ran towards the centre. Instead, they found this water system. As Europeans pushed inland, it became a means of transport. On the eve of Federation, irrigation began. Since then, the Murray–Darling system has been a lifeline and a drain, with capillaries running to and fro, carrying water to crops, cities and gardens, and discharging wastes to the sea. It makes a large part of Australian life possible.

  More than this, in the lexicon of the imagination on which nations are built, the basin’s rivers carry myths and meaning. They connect the Dreaming stories of the first human occupants. Most of the indigenous peoples who lived in the Murray–Darling Basin shared the story of the great Murray cod – ponde in the
language of the Lower Murray – that carved the river’s course before being speared by Ngurunderi in the Lower Lakes.

  The European myths are also powerful – archetypal, even. European settlers dreamed of gardens in the wilderness, and growing fruit in the desert. It was these dreams that led to astonishing changes to the landscape, and the dominance of the irrigation engineer. Today the Murray–Darling system is not only a collection of rivers. Rather, it is one of the most heavily plumbed river basins in the world.13 The Murray–Darling Basin Authority has schematic maps of the system that show it as pipes, with weirs and storages and taps that enable the precise management of water flowing along the river. For decades the engineers were heroes – creators of the gardens in the desert.

  Water not only connects. In Australia it also divides. Under the agreements made at Federation, the power to manage the Murray River belongs with the states through which it flows. South Australia is at the end of a long, dysfunctional chain of cause-and-effect over which it has hardly any control, yet Adelaide depends on the Murray for more than half its water supply. The federal government has authority only as the states agree to give it. When it comes to the Murray–Darling, all the federal government has to negotiate with is moral suasion, a chequebook and a limited amount of power flowing from constitutional obligations to enforce international environmental treaties.

  The crises that Penny Wong faced on assuming the portfolio had a long history.

  In the 1980s, with Labor governments in power federally and in South Australia, New South Wales and Victoria, the basin states met to formalise what became the Murray–Darling Basin Agreement, which established an intergovernmental structure with a ministerial council drawn from each state to manage the use of water from the basin. It was already clear that the volume of water being taken from the system was unsustainable, but little progress was made towards addressing this.

  History shows that progress towards better management systems for the river happens only when there is a visible crisis. In the early 1990s, a blue-green algal bloom infected more than 1000 kilometres of the river system. The shock of the river turning toxic made clear to everyone that the water in it had been drastically over-allocated. A few years later, in 1995, a cap was put on water extractions, although it was often honoured in the breach, and was constantly disputed between the states.

  Then came the Millennium Drought. Inflows to the river system were at record lows – less than half of the previous record low. The stress on the river was obvious, and water allocations were cut. In September 2004, the Howard government began a program that allowed for a formal return of water to the river system for environmental purposes. New legislation, the Water Act 2007 (Cth), was passed by federal parliament with bipartisan support. The Act relied for its constitutional validity on the Commonwealth government’s powers to ensure compliance with international environmental treaties. For the first time, legislation governing Australia’s largest river system rested on environmental outcomes, not on social or economic grounds. The Howard government created a new body, the Murray–Darling Basin Authority, to oversee water resource planning, and created a Commonwealth Environmental Water Holder to manage this vital resource for the environment.

  Commissioner Bret Walker later described the Water Act as a ‘pivot’ in the history of the river. He proclaimed his ‘admiring praise’ for the Act, together with his pessimism about whether its objects and purposes – which are to enable the sustainable management of the river system in the national interest, while protecting the environment – would ever be achieved.14 In its dying days, the Howard government – with Malcolm Turnbull as the minister for the environment and water resources – tried to quicken the pace of reform against intransigence from the states. Despite the new legislation, they were dragging the chain on undertaking the necessary reforms and the work to give it effect.

  Enter Penny Wong.

  By the time the Rudd government came to power, the gum trees along the sides of the river were dying. Water allocations had been cut across the basin states; there were fears that the big cities would run out of drinking water. Desalination plants were planned by state governments. Meanwhile, in the basin, cotton production fell away entirely, and Australia began to import most of its rice.

  When Penny Wong said that there simply wasn’t enough water in the system, this was the hard reality. It wasn’t an easy political message to deliver. She says today that she always assumed the Millennium Drought was not just a drought – that, thanks to climate change, there would be even less water in the years ahead. She had holidayed to Goolwa, on the Coorong, during university camping trips. She had seen firsthand the impact of increased salinity and reduced water flows. ‘I brought a South Australian perspective to the issue,’ she says. Her top priority, she maintains, was to simply buy water for the environment – spending federal money on purchasing entitlements from willing sellers and sending the water downstream.

  The main way the purposes of the Water Act were to be achieved – and the immediate task of the Murray–Darling Basin Authority – was to use the best available science (a legal requirement) to develop a whole-of-basin plan incorporating every aquifer and irrigation channel across the basin. It was to be the first ever comprehensive audit of the basin, and it was meant to lead to an understanding of how much water could be taken on a sustainable basis. It was a massive research undertaking, with huge economic implications. The plan was to set a sustainable diversion limit of water that could be taken for agriculture and other human needs. Clearly, there would be reductions in water allocation. Livelihoods would be affected, futures compromised and townships hit. As Wong knew, there were no easy answers. Throughout her period as minister, the research work leading to compilation of the plan bubbled away, a potent but sleeping political issue – keenly appreciated in rural basin communities but largely neglected and not understood by city-based media and many politicians. The draft Murray–Darling Basin Plan was due to be released in 2010.

  There was a fair degree of bipartisanship between Labor and the previous government on water policy, although neither side would admit it. John Howard had set aside $10 billion to address the over-allocation of water. The main policy difference Labor took to the election was the addition of a national urban water and desalination program, with subsidies and incentives for rainwater collection and the use of greywater. More controversially, Labor also promised to bring forward $400 million of the $10 billion to start buying back Murray–Darling basin water.15

  The bureaucrats who worked on the Howard government program remember two things about the transition to power. First, there was a comprehensive review of the Howard government program for implementing the Water Act. This review was run from inside Rudd’s office by Terry Moran, secretary of the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet. The perception among many of the public service workers involved was that Moran had reservations about the idea of the Commonwealth getting involved in water. Only after the review was complete could Penny Wong announce her program. It largely adopted the Howard agenda, but brought forward water buybacks, and added money for urban stormwater programs. Inevitably, there was a change of name. The Howard government’s Living Murray program became, under Labor, Water for the Future.

  Second, even before agreement had been reached with the states, Wong prioritised the buying back of water for the environment. This had always been part of the plan, but under Wong it got a giant push. In February 2008 she put $50 million on the table to purchase water in the Murray–Darling basin. ‘It is the first time in the nation’s history that the Commonwealth government has directly purchased water, so we’re not waiting for agreement from the states to make that water purchase, because we understand the river needs it,’ she said at the time.16

  ‘The message was “Get on and do it,”’ remembers one senior bureaucrat. ‘“Don’t wait. Just do it.” It was the main difference between the governments, that sense of urgency about it.’

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sp; Penny Wong says that the water portfolio quickly taught her new priorities. The policy was complicated and the politics almost impossible to manage, but there were also problems with implementation. She was not well prepared, as a first-time minister, to deal with this. ‘Politicians tend to assume that the challenges are all to do with politics and policy. They tend to miss the third – implementation – because they are not trained for it. I sort of assumed that the public service would just get on and do things,’ she says. In charge of the new, high-profile portfolio of climate change, she was working with some of the best bureaucrats in the system, who flocked to help achieve progress in this area of vital importance. But, Wong says, in the Department of the Environment, Water, Heritage and the Arts (today part of the Department of Environment and Energy), years of neglect by the Howard government had left ‘good people’ in need of greater ministerial guidance. She fell into the habit of sending back briefing notes with extensive annotations and holding meetings with water bureaucrats at ‘the next level down’ to guarantee the implementation of policy in ways she had not expected would be necessary.

  Unsurprisingly, the bureaucrats who were there at the time remember it differently. Penny Wong brought in a new secretary, Robyn Kruk, in 2009, but the staff below Kruk were left largely unchanged – although some individuals were made aware that Wong was trying to get rid of them. Today these people nevertheless describe Wong as having been a good minister. ‘But she could be very cutting,’ says one.

  Meanwhile, the architecture of the Water Act was in place but the states had yet to agree to refer their authority over water allocation to the Commonwealth. Howard had written to all state and territory leaders in January 2007, asking them to cooperate with a new system of management devised by the Commonwealth. New South Wales, Queensland and South Australia indicated they would comply, but Victoria refused, insisting that the state should not be worse off under any deal. Wong says today she was keenly aware of her lack of power – yet the Murray–Darling Basin Plan would come to nothing unless she could get the states on board. It was another example of her needing to persuade when she lacked the power to compel.