The Murray–Darling Basin Royal Commission found that the Basin Plan adopted by Labor was likely in breach of the Water Act because it employed a ‘triple bottom line’ approach – putting social and economic concerns on an equal basis with protecting the environment when deciding how much water could be taken from the river. The royal commission had been opposed by the federal government, and current and former Murray–Darling Basin Authority and CSIRO staff had been prevented from giving evidence. Burke, too, left it until just weeks before Bret Walker reported to write a letter defending himself, when it was clear that the finding might be made that he had acted illegally.
Penny Wong was still in cabinet, though no longer in this portfolio, while all this went on. So what did she think of these events?
Consistent with her pledge not to reveal cabinet discussions or criticise Labor colleagues during these interviews, she refuses to respond. ‘I’m not going to tell you what was said in cabinet, or what I said.’
I put it to her that Labor crumbled. She shakes her head and remains silent. Then she says, ‘This puts me in a difficult position. I think the state royal commission demonstrates the problems with water policy.’
But it is not simple, she says. ‘Some would argue that the kind of compromise in the plan that was criticised by the royal commission was required in order to keep New South Wales in: that perhaps they would have walked away if we had pressed ahead with my approach. And I was in a lot of conflict with the sector. Perhaps those who have a different political view of the world would say I was too confrontationist. Or too pure.’
She prefers to talk about Barnaby Joyce and what happened under the Abbott and Turnbull governments. Joyce, she says, trashed the river.
Famously, in November 2016, Barnaby Joyce wrote a letter to Ian Hunter, once of the Bolkus Left and by 2016 South Australian Minister for Water and the River Murray, in which he backtracked on 450 gigalitres of water promised to the state as a result of the ‘efficiency’ measures. He was effectively announcing that he planned to ignore even the weakened plan.42 Shortly after the letter was delivered there was a ministerial council meeting in Adelaide. Hunter and Joyce were among a group that went for dinner at Rigoni’s Bistro in the CBD. The royal commission report later described the dinner: ‘The South Australian minister made his and perhaps the then state government’s views known to his interstate and Commonwealth colleagues in unambiguous terms, with Minister Hunter apparently telling Minister Joyce, in colloquial terms, to leave the jurisdiction.’43
The Adelaide media were less circumspect. They reported that Hunter had told Joyce, and Victorian Minister for Water Lisa Neville, to fuck off.44
Just over twelve months later, amid the media attention, Penny Wong’s former partner, South Australian premier Jay Weatherill, announced the royal commission.
The trajectory of the Murray–Darling Basin Plan, said commissioner Walker, was ‘a story of cynical disregard … to the lasting discredit of all those who manipulated the processes to this end’.
Wong says she agrees with much of the royal commission report, and its analysis of where things have gone wrong, but that Bret Walker is a purist. It is not politically realistic to suggest that no account be taken of the social and political impact of reduced irrigation allowances. She doesn’t accuse Walker of lacking an understanding of praxis – practical political action – but she implies it nonetheless. He is an excellent lawyer, she thinks; just not a politician. The former minister for water says she put priority on buybacks because ‘it was clear to me it was the cheapest and fastest way to try and reduce what has been taken out of the river … That’s just instinct.’
Commissioner Walker’s most scathing criticisms concern what happened after Wong left the portfolio. But the period of her tenure doesn’t escape criticism. In particular, Walker asks why the release of the Murray–Darling Basin draft plan came as such a surprise to the affected communities, making it easier for lobbyists to push for it to be dropped. Why was there no preparation, no communications campaign leading up to the release? His criticism is aimed mainly at the Murray–Darling Basin Authority – but it can also be read as a criticism of Wong. Is this another example of her shortcomings as a ‘retail politician’? Should she have been out in the irrigation communities visiting the farmers, talking up the future?
Wong agrees more communication about the reforms would have been better, but what, after all, could she have said? ‘The hard reality that no amount of communication is going to fix that. For some of these industries and some of these communities it doesn’t matter what policy you have in place, there’s not going to be sufficient water for business as usual.’ Penny Wong did notch up other achievements in her time as the minister for water. One of the Labor additions to the Howard government’s programs was money for urban infrastructure, in the form of subsidies for water tanks and other means of capturing stormwater – all part of the preparation for climate change. There is little doubt that, as a result, urban Australia is marginally better prepared for climate change than it might otherwise have been.
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For most of the first ten years of the twenty-first century, the mouth of the Murray was kept open by dredging machines – sometimes two at a time – working to move sand and maintain a minimal flow to the Coorong, preventing it from warming, stagnating and dying. In 2010 the drought ended and dredging was stopped. The Murray flowed again to the sea.
Five years later, with the start of the current drought, the dredging continued. Today, two dredges remove sand daily to keep the river connected to the sea.
In February 2019, Penny Wong and Tony Burke issued a joint media release – she as Leader of the Opposition in the Senate and he as Shadow Minister for Environment and Water. They announced that if Labor won government it would repeal the 1500-gigalitre cap on water buybacks introduced by Barnaby Joyce. They cited the ‘dire warnings’ from the Productivity Commission review and the royal commission. ‘As we get closer to the period where the Murray–Darling Basin Plan will be due for review … we need to make sure our options are open to recover water. By removing the cap on buybacks Labor is removing [a] legislative barrier to providing more water for the basin, if that is what is needed.’45
Wong and Burke were apparently united, preparing for power and another go at saving the basin. It was clear that, with the nation again in the grip of drought, water politics was about to blow up. It was an election issue, with rural independents gaining votes by calling for the entire plan to be abandoned and reset.
If Penny Wong had her time as the minister for water over again?
She says, ‘I think counterfactuals in retrospect are so self-serving.’
But she would agree to take on only one portfolio, climate change or water – not both. And if she had water, she would keep a closer eye on the implementation.
She says she feels the Rudd government achieved a lot between 2007 and 2010. But today ‘it’s disappointing to see, nine years on, where the country is’. The recent fish kill, she said when interviewed in early 2019, weeks before the election, was an example of a ‘crisis that can be used’ to spur ‘what we do next’.
She was speaking on the assumption that Labor would get that opportunity after the election. Those expectations were dashed.
Looking back on Penny Wong’s record in the portfolio, it is clear that much, much more was needed to save the Murray–Darling Basin and the river. Perhaps a different kind of minister – a bolder visionary, someone less cautious – would have pushed harder, achieved more. Though it is likely that if she had taken any more water back for the environment the entire agreement between the states and the Commonwealth would have come undone. More likely, without her careful work in cutting a deal with the states, her balancing of what she thought was right with a preparedness to dole out cash, nothing would have been done at all.
The reality is that a better result was not politically possible without a long-term strategy for managing change in
rural communities. Neither side of politics has composed such strategies. Wong, on her own, could hardly have done so in her three years as minister, given that Labor showed no sign of having developed appropriate policies in opposition. The development of good policy for a fast-changing rural Australia should be the work of decades, and the failure to do so is, likewise, a generational failure. The results extend beyond irrigation communities. This is the malaise that affects coal-mining and power-generation communities, farming communities, all those asked to bear the heaviest burden of change.
Once these rural communities were at the heart of Australian life and identity – storied and balladed, proud of their role in feeding and powering the nation. They were at the heart of the history of the Australian Labor Party – founded by striking pastoral workers in Barcaldine, Queensland. Now, rural Australians have become what Mark Latham in his better days would have termed outsiders – deprived of voice, alienated, cynical. After decades in which they have been offered no hope, they are now resistant to hope and therefore resistant to political messaging.
When Labor left power, things got worse. Cynical politics thrives in communities without hope.
Maryanne Slattery is a senior researcher at the Australia Institute and a former director at the Murray–Darling Basin Authority. She was a witness before the Murray–Darling Basin Royal Commission, and describes Wong’s time in the portfolio as ‘good compared to what came after’. She says that if a criticism could be made of Penny Wong’s time, it is that probably the rush to buybacks led to the Commonwealth paying too much for water, sometimes where the water flow was of dubious reliability. But after Wong left the portfolio, Labor crumbled. Then, after the change of government, it got much worse, with maladministration, malfeasance and ‘dodgy deals’.
Water politics cost both Labor and the Coalition heavily at the 2019 election. Labor was easily characterised as being out of touch with rural communities, and the National Party lost three seats amid anger over drought, water allocations and the Murray–Darling Basin Plan. Those seats were picked up by minor parties and independents – those not burdened with the hard responsibilities that come with being a party of government.
After the 2019 election, National MP David Littleproud was reappointed the minister for water resources. In his first public statement, he vowed an investigation into the ‘purity’ of the water market and promised Murray–Darling Basin communities he would equip them with the tools to ‘recover and restructure’. At the time of writing, there are as yet no details as to how he proposes to do this.46 Meanwhile, the calls for a royal commission grow, and the agreements between Commonwealth and states, essential to the implementation of the Water Act, are fragile, vulnerable to populist politics in communities deprived of story, voice and dreams.
Is it true that the political processes in Australia are no longer capable of meeting the needs of the people? This question underlies Penny Wong’s time as the minister for water and the dilemmas she faced. It is also one that underlies a review of her entire parliamentary career, and her future in the wake of the 2019 election defeat.
10
PENNY WONG FAILS TO SAVE THE WORLD (PART 2: CLIMATE CHANGE)
One image of Penny Wong has fixed in the minds of journalists who reported on the United Nations Climate Change Conference – the Copenhagen Summit – in December 2009. She was with Kevin Rudd, holding a media conference in the early hours of the morning after all-night negotiations in a windowless room. The process had been, at best, only a partial success, and a devastating disappointment to Rudd, who had hitched many of his hopes for change on this event. Penny was swaying on her feet. She had snatched minutes of sleep on a blow-up mattress in a corner of the conference centre. The journalists thought she might faint. They stopped their questioning long enough to offer her a chair, which she declined.
Penny Wong spent two long years and eight long months as the minister for climate change. The portfolio was about the exercise and limitations of government power, and the shifting dynamics of geopolitics. It was a portfolio that involved the tide of human history and the future of the planet – that focused on the ‘greatest moral challenge of our generation’, according to Kevin Rudd. And all of this was winnowed through the limitations of human capacity.
At its most basic, there was the need to sleep – at least sometimes. There was the need, in the maelstrom, to find time to think. Time to think is a scarce asset in government and under the pressure of the media cycle. Yet thinking time, says Wong, allows you to ‘settle yourself … to determine what is urgent, and what is important. To be creative and think laterally, creatively, about how to get around obstacles.’ Kevin Rudd, she believes, did not give himself enough of it. ‘Woven through those needs, those limitations on the doable, there are the other weaknesses of human beings – their egos, ambitions, capacities for greatness and for panic – the future of the planet tangling on the wreckage of politics as usual.
During Penny Wong’s time as minister, climate change became the most toxic issue in Australian politics. It was crucial in the demise of both Kevin Rudd and Malcolm Turnbull as leaders of their parties. It went on to be a key factor in the second rise of Rudd, the defeat of Julia Gillard by Tony Abbott, and the second fall of Malcolm Turnbull – this time as prime minister.
Because climate-change policy was so determining of the political trajectory of the Labor government, just what happened and why during Penny Wong’s time as minister has been reported, chewed over and analysed by many both inside and outside parliament. Climate-change policy features prominently in the memoirs, often self-justifying, of Labor’s Kevin Rudd, Julia Gillard, Wayne Swan and Greg Combet, and the Greens’ Christine Milne. Each gives a very different view of who said what and who was to blame. Penny Wong emerges well from both Gillard’s and Rudd’s accounts, although they are poisonous about each other and agree on little else.1 There have been journalistic accounts as well, including Sarah Ferguson and Patricia Drum’s The Killing Season and Paul Kelly’s Triumph and Demise.2
How could a policy begun with so much idealism and high hope end in a train wreck for Labor and for Australian action on climate change? Today, Australia is the only nation in the world to have abolished a climate-change framework that included a price on carbon and legally binding emissions reduction targets. As Mark Butler wrote in his book Climate Wars, ‘we are also pretty much the only major advanced economy where carbon pollution levels are rising rather than coming down’. Australia is in the first rank of carbon polluters, with the highest rate per capita of carbon pollution output in the world.3
Penny Wong acknowledges there was trauma involved in having worked so hard for such a paltry outcome. When asked to revisit those years for these interviews, her distress was obvious. ‘I get very distressed talking about it.’
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The climate change ministry was an enormous promotion for Wong. She had not had much to do with climate-change policy in opposition, and climate action was a centrepiece of Rudd’s agenda. Days after the end of the election campaign, she was in the thick of it – attending the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Nusa Dua, Bali. Her adviser John Olenich remembers the rush to pack and get on the plane, and then the sudden realisation of the changes that came with being in government – being greeted by the ambassador at the airport, Wong being whipped away to briefings and high-level meetings.
As she departed for Bali, the new Department of Climate Change was being composed in a tearing hurry. It was to sit within Rudd’s own portfolio, the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, making Wong, in this area, effectively his assistant. She was operating in a policy area that Rudd had made clear he intended to dominate. This positioning was emblematic of the anomaly in Wong’s status. She was, as Mark Butler puts it today, a ‘junior senior’ minister: junior in the sense that she had been in parliament just over five years, had never been a minister and lacked the clout within cabinet to command support; senior in the sense tha
t she carried two of the most important portfolios, was widely recognised for her ability, and had been important to Labor’s victory in her role as 2007 campaign spokesperson.
An optimistic outlook may have been a factor in Rudd’s appointment of Wong to two very difficult portfolios in climate and water. Few foresaw quite how challenging the reforms on climate would prove. Brendan Nelson was leader of the opposition, and there was bipartisanship on taking action to reduce carbon emissions. Tony Abbott had considered contesting the Liberal Party leadership after the election but withdrew when it was clear he didn’t have the numbers; nobody anticipated the formidable political foe he would become.
In Bali, Rudd was greeted as a hero. His first act as prime minister had been to ratify the Kyoto Protocol, the international agreement that committed countries to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Australia, along with the United States, had been one of only two developed nations not to have signed.
Rudd addressed the conference on 12 December and repeated that climate change was ‘one of the greatest moral, economic and environmental challenges of our age’. He stated that Australia was ‘ready to assume its responsibility, both at home and in the complex negotiations which lie ahead across the community of nations.’4 The speech was greeted with a standing ovation. ‘The mood of the conference, at least for a time, grew almost euphoric,’ Rudd recalls in his memoir.5
But, days after his address, the rift between developed and developing nations became apparent. It seemed the whole process towards devising a successor to the Kyoto Protocol, including a road map and a timetable towards reaching agreement by 2009, might fall apart. Rudd directed Wong to try to convince developing countries to drop their demand for the inclusion of an emissions target for developed countries in favour of a commitment to attend the next round of talks, scheduled for Copenhagen in 2009. It was more important to get a commitment of attendance from all countries than it was to push for targets.
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