Penny Wong

by Simons, Margaret;

  Many ministers – Swan, Conroy and others – were opposed to Rudd on personal grounds, not wanting to reward what they saw as his undermining and treachery. Others were opposed to Gillard because of what she had done to Rudd. But Butler and Wong were simply ‘trying to work out the best thing’.

  Butler says they both agreed that Gillard had been an excellent prime minister under extraordinary pressure. ‘She kept things moving, she consulted, she gave ministers their head. There was no animus there in cabinet as there was about Kevin.’ But Labor was headed for the kind of defeat that could see it out of power for a decade or more. The polls showed that it would lose ‘really important people, the kind of people you need if you are going to have a chance at government any time in the future’. He says, ‘There was no philosophical difference. It was not people backing Kevin because of his vision or Gillard because of her vision.’ For all its disarray, the party did not have a deep ideological divide of the kind plaguing the Liberals.

  Switching sides to Rudd was a difficult decision for them both – made not in the course of a single conversation but gradually, over several late-night talks from mid-June onwards. ‘It was just, “What a fucking mess. How do we give ourselves some hope of winning this election?” … We didn’t sort of hold hands and leap over the cliff together. It was an iterative process in which we both reached the same conclusion at the same time.’

  Penny Wong went to see Julia Gillard. Wong was in tears. She told Gillard she would be changing her support to Kevin Rudd, and begged her not to stand in the leadership spill the next day, saying it would be easier. Gillard responded, ‘You mean easier for you, Penny.’50 Gillard made it clear she would fight to the finish, but as she told author Mary Delahunty, it was after that conversation that Julia Gillard knew her prime ministership was over.51

  Wong was repeatedly on the record as saying that Gillard was the best person to lead the party. Voting against her was both politically embarrassing and personally painful. Wong describes this as one of the worst – if not the worst – day she has had in politics. Nevertheless, on 26 June 2013 Kevin Rudd was elected leader of the Labor Party 57–45, with Wong one of his votes. She was the only woman in cabinet to desert Australia’s first female prime minister.

  Immediately after the vote, a collection of the ministers who had publicly disparaged Rudd stood and declared they would not serve in his cabinet. Swan resigned as treasurer and deputy leader, to be replaced by Chris Bowen as treasurer and Anthony Albanese as deputy. Stephen Conroy resigned as Leader of the Government in the Senate. Penny Wong was elected to replace him, unopposed. Her promotion was not a surprise. When Conroy had been appointed leader in the Senate in February 2013, her name had been mentioned as a possible alternative. She had chosen not to run – perhaps because of the demands of new motherhood.52 She had been appointed as Conroy’s deputy, and stepping up now was a natural move, particularly given her profile and ability. This made her the third most powerful person in the government, after Rudd and Albanese, and the first woman to lead the government in the Senate. Rudd commented in his memoir, apparently without rancour over her long support for Gillard, ‘She was one of the stars of our side. And, unlike Conroy, she could hold her own in the parliament and in public as an accomplished public speaker.’53

  Penny Wong walked out from the vote at Kevin Rudd’s right shoulder, ready to greet the media.

  Just over a month later, on 5 August, Kevin Rudd called the election for 7 September. Before the caretaker period began, Penny Wong made one last move. She organised federal funding for a program, pioneered in Victoria, that sought to foster a safe environment for LGBTQIA children at school. By the time Tony Abbott won government, the contracts – for an $8 million program over four years – had been signed. Years later, when Safe Schools was at the centre of the culture wars, Penny Wong was asked by author Benjamin Law if she had rushed the contracts through to force a commitment that the inevitable Abbott government would have to maintain. Law reported, ‘She gives the faintest ghost of a smile. “Well, you could turn it around and say, ‘Labor people believe a whole range of programs are important, and whatever we can do in the face of a hard-right prime minister to protect young people is not a bad thing.’”’54

  The 2013 election campaign was regarded as shambolic by just about all the journalists who reported on it. Stories circulated that Rudd announced major policies on the run without consultation. Penny’s university acquaintance Samantha Maiden wrote that the campaign trail was a ‘voyage of the damned … poor planning, exhausted staff, a siege mentality’.55 Once again, Penny Wong was campaign spokesperson, largely based in Melbourne, at the campaign headquarters. Campaigning was being done ‘on the fly’ for the first three days, until she intervened and insisted on a campaign plan, which was composed in a telephone hook-up over three hours. ‘It was adopted, but quickly became irrelevant as Mr Rudd and his travelling party of policy advisers changed destinations, announced unheard-of policies and conducted their own exclusive meetings.’56

  One campaign blunder – the mistake most commentators saw as signifying the death knell of Labor’s hopes – involved Penny Wong. On 29 August she, Rudd and Bowen fronted the media in Melbourne to claim that Treasury costings had identified a $10 billion hole in the savings announced by the opposition the previous day. They released minutes from Treasury, the Department of Finance and the Parliamentary Budget Office to back up the claim.

  It blew up in their face when the relevant public servants came out later that day with a statement undercutting the claim. The figures had been done during the caretaker period, on the basis of material provided by the government, they said. ‘At no stage prior to the caretaker period has either department costed opposition policies.’ Laurie Oakes said Rudd, Wong and Bowen had used the public service ‘in a bit of political trickery’.57 Political journalist Tony Walker wrote, ‘This is a debacle captured in the colourful language of one among many beleaguered supporters: “Holy shit, what have we done now?”’58

  Today Wong acknowledges it was a ‘bad mistake … a political disaster’ to use public service figures in this way, but points out that the same thing has been done by the Coalition – including in the 2019 election campaign – without the same response from the bureaucrats. She also claims the costings proved correct.

  Consistent with her reluctance to criticise others, Wong won’t attribute blame for the election campaign. She takes her share of responsibility for the Treasury costings blunder, but as for the rest, she says, ‘Yes, it wasn’t the most functional campaign. It wasn’t as good as the 2007 campaign but, when you have had two leadership changes and changes of key ministers, we were as professional as we could be. When you win, everybody wants to own it, and when you lose, everyone wants to distance themselves from it. People did their best. People make mistakes … There were things Kevin did which some were critical of. There were things Kevin did which helped us.’ She believes switching to Kevin Rudd saved the party twenty seats, and left it in a position from which it could strike again at government.

  A few days before the election, when Penny Wong was trying to ‘keep the whole thing hanging together’ at campaign headquarters, she was alerted that the polls for the South Australian Senate were looking particularly bad. Independent Nick Xenophon was attracting phenomenal levels of support. Labor’s number-two spot on the ticket – Don Farrell’s position – was at risk. There were appeals for her to come home and campaign. Unnamed sources from the Right warned the media that the Left ‘would have to pay’ if Don Farrell was unseated.59 Too many people owed him their careers.

  Penny Wong didn’t respond to the threats and stayed in Melbourne.

  She says today that the party probably needed her to go home and campaign – but it also needed her in Melbourne.

  When the vote came in, Xenophon had scored a record 25.8 per cent of the primary vote, with the most ballots cast for a Senate candidate anywhere in the nation, beating Sarah Hanson-Young of th
e Greens. Penny Wong was the third senator, and the only Labor senator, elected from South Australia.

  It was some days before it became clear that Farrell was out of parliament. Wong was quoted describing the result as ‘unexpected and extremely disappointing’. However, she would not be drawn on whether she had any regrets about the Left’s campaign to force Senator Farrell to give up his top Senate ticket position for her. ‘No one was expecting this outcome when those issues were discussed,’ she said.60 Today she acknowledges that if Anthony Albanese had not saved her position on the ticket, her political career might have ended.

  Chris Schacht blames the lack of campaigning squarely for the result. ‘I asked them, “What are you doing out in the bush? Have you been to the industrial towns in Spencer Gulf? Are you campaigning?”’ He says nobody listened. Instead, Don Farrell became the third Labor senator from South Australia to have his Senate career halted by the rise of Penny Wong.

  The setback proved temporary. After the 2013 result, the party decided that it had to run fully fledged Senate campaigns in South Australia in future. At the 2016 election Farrell recontested for the Senate in the second position on the Labor ticket; the party mounted a strong campaign and he was re-elected, with Labor winning three Senate places, the third going to Alex Gallacher. Penny’s friend, Anne McEwen, failed to make it. Nevertheless, it was the best result for the Labor South Australian Senate team for some time.61

  The 2016 election was also the first in which voters had a choice of optional preferential voting below the line, without having to number every box on the ballot paper. Penny Wong, as the number-one candidate for Labor, got 17,899 personal first-preference votes, as well as her quota from the above the line Labor group vote. It was the second-highest personal vote of any South Australian Senate candidate – evidence of her growing profile. But she was well behind the populist frontrunner, Nick Xenophon, who gained 25,777 personal first-preference votes.62 Penny Wong was consciously anything but populist. During the 2016 campaign she said, ‘Obviously Nick gets a lot of attention, but this election ultimately isn’t about who gets attention, it is about what sort of country we want … There is an open question as to what he’s actually achieved. But as I say, I understand for people it’s – you know, it’s easy for a politician who tells you things you want to hear.’63 That wasn’t her way.

  *

  On 7 September 2013, Abbott and the Coalition won government with a majority of thirty seats and a swing of 3.6 percentage points. The Labor Party recorded its lowest two-party-preferred vote since 1996 and lowest primary vote since 1931. Kevin Rudd resigned as party leader and from the parliament.

  Labor had to elect a new leader. Under rules introduced by Rudd, there was a new and very public process. The vote would be split between rank-and-file party members and the parliamentary party, with each group equally weighted. The process was to take two weeks and include two public debates. The candidates were former minister Bill Shorten and former deputy prime minister Anthony Albanese.

  Penny Wong, as Leader of the Opposition in the Senate, announced that she would be backing Albanese but affirmed that both candidates would make ‘outstanding Labor leaders’. Albanese had her vote because of his long-term support for women and ‘he has the experience, the runs on the board, he’s had some tough portfolios which he’s handled really well. And he’s also our best parliamentary performer … I think [he] really lives his Labor values.’64

  Albanese won nearly 60 per cent of the rank-and-file vote, but Bill Shorten won the leadership thanks to gaining more caucus votes.

  The contest was conducted with extraordinary civility – any barbs well cloaked. Having made itself unelectable through a failure to govern itself, everyone was determined not to repeat the mistake. But, immediately after the vote, factional warfare broke out over frontbench positions, with a rift in the Right.

  In a measure of her standing, there was no dispute about Penny Wong retaining her place as Labor’s leader in the Senate. A few weeks later it was announced that she would be also become Shadow Minister for Trade and Investment.

  In the wake of the 2019 election defeat, those around Penny Wong were inclined to recall this 2013 battle. Shorten had proved persistently unpopular with voters, particularly in Queensland, where he was remembered for his role in bringing down local boy Kevin Rudd. Penny Wong had been right to back Albanese in 2013, it was said. Perhaps if Albo had won, recent history would have turned out differently.

  12

  ARRIVAL

  When, exactly, did Penny Wong become cool? When did she become, as Bill Shorten described her during the 2019 election campaign, ‘the weapon’ in Labor’s journey to government?1 The kind of person who has sandwiches named after her in hip inner-suburban cafés?

  Certainly not during her early years in parliament. Her colleagues recognised her talents. When Kim Beazley embarrassed himself by not being able to name Labor’s five South Australian senators, Penny Wong was one name he could recall. He covered up for forgetting the others by saying, ‘Every now and again in politics you see a bright prospect emerging that is really a little bit special.’2 Journalists regularly gave her high rankings in their end-of-year report cards for politicians, although they also criticised her for being excessively cautious and answering questions in bureaucratese.3

  She was certainly not cool when she was the minister for water and climate change, embattled on all sides, including within her own party, and blamed along with Rudd and the Greens for the failures on climate-change action. Journalist Lenore Taylor profiled her under the heading ‘The minister of cool’ in 2009, but that was a reference to the portfolio of climate change, not to Wong herself, whom Taylor described as ‘forensic, controlled, focused’.4

  And certainly not when she was the minister for finance. It’s hard to be cool in that job, particularly defending the surplus that never was, the mining tax that didn’t work and the party that couldn’t govern itself. In 2011 she made the list of Top 100 Most Admired Women in Australia, compiled from the votes of more than 1200 Australian women, but she didn’t come close to the winner – Cathy Freeman – and was well behind Julia Gillard, actor Cate Blanchett, pop star Kylie Minogue and country singer Kasey Chambers.5

  Perhaps she truly became cool when journalists began to comment on her eyebrows. In 2015 BuzzFeed put together a video of her eyebrow raises – usually the left, and usually in Senate Estimates.6 The Australian described her eyebrows as ‘a wonder, their movement a form of communication as whole and complex as semaphore, a single arch saying more than an entire harangue’.7 The Sydney Morning Herald commented, ‘The greatest interrogators extract their truths with nary more than a smile … In this, Senator Penny Wong has emerged a master … armed with a laser focus, quirked eyebrow, relaxed stance and unwavering dedication to her line of questioning.’8 The Guardian writer Brigid Delaney imagined a movie version of Julia Gillard’s prime ministership and suggested that Penny Wong should be played by that epitome of cool, k.d. lang. ‘But k.d. is not Asian, I hear you say. Never mind … she is evocative of the essence of P. Wong. The mood.’9 In 2018, author and cartoonist Kaz Cooke suggested on Twitter that ‘somebody should manufacture the Penny Wong Senate Estimates Committee Doll. When pressed, the doll raises an eyebrow and leans forward. Children can provide their own imaginative dialogue.’10 Penny Wong’s eyebrows provided content for dozens of social media gifs.

  Opposition suited Penny Wong – if not her aspirations, then certainly her profile. Rather than having to explain complicated and contentious policy problems with no winners, she became the forensic, drily witty scourge of government, holding ministers to account and often making them look like fools. She was indeed the chief cross-examiner.

  There was her testy exchange in the Senate with the Liberals’ Ian Macdonald. He was interjecting continually while she spoke. He made a comment sotto voce, too quiet to be picked up by microphones or Hansard – but Wong heard it. She responded, ‘You’re not my ty
pe either, mate, don’t worry about it.’ The exchange went viral. The French website Brut described what Macdonald had done as an example of ‘manterrupting’.11 She tangled with the attorney-general, Senator George Brandis. She was interposing in a debate about his handling of the Sydney siege. He accused her of ‘becoming hysterical’ before telling her to ‘just calm yourself’.12 She tweeted to her followers, ‘After being called shrill and hysterical by George Brandis, I’m off to my office for a cup of tea, a Bex and a lie down. #dinosaur #senateqt’

  Then there was the time in Senate Estimates when she was cross-examining Brandis. She told him she was trying to ‘square away’ his answers. He leaned back expansively, twirling a pencil between his fingers. ‘You mean reconcile,’ he said. ‘When you say square away, do you mean reconcile both answers?’ Up went the Wong eyebrow, and she fired back, ‘Are you going to be pompous the whole day, or only for this question?’ That, too, went viral.13 In 2017, after four years in opposition, she learned that a public relations firm had been hired to do role play with public servants and Department of Defence officials on how to manage appearances before her at Senate Estimates. She responded, ‘I want to know who plays me.’14

  When Brandis, an advocate for removing sections of the Racial Discrimination Act, declared, ‘People do have a right to be bigots, you know,’ she called out sarcastically, ‘Yes, George, you go out there and defend the right to be bigoted.’15 To him, she was a threat to freedom of speech, the ‘high priestess of political correctness’ in the grip of an ‘unhealthy obsession’ with Pauline Hanson.16 To her, he was Gollum from The Lord of the Rings, in search of ‘his Precious’ – weakening the Racial Discrimination Act – while the government trashed legislation ‘like a gang of orcs’.17