Penny Wong

by Simons, Margaret;

  For left-wingers dismayed by the Coalition government, this stuff was gold, shared and gloated over. It was during this period that it became common to hear people ask why she wasn’t the leader of the party, or even prime minister. Might she move to the lower house to contest the leadership? She continually batted away these suggestions, insisting she had no such ambition.

  Within the parliamentary party she was one of few to emerge from the Rudd–Gillard–Rudd leadership traumas with her reputation enhanced. Unlike other ministers, she had never indulged in abuse and character assassination. She had held back from the demonising of Rudd when others sallied forth. Her relationship with Gillard was difficult – both over climate-change policy and same-sex marriage – but she had handled those disputes without ever allowing them to become personal. The internal politics of the Labor Party’s decisions during government was not public knowledge until the brace of memoirs and journalistic accounts were published, but insiders knew that she alone of the leadership team had correctly called the political judgements around climate change. While she had switched from Rudd to Gillard, and from Gillard back to Rudd, she had done so reluctantly and with the interests of the party at heart.

  Not everyone liked Penny Wong, and some in her own party dislike her. Some of her own Left faction thought she was too close to the Right – and increasingly during the opposition years, some of her strongest allies were from that faction. Her sharpness and aggression in caucus and shadow cabinet meetings continued to make her enemies. Despite this, she drew respect. Her internal enemies baited her with caution, even if they loved it when she bit.

  Parliamentary gamesmanship was not her only contribution. In one of her first public appearances after the election of 2013, in a speech to the Chifley Research Centre on 3 November 2013, Penny Wong revisited the understanding of Labor values that she had spelt out in the John Button lecture. This time, the ideas were turned into the kind of speech a leader might give after a defeat – a rallying and a steadying of the troops. The Abbott government would, she said, be a secretive regime, for the few. Contesting its agenda would be a ‘colossal task. But contest it we must. And, while we must learn the lessons of our loss, we do not have the time nor the space to indulge in blame. Now, we must both defend our legacy and we must be prepared to renew.’ She added, ‘My past experience of opposition is that it is nine-tenths discipline, one-tenth luck.’18

  She moved on to display the discipline and make the most of the luck. Her public performances were highly controlled – not false, but also not entirely authentic. The internal life remained fiercely protected. As the political journalist Katharine Murphy commented:

  Labor’s Senate leader enters political battle with a suit of armour, always composed, always perfectly prepared; she deploys a Boudicca-like character which is both real and curated public projection, to deliver what needs to be delivered … If the Wong temper flares, if the eyebrow lifts, it’s for a purpose, it’s choreography, not impulse. Impulse is something that happens behind closed doors, never in the professional sphere, which is about reason, preparation and calculation.19

  By now, she had a well-worn form of words for most situations. There was that Wong cliché ‘the best of his generation’. She used it when talking about her mentor, John Faulkner, when he announced his retirement in 2014. He was, she said ‘one of the outstanding parliamentarians of his generation’. In interviews, there were regular phrases ‘let me say this’, ‘what I would say’ or ‘let me say two things’. But now, somehow, she had transcended the dead language. Penny Wong was cool. And she could also rise to oratory.

  As leader of the party in the Senate, Penny Wong was central to Labor’s strategy through the first and second terms of opposition. When the Abbott government delivered its first budget, she drove the strategy that saw it widely condemned as unfair. She denounced it as a triumph for the big end of town, and a ‘vicious assault on middle Australia’; she told journalists it ‘trashes decency and trashes democracy’.20 She led the blocking of some of its most unpopular measures, including the Medicare co-payment, which was eventually dropped. It helped to permanently tarnish the government’s reputation.

  Until mid-2014, when the new senators took up their positions, Labor and the Greens combined to block repeal of the carbon tax. During this time, Greens leader Christine Milne found Penny Wong ‘always polite and respectful. We worked well together during that period.’ It marked a clear shift in attitude from Labor’s time in government, when Wong had treated the Greens with contempt.

  Outside the gladiatorial spectator sport of politics, Wong, as shadow minister for trade and investment, began to develop the strategic and intellectual agenda that, today, informs her approach to the shadow ministry of foreign affairs.

  Much of this agenda brought her into conflict with members of her own faction. Penny Wong favoured free-trade agreements, despite those in the party and the union movement who argued they took away Australian jobs. She made speeches in which she described free trade as continuing in the tradition of the Hawke–Keating economic measures, and asserted that the best way to guarantee Australian jobs and prosperity in the long term is to open Australia to the world. In one of her early speeches as a shadow minister, she talked about socks and stents. Before the Hawke–Keating economic reforms, clothing and footwear industries had employed hundreds of thousands of Australians. Now, they hardly employed any. Socks could be made in developing countries where the wage rates for workers were less than $1 an hour. If Labor imposed a tariff to compete, poorer Australians would pay a lot more for clothing, and the nation would be locked into competing with the world’s poorest countries on wages alone – ‘a strategy of locking more Australians into jobs on the minimum wage’. This was not what a Labor government should do, she said. A more-progressive policy was for Australia to compete on skills-based initiatives and cutting-edge technologies. She gave as an example a company in Brisbane making and exporting endovascular stents – small woven tubes made by former clothing and footwear workers. Fewer were employed than had been on socks, but the jobs were sustainable and did not trap Australia into competing with the third world on price.

  Wong advocated for a reduction of trade barriers in all countries. Kevin Rudd had been a prominent supporter of the World Trade Organization’s Doha Round of negotiations, but by the time Wong became shadow trade minister talks had stagnated and were to be effectively abandoned in 2016. In that context, she said, while regional agreements could be positive, care had to be taken not to allow the world to become divided into overlapping trading blocs, each with different rules on labour rights and environmental protections. Some effort should be made to link the agreements, and she argued that Australia, as a member of both the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and the Trans-Pacific Partnership, was ideally positioned to be a bridge.21 In a speech in the lead-up to the 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference, to be held in Paris, she compared the Doha Round with the difficulties of negotiating climate change: ‘Nothing is agreed until everything is agreed and everyone must agree with everything.’ The need for total consensus held things up. Regional agreements could help overcome the roadblocks, and linking them – which Australia was well placed to do – could lead to global progress.22

  She also stood against those who demonised the rise of China. ‘An ambitious free trade agreement between Australia and China is in the national interest,’ she said. ‘Some in our movement hanker for the days of protectionism, imagining that tariffs on imports support local jobs … Protectionism is a false panacea … Sitting on the sidelines while other countries negotiate trade agreements is also a false panacea. Refusing to enter trade agreements will allow our competitors to gain market share at Australia’s expense.’23

  She led Labor in supporting the China–Australia Free Trade Agreement in principle, but opposed the necessary ratification by the parliament until extra protections for Australian workers were built in. Tony Abbott accused Labor
of ‘economic sabotage’ and refused to negotiate, but in 2015, after Malcolm Turnbull replaced Tony Abbott as prime minister, Penny Wong led intense negotiations with the trade minister, Andrew Robb, that resulted in a deal to pass the agreement with regulations to ensure employers tried to recruit Australian workers before seeking them overseas. The union movement remained unhappy. Bill Shorten fronted the media on the issue, but it was Penny Wong running the negotiations and standing up in caucus and shadow cabinet against representatives of the party’s industrial base.24 She took the same approach to the Trans-Pacific Partnership – approving trade agreements but arguing for improvements and negotiations over the detail – although this debate was overtaken by President Donald Trump’s decision in 2017 to pull out, after a decade of negotiation. In June 2016 the ALP’s trade policy was released to a cautious welcome by both business and unions. It included increasing the threshold for farmland sales to China, Japan and South Korea, and removing laws requiring foreign investments in agribusiness of more than $55 million to be screened by the Foreign Investment Review Board.

  There were rumblings about Shorten’s position as leader of the Labor Party, particularly after Turnbull had displaced the unpopular Abbott. In January 2016, Mark Butler was reported to be doing the numbers for Anthony Albanese.25 Wong had supported Albanese against Shorten in the leadership ballot of 2013, but in the years since then she built her influence in Shorten’s inner circle. Despite her previous backing for Albanese, and despite the rumours about her ally Butler, the media reported that she had become one of Shorten’s central advisers. Wong’s default position was that the party should support the leader, unless that had become clearly untenable. Shorten apparently trusted her.26

  *

  Many of those interviewed for this book who have spent substantial time in public with Penny Wong – in the street, in restaurants and at events – have a story about her being racially abused. It’s shocking to hear these tales. It transforms her obvious achievements in overcoming prejudice from the abstract to the visceral. They contextualise her instinctive privacy and the armour she adopts. They explain, perhaps, her combativeness, as well as her response to Pauline Hanson, and to George Brandis’s claim that people have the right to be bigots.

  Typical is a story from the 2004 election campaign, when she was sitting outside a suburban Adelaide shopping centre with two young male Labor campaign workers. A woman – a complete stranger – yelled out a question. It was something like, ‘How does a slanty-eyed slut like you get two guys?’ The men were shocked into speechlessness, but Penny Wong had practice in dealing with this. She responded, coolly, ‘Just lucky, I guess.’

  There are other stories. The people driving past her in cars, windows down, hurling abuse, and once a can. Most of these experiences occurred before she was a recognisable face. Some have happened since, and are amplified by the slurs she receives on social media. Keyboard warriors bring with them homophobic abuse. In May 2013 she tweeted that she had received her ‘first homophobic tweet of the day at 8am. Something incoherent about being a lesbian pie face.’ The trail of replies contained more. ‘Why do you think it makes you better than anyone else?’ said one. Then there was a rape threat.

  There was also support. Author and cartoonist Kaz Cooke wryly observed that Lesbian Pie Face would make a great name for a restaurant.27

  The other reason Penny Wong’s profile grew while in opposition was the momentum in the campaign for marriage equality. At first reluctantly, and then with increasing willingness and confidence, she became one of the faces of the movement. It was important politically. The Labor Party’s 2011 change of platform, for which she had fought, was key. It represented the moment same-sex marriage became a mainstream political issue.28

  It was also personally profound. Stepping into the spotlight on same-sex marriage was a decision to allow a collision between her politics and her personal life – the internal world that had been so heavily fortified against outsiders ever since she and Toby were embattled in the schoolyard. Penny Wong thought of herself as tough enough to withstand the homophobic and racial abuse she received but, as she told the parliament, many were not. In her maiden speech she had said that Toby’s life and death would always serve to remind her ‘what it is like for those who are truly marginalised’.29 There was an echo of that in some of her speeches to the parliament as the issue of same-sex marriage came to a head in 2016 and 2017. For her, and for many others, hate speech was not an abstract thing, she said, but a daily lived reality.30

  For many years her advocacy had been exercised in the back rooms of the party. That had changed in 2010, when she fought to modify the party platform on same-sex marriage at the South Australian state Labor convention, and more dramatically in 2011, when Sophie Allouache’s first pregnancy coincided with the new platform at the national conference. As the momentum grew, she increasingly accepted that she was a role model. Despite her shyness, her need for a refuge in family life and any fear she may have held of the impact of abuse and prejudice, Penny Wong, in the opposition years, began to step forward.

  In March 2014 she took part in Sydney’s Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras for the first time, appearing on the Rainbow Labor float with Tanya Plibersek, Anthony Albanese and Sam Dastyari, in a red ‘Love Is Not a Crime’ T-shirt. The week before the event she wrote an article for The Guardian saying that there was a need for people like her, in positions of leadership, to ‘speak out, be counted’.31 On the nation’s largest annual street parade, Senator Penny Wong was sedate and obviously less than comfortable amid the noise and flamboyance. ‘It’s much better when politicians don’t dance,’ she told reporters.32 But she was there.

  Early during her period in opposition, and a few weeks after her forty-fifth birthday, Wong accepted an invitation to contribute to the rolling series of events under the umbrella title Women of Letters. Prominent women were invited to read aloud a letter they had written on a set topic. The occasion was not recorded, or shared on social media, making it an oddly intimate public event, although some years later a compilation was published in book form.

  Penny Wong’s topic was ‘The time I changed my mind’, and she wrote a letter to her younger self. It was on her decision to enter politics, and her ambivalence about public life. She revisited the elements of her intellectual and political architecture – the importance of being in the room and of practical action. The counterfactual made an appearance: what would life have been like if she hadn’t entered politics? She opened by saying she thought about writing two letters; looking back, she wasn’t sure if she would advise herself to make a different career decision. So one letter, she said, would ‘encourage … inspire and … reassure’; the other would ‘scream and yell … dissuade’.

  The first letter would reassure her younger self that ‘it will be all right – more than all right … it would remind me that who is in the room matters … it would remind me … of how social change comes about – by changing hearts and minds, by deepening understanding, by working with others. Not by sitting on the sidelines.’ This letter would also ‘calm my fear that this life will destroy me. It would tell me that I can still love and live and nurture and heal. It would tell me that I will not lose myself. That I have not lost me.’

  But the second letter would scream, ‘Don’t do it! Do you know what this country can do to strong women? To those who are pushy and presumptuous enough to stand up? You have no idea of the bile and vitriol coming your way.’ That letter would tell her that there would be ‘even more of the garden-variety “Go back to where you came from, you bloody Chink” abuse’, and that there would also be ‘homophobia – from those who can’t decide if I hate men or if I want to be a man’. It would, she said, warn that ‘there will be deep loneliness, not only because loved ones will be far away, but also because politics is the loneliest team sport’.

  She moved on to muse that the ‘notion of being a role model, which sits so uncomfortably with you today, matters not because o
f you but because it changes how others see themselves’: ‘It alters the limits others put on or take off their own aspirations. Because people can’t be what they can’t see … Don’t worry about being gay. Most people will get over it, and those that don’t will never change their mind, regardless of your competence.’

  It is difficult not to read her final lines as a rallying cry not only to her younger self but to her contemporary one, gearing up for a battle of passion and principle, and the next episode in her journey to use politics to achieve change:

  Knowing what I now know, I honestly cannot decide whether to warn you off or be supportive. Life and politics are always shaded by the myriad of counterfactuals, the endless what ifs, the possibility of another path. I don’t know what I’m choosing between. So instead, here is a reminder of you, of who you are. You are not an artist. You are not a writer. But you do understand the power of imagination. And the nation you imagine, the nation you hope for, is part of you. So, whatever you choose, do something that speaks to that part, to that hope, and you will never lose yourself.33

  Early in her career, Wong had been determined not to be written off as ‘the lesbian candidate’ and had spent time and effort to make sure that didn’t happen. Her journey from this to being prepared to put herself on the line over this issue began in 2004, with the excoriating vote for Howard’s changes to the Marriage Act. That was when she promised herself, and her close friends such as Carol Johnson, that she would achieve change. It was a long journey. It had involved waiting, and strategising, to create the right political climate. Now the journey was nearing completion, and resolution.