Penny Wong

by Simons, Margaret;

  Certain aspects were harder than she had expected, others easier. Asked if there was any part of her that had not wanted to be the minister for foreign affairs in a Shorten government, Wong said, ‘I was really worried about how we would manage, how I would protect and maintain and nurture my personal relationships.’

  During the campaign, Alexandra, now seven years old, had been very focused on how much her mother was home. ‘She was always asking, “When are you coming back? How many nights will you be gone? Will you be gone before I go to sleep? Will you be here when I wake up?” And now the kids have stopped asking, because I am just around. That’s very nice. Really, really nice.’

  Our interview took place the day after she had appeared on the ABC’s Q&A, in which she talked again about foreign affairs. We were in a sterile meeting room at the Commonwealth Parliament Offices in central Sydney. The two events together – granting this interview and her Q&A appearance – signalled that Penny Wong was back in the game, still ‘in the room’.

  *

  Penny Wong’s preparation in foreign policy had begun in the shadow trade portfolio, which she held between the 2013 and 2016 election defeats. Once given the foreign affairs remit after the 2016 election, the preparation intensified.

  Early on, she spent time with Gareth Evans, foreign minister in the Hawke and Keating governments from 1988 to 1996. Evans is remembered as one of Australia’s most ambitious and successful foreign ministers, whose tenure straddled the end of the Cold War.

  In theory, what is generally referred to as the ‘international rules-based order’ – the system of trade agreements, international treaties and compacts sponsored and led by the United States – dates from World War II and its immediate aftermath. In reality, it had its fullest expression in the burst of optimism and the potential for a better world that followed the fall of the Berlin Wall. Evans increased Australia’s involvement with Asia and shifted the emphasis away from our traditional alliance with the United States. His was a structured, analytical approach. He articulated the concepts of Australia as a middle power and insisted that practising what he called ‘good international citizenship’ should be considered not just worthy in a moral sense but as an essential part of the national interest. His achievements included the initiation of a United Nations peace plan for Cambodia; Australia’s crucial role in the international Chemical Weapons Convention, which outlaws the production and stockpiling of chemical weapons; and establishing both the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum and the ASEAN Regional Forum. His was an activist foreign policy.

  Today, Gareth Evans remembers that he offered Penny Wong ‘an opportunity to throw ideas around’ almost immediately after she was appointed. He thought highly of Wong but hadn’t worked closely with her. In the months that followed her appointment they talked both detail and overarching principle. Penny Wong nominates ‘Gareth’ as the foreign minister she most admires, while also acknowledging that he presided over ‘a different time – not as disruptive’. For Evans, working for outcomes within the rules-based order was possible. Now, across the world, from Britain to China and Donald Trump’s United States, the dominant powers are moving away from the rules and the treaties that represent the best chance of security for middle-sized powers such as Australia.

  Evans encouraged Wong to spend time thinking through the intellectual framework for foreign policy. She recalls, ‘I took that on board. And I went back and looked at a lot of what he had done, his early writings in opposition and then also in government … he had worked through quite systematically an intellectual framework … and that appealed to me.’5 Evans remembers that in their early conversations he urged her to think through and articulate the ‘national interest’ – a phrase often thrown around by politicians but rarely defined. As Penny Wong was later to remark, John Howard as prime minister had used an undefined notion of ‘the national interest’ to shut down conversation when he sent Australian military forces to join the United States in the 2003 invasion of Iraq.6 Evans suggested to Wong that while the international climate had fundamentally changed, the national interest had not. He characterised the national interest as consisting of security, prosperity and a sound economy. He also talked to her about ‘good international citizenship’. These were the foundations on which she should build, he suggested.

  Penny Wong talked to many other foreign policy specialists. She had discussions with Hugh White, professor of strategic studies at the Australian National University and the author of several books arguing that Australia will increasingly be forced to choose between the United States, our traditional ally, and China, our largest trading partner. White has argued that the regional power balance has already shifted towards China, and that the United States is a less-than-reliable ally that might not come to Australia’s aid in the future. In the contest for regional supremacy, he has said, ‘America will lose, and China will win,’ so Australia had better work out how to deal with that. White imagines Australia forced to cope alone in a region where conflict between two superpowers is playing out. His latest book examines whether Australia could defend itself in the absence of US assistance – and what that would entail.7 White remembers Wong as a ‘charming and gracious persona and an appealing interlocutor’. He was left with the impression that she disagreed with his analysis, but ‘clearly understood what I was saying and was at grips with what was going on and why I thought as I did’.

  She talked to Michael Fullilove, the executive director of the Lowy Institute, and to Peter Drysdale, an emeritus professor at the ANU’s Crawford School of Public Policy and an expert on China’s growing economic strength. She had meetings at the university’s Australian Centre on China in the World and launched its 2017 yearbook. She consulted Allan Gyngell, director of the Crawford Australian Leadership Forum and Fullilove’s predecessor. Gyngell’s 2017 book Fear of Abandonment argues that Australian foreign policy has always presupposed dependence on a great power – first Britain, and then the United States. Until recently, Australia’s strategic partners have also been our main economic partners, but with China our biggest trading partner, for the first time we are economically dependent on a country that is not an ally. Australia is at a turning point, Gyngell argues. The ‘globalisation engine is now spluttering’.8 He criticises ‘Australia’s occasional lack of ambition and reluctance to wield the power available to it; its preference for hunkering down in the company of allies; its diplomatic caution’. In future, he says, the slipstream of the superpowers will be a dangerous place. Australia needs to be bolder and more vigorous.

  Penny Wong listened, and was later to quote some of his ideas. Of all the experts she consulted, she singles out Gyngell as the one who probably influenced her the most. He is a ‘clean thinker’, she says – which from Wong is very high praise. ‘He writes as I would like to write.’ Gyngell, meanwhile, describes Wong as probably the best-prepared foreign-minister-in-waiting Australia has ever had.

  She also read widely among the international foreign policy periodicals and academic papers. A PhD student specialising in India at the University of Melbourne was surprised one day by a contact from Penny Wong’s office requesting a chat about the subcontinent.

  Allan Behm was brought on to her staff as the senior adviser on foreign policy. She had first encountered him when he was Greg Combet’s chief of staff. Behm had spent thirty years in the public service, specialising in international relations, defence strategy, and counterterrorism and law-enforcement policy. He was highly respected within the foreign policy community, and renowned for the character of his approach – intellectual, reflective and values-driven, rooted in his Jesuit education. When Wong’s speeches began to contain references to Enlightenment figures, people interpreted it as Behm’s influence.

  Today, Behm says Wong has one of the best policy minds he has encountered among the many politicians he has served. She is, he says, ‘certainly in the league of Gareth Evans and Kim Beazley’. Behm, who joined her staff in March 201
7, remembers his brief was to ‘offer a set of propositions to help her hammer out her ideas. If she didn’t agree with me she would argue with me. It was a synergistic process.’ They both loved intellectual combat. ‘We had a lot of them. Never did they come anywhere near anger or irritation. Penny has never been the slightest bit short with me. But she is forensic. She’s a lawyer, and she approaches any issue in a relentlessly logical way.’ Behm was also dispatched to talk to other foreign policy thinkers, some of whom Wong had already spoken to. He prepared summaries of what the various thinkers said, highlighting areas of agreement and disagreement and detailing their reasoning.

  They both remember early conversations about ways of thinking through problems. Their approaches were very different. She was structured, logical and deductive. His thinking was inductive or, as he puts it, when confronted with a problem he would consider it laterally: imagine what the world would look like without that problem in it, and work out how to get closer to that world. With Behm, Wong thought through how to frame issues differently, and how to attempt to persuade other countries to act in a way that met Australia’s interests, rather than focusing only on our own actions. Wong says she worked on her speeches in a structured way – starting with boxes of concepts branching out into collections of ideas. To her, Behm seemed to be ‘stream of consciousness’, but together they worked in a way that was multidimensional. She says, ‘I think about it as a meta-analysis. I try to think through the particulars in terms of what it means.’

  Elements of this ‘meta-analysis’ approach were already visible in her brand of intellectual engagement with an issue. It could be seen in her repeated rejection of binary thinking, dating back to her period as the minister for climate change and water, if not before. It could be seen from the 2013 John Button address on in her adoption of the concept of the counterfactual as a way of thinking through policy dilemmas and alternative trajectories. It could be seen in the speeches she was giving on same-sex marriage, overlapping with the period in which she was working out her approach to foreign policy. It was visible in the framing of same-sex marriage as about love rather than aberration, and in the way she addressed the argument that marriage was an archaic institution by pointing out how it had changed over history.

  Today, she says it is evident in her attitude to the debate over religious freedom in the wake of the homophobic comments made by Christian rugby union star Israel Folau. In her July 2019 Q&A appearance, she talked not about a legal response but about the kind of society we should seek to be – tolerant and respectful: ‘Surely we want to come out of this improving that and not diminishing it.’9 In our interview the following day, she said, ‘I always find this religious freedom debate quite intellectually frustrating. We seem to move from the right for people to have belief to the idea that we abrogate the concept of equality before the law as a consequence of belief. That is a substantial step for a liberal democracy, but people just jump that step without understanding the meaning of it.’

  Her rejection of binary thinking and conventional solutions, though, reached its apogee in her approach to the most urgent and difficult foreign policy issue of our time: how to handle our relationship with China and the United States. Is Australia to be meat in the sandwich? Does China’s rise represent an opportunity or a threat? Do we have to choose between our traditional ally and the country on which so much of our economy depends?

  On 8 November 2016, when Penny Wong had been in the shadow foreign affairs job about four months, Donald Trump won the US election. During the campaign Bill Shorten had described Trump as ‘barking mad’.10 Penny Wong, invited to agree during a television interview, was much more diplomatic. He was, she said ‘an interesting candidate’, and acknowledged that Labor’s policies – against protectionism, in favour of multilateral trade agreements and a rules-based international order – were at variance with Trump’s positions.11

  Trump had made it clear he was a nationalist and a protectionist. He was contemptuous of the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement, the engine of former president Barack Obama’s promised ‘pivot to Asia’. Later, Trump was to withdraw from the agreement and start an episodic trade war with China. Australia’s former ambassador to Washington, Kim Beazley, commented that if Trump pursued his objectives ‘it will effectively suspend American leadership in global free trade and in the global order’.12 Penny Wong wrote an opinion piece for The Sydney Morning Herald predicting a ‘substantive shift’ in US foreign policy. ‘It is in Australia’s interest to continue to assert our values and interests, and we should always be prepared to make clear our disagreement with political leaders who undermine them,’ she wrote.13 For that she was criticised by Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, who claimed Labor was trying to weaken the foundation of national security: the Australia–US defence alliance.14

  But the problems with US policy towards China preceded Trump. President Obama had proclaimed his ‘pivot’ but failed to push back credibly when China established a military presence around the disputed Scarborough Shoal, which the international courts later recognised as belonging to the Philippines. That apparently emboldened the Chinese, who began to fortify and build islands in disputed areas the following year. The United States had attempted to draw a line, and then failed to enforce that line. The countries of the region had to work out how to respond. Following the 2016 election of Rodrigo Duterte as president of the Philippines, that nation did not pursue its rights under the international courts ruling, and instead grew closer to China. If the United States was not going to enforce the line, the Philippines was hardly able to do so on its own. Conciliation was the only option. This was part of the environment in which Wong sought to work out her ‘transformational’ approach to foreign policy.

  The language of diplomacy is nuanced. Political bipartisanship in the national interest means that differences are communicated in ways missed by most ordinary people – and, for that matter, by most daily journalism. The foreign policy community, and the diplomats of foreign nations, examine the entrails of speeches and public statements, and do the textual analysis, looking for shifts in attitude or emphasis. For example, when Penny Wong said, as she did in most of her speeches from early 2017 onwards, that Australia would always follow its national interest, it was probably read by most as a statement of the obvious. But in the contexts Wong used it, the message received in the foreign policy community was loud and clear. It was about a more independent stance – that the United States should by no means assume that Australia would be in lockstep should it choose to confront Beijing in the South China Sea.

  One of her first significant speeches as shadow minister for foreign affairs was delivered in March 2017 to the Global Heads of Mission – Australia’s senior diplomats – who had been gathered by foreign minister Julie Bishop as part of the consultation process for a Foreign Policy White Paper. Wong talked about the ‘discontinuity’ in world affairs. She preferred this term to ‘disruption’ because it highlighted the fact that almost nothing in the current environment could be counted as a continuation of business as usual. Few of the traditional rules or assumptions still applied.

  In particular, she described China’s rise as having altered the rules of how strategic power was acquired. Previously, it had been about military might, and economic strength translated smoothly into military power. China, though, was ‘seeking strategic power through economic dominance’. It was a new and challenging dynamic. She went on to catalogue the troubles of the world – Brexit, the unpredictability of Trump, civil war from North Africa to Afghanistan. Then she came to the main message she wanted to deliver to these senior diplomats. Australian foreign policy, said Wong, should be driven not by fear, but by optimism and confidence: ‘In times of uncertainty, first-mover advantage lies with whoever sets the agenda. And that is exactly what we should seek to do, practically and confidently.’

  She signalled a pragmatic approach to China. Labor would ‘begin with what China actually is, rather than through the
lens of risk management’. It was a form of words that recurred – the idea that China was portrayed or characterised in various ways but none captured its true nature. Later, she developed the idea that China’s own idea of itself might not always be accurate. Labor would not deal with China from an ideological or fixed position.15 For example, Australia did not need to either wholly reject or embrace China’s Belt and Road Initiative, the wide-ranging international infrastructure program. Labor would approach it ‘with an eye to identifying points of mutual interest and complementarity rather than reflexive negativity’.16

  Wong was rejecting the idea that Australia had to choose – or rather, as she put it in later speeches, she thought we should be continually involved in a pragmatic, enlightened process of ‘choosing for us’. This would involve a transformation of both Australia’s key relationships – that with the United States, as well as that with China.

  She had been Julie Bishop’s guest at the Global Heads of Mission Meeting, and did not criticise her directly. But in later speeches she characterised the Coalition’s approach to foreign affairs as ‘transactional’ – mere reactive management of events. Labor, she said, would be ‘transformational’ – taking the lead and the initiative to bring about change. Transaction and transformation were not binaries, she suggested. Both management and strategy were needed. But Labor sought, within its sphere of influence, to change the world.17 Bishop had said in the 2016 election campaign that her approach to foreign affairs was marked by realism: ‘We deal with the world as it is, not as we would wish it to be.’ In a later speech, Wong picked up those words and used them against her: Labor would ‘deal with the world as it is, and … seek to change it for the better – to shape, as best we can, the world in which we live’.18 This declaration appeared in most of her speeches from then on.

  In the months after the Global Heads of Mission Meeting, Wong laid out her foreign policy approach in a series of addresses. The first two, conceived as a pair, were described in her office as ‘the interests speech’ and ‘the values speech’. Behm had wanted the values speech delivered first – as the foundation of all that followed – but Wong was instead keen to establish the national interests that would drive Labor’s foreign policy, and concerned not to appear romantic or sentimental. The values speech therefore took many careful drafts, which meant the interests speech came first for practical reasons. Titled ‘Australia’s national interests in a time of disruption’, it was delivered at the Lowy Institute on 6 July 2017. The values speech, titled ‘Australian values in a time of disruption’, was delivered at Griffith University almost exactly a month later.19 After these two came another pigeon pair – an address about Australia’s relationship with China, delivered on 16 October 2017, and one about the foundations and future of Australia’s connection with the United States, again almost exactly a month later.20 The following January, she brought all these ideas together for an international audience in a speech at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy in Singapore.21 According to Allan Behm, Kim Beazley described this as the best address ever given by an Australian foreign minister or shadow. Two more speeches about China followed in the ensuing year as events developed.