Penny Wong

by Simons, Margaret;

  Again, there was cooled optimism on China. Managing the relationship would become more challenging, but ‘it is hard to think of an important issue for Australia’s future where China will not be an influential player … We also recognise that China has a right to develop, and a right to a role in the region alongside other regional powers.’

  For the first time, at the end of the speech, she spoke about what difference her personal background and ethnicity would make should Labor be elected. ‘What is significant … is not my personal attributes. Rather, what would be significant about an Asian-Australian being our foreign minister is what it says about us.’ The fact of her holding this key position, Wong said, would be a powerful demonstration of Australia having overcome its racist past. It would be an exemplar of Australia as a confident multiracial nation. ‘South-East Asia is not just our region, it is where I was born. I grew up with stories of the Fall of Singapore, the occupation of Malaya and the unique American contribution to peace in the Pacific. China’s rise and its future place in the world was far more likely a topic of discussion than nostalgia over the Anglosphere.’

  If elected, her first overseas visit as foreign minister, she announced, would be to Indonesia, and then to Malaysia – ‘the country of my birth’.

  The plan was for her to make a rapid tour of the region, visiting the ASEAN nations and including a made-for-media return to Kota Kinabalu, the city of her birth. It would have been a powerful illustration of her personal story and connections, a statement of Australia’s place in Asia and a public relations coup not within the reach of any previous Australian foreign minister.

  But then came the election defeat.

  So what did Australia miss out on through Penny Wong not becoming the minister for foreign affairs in 2019? The key distinction is not so much on the aims of foreign policy – the commitment to the rules-based order is bipartisan. Rather, it is her commitment to activism, and to not only manage but take the initiative in building coalitions in our region, making this a priority independent of the relationship with the United States.

  In July 2019, the new US ambassador to Australia, Arthur Culvahouse, signalled that the United States would expect Australia to be ‘even more supportive’ of US policy in the Pacific. ‘That may include calling out malign influences where they see them.’ He called on Australia to play ‘a great power leadership role’ in the region, and said the Australia–US alliance was ‘solemn and unbreakable’ and the United States would ‘absolutely’ come to Australia’s aid if it were threatened by a foreign power.

  Culvahouse’s words could be read as an encouragement for Australia to remain in the US slipstream. Certainly, they telegraphed that the nation expected Australia to choose between the United States and China, and assumed that choice would be for the United States.27

  If Penny Wong had been foreign minister, it is reasonable to expect that she might, ever so politely and carefully, have pushed back – or at least made another speech affirming the need for the United States to stay engaged with the region, but pointing out what other work needed to be done.

  *

  Penny Wong voted for Anthony Albanese to be leader of the Labor Party in 2013. Albanese won 60 per cent of the vote among rank-and-file party members, but lost in the caucus.28

  So what was it like for Penny Wong over the next six years, working for a leader she had not supported in the ballot? Commentators generally saw the relationship between Shorten and Wong as positive. Insiders confirm the communication between their offices was good. She was credited with being one of his key advisers, part of a trusted ‘inner circle’.29 She did not leak; she did not undermine. There were occasional rumblings that Albanese was doing the numbers, both after the 2016 election defeat and in the lead-up to the Super Saturday raft of by-elections in mid-2018. Shorten’s performance in both quashed any nascent leadership speculation. There was never any suggestion that Wong was anything but loyal to her leader during this time.

  Yet there is a curious fact about Wong’s role in the Shorten opposition that has gone largely unremarked. Early after the 2016 election she withdrew from the Opposition Expenditure Review Committee – the part of the policymaking framework that examines tax and spending policy. Given she was a former finance minister and the third most senior person in the parliamentary party, her withdrawal was significant. Wong rejoined shortly before the 2019 election, but for the period when the spending and taxation policies were presumably being devised, she was not on this committee. There is clearly a backstory – but not one that Wong will share.

  Asked about the election loss, she is careful to make clear she regards herself as responsible, together with the rest of the leadership team, for the policies and the campaign. ‘I am not trying to duck anything,’ she says. ‘I don’t think it’s ethical to do so, and I was part of the leadership group. We decided together on these things, and we all signed off on the policy package.’

  In the media conference after the 2019 election at which she backed Albanese for the leadership, and again in the final interview for this book, she resisted too rapid an assessment of what had gone wrong for Labor. The election loss is now being reviewed by Jay Weatherill, her old friend and ally – although she says she did not suggest his name – and Craig Emerson. Wong says she thinks all the policies will have to be reviewed, together with the impact of the campaign and the leadership.

  Yet her withdrawal from the ERC tempts the conclusion that she was not always comfortable with the decisions of the committee.

  Against this, there has been a line of media commentary in the wake of the defeat that part of the problem for Labor was that Shorten, although from the Right, bought into and prosecuted a Left agenda – and that the Left is now too powerful in the parliamentary party. In this argument, Wong is sometimes mentioned explicitly, sometimes implicitly.

  I put this view to Wong. She responded that it was completely wrong: ‘I am a lot more fiscally conservative than a lot of my colleagues. Haven’t they noticed that?’

  When I tell her that Gareth Evans has suggested it is a ‘category error’ to see her as from the Left, she laughs uproariously, then says, ‘I’ve been finance minister. I know that when you spend money you have to work out how to pay for it. Of course I’d love to spend more on health and education, but that inevitably has implications for how you raise the revenue, and that has political consequences too.’

  She continues, ‘I was always part of the leadership. So we agreed this policy framework and obviously it didn’t work. So all of us take responsibility.’ And further than that she will not go.

  As for her relationship with Shorten, she says, ‘I was Bill’s Senate leader and I didn’t engage with him, or he with me, thinking that I would then talk publicly about it. So I am not going to do that.’

  Penny Wong was on form as the election approached. On 20 March it was announced that she would receive a major award for political leadership – the McKinnon Prize. It was bestowed ‘for her leadership and advocacy in promoting a more tolerant and inclusive Australia, and for shaping Australia’s foreign policy dialogue’, the media release stated.30 The judging panel that awarded her the gong included former prime ministers Julia Gillard and John Howard. Gillard’s involvement was apparent evidence against Rudd’s claim, published in his memoir a few months before, that she held Wong in contempt. Howard, on the other hand, had been the focus of Wong’s criticism many times. Perhaps significantly, he did not appear on the video reel of the judges saying positive things about her. Other judges in the thirteen-member panel included Business Council of Australia chief executive Jennifer Westacott, former defence secretary Dennis Richardson and the University of Melbourne provost, Professor Mark Considine, who told the media that Wong was ‘remarkable’ for having been able to innovate from opposition.31

  In her acceptance speech, the winner who would soon lose was upbeat about politics. The prize affirmed democracy, she said. She went on to lay out what democracy meant
, and how it related to racism. She was speaking two weeks after the Christchurch mosque shootings, in which Muslim men, women and children had been gunned down by a white racist extremist while at prayer. The perpetrator was an Australian but, said Wong, he did not represent our values.

  Hate speech is inimical to democracy; it must not be normalised; it cannot be defended on grounds of freedom of speech because it inflicts real and direct harm. A central element of the way prejudice works is by dehumanising, by singling out people as outsiders, as second-class citizens, not deserving the protections and dignity afforded to full members of the community.

  Australia was poorer and its democracy more fragile for the debate on Asian immigration, hate speech and the Racial Discrimination Act, she said. The Coalition should preference One Nation last.

  Wong went on to address the question of the times – the one that I have suggested underlies her career. Can Australian democracy and political processes deliver on the needs of the times?

  ‘Many Australians feel that their political leaders are out of touch and that the political system is increasingly dysfunctional, incapable of addressing everyday concerns, let alone longer-term challenges,’ she said. The reasons were many, but among them were ‘hyper-partisanship’ that went beyond the healthy contest of ideas. This was driven by the conduct of political leaders, but also by the rise of social media.

  She mounted a defence of democratic values that, in the light of the 2019 election defeat, is almost poignant. Democracy had allowed the advance of women’s rights, defended the rights of minorities and created an international system that underpinned the world order, she noted. ‘In my first speech in Parliament, I said that prejudice and distrust cannot build a community, but they can tear one apart. Unfortunately, that observation remains as relevant today as it was in 2002 … My hope is that people from across the political landscape will once again work together to articulate and defend the values and principles that underpin who we are and what we believe.’32

  *

  As Paul Keating might have said, a few days later she was throwing the switch to vaudeville.

  She and her opposite number, Leader of the Government in the Senate, Mathias Cormann, were doing their customary double act in the parliament as she pressed him on when the election might be called.

  Cormann: ‘I’m not inside the Prime Minister’s mind.’

  Wong: ‘It might be a little more ordered if you were!’

  And then:

  Wong: ‘You’re going to call the election this weekend …’

  Cormann: ‘I’m not going to call the election.’

  Wong: ‘You, plural; vous.’

  Cormann: ‘We’re speaking French now?’33

  She used Senate Estimates to challenge the cost of taxpayer-funded government advertising in the lead-up to the election – an old chestnut that she had prosecuted in every attempt to defeat Coalition governments since she entered the parliament.

  The poll was finally called on 11 April, scheduled for 18 May.

  Penny Wong was well used during the fray. She campaigned once again with Steve Georganas, now contesting the seat of Adelaide following Kate Ellis’s retirement and an electoral redistribution. She appeared with Bill Shorten on a stage in Box Hill, Melbourne: the centre of the city’s Chinese community. She toured the centres of ethnic Chinese populations, and spoke out about fake news on WeChat. Penny Wong was the face of the campaign in South Australia. In Labor’s mail-outs it was her picture, not the unpopular Shorten’s, that featured prominently.

  But, this time round, Penny Wong was not the campaign spokesperson – her role since the 2007 election. Instead that job was taken by Jim Chalmers. She says this was at her suggestion: she felt the time had come for a fresh face, Chalmers was a good media performer and was from Queensland, which didn’t hurt. As shadow minister for finance, he was across all the portfolios and issues.

  This meant that Wong was not, as in previous years, at campaign headquarters. Each morning she took part in a telephone hook-up of the leadership team. She shared the general view that the first two weeks of campaigning were wobbly, and she was part of measures taken to address that. ‘I thought we retrieved it,’ she says. She was not excluded from the campaign strategy, but at the same time was clearly not as central to it as she had been in previous years.

  On 8 May, a few days before the election, there came a personal low point. It was one of few occasions when Wong’s weakness – her temper and ill-judged aggression – showed in public.

  She was part of a debate in Adelaide including other South Australian senators. At the end of the event, trade minister Simon Birmingham was discussing former prime minister Paul Keating’s comment that Australia’s security and intelligence agencies were ‘nutters’ for their hostility to China. Birmingham suggested Labor was weak on China, mentioning former foreign minister Bob Carr. As Birmingham spoke, Wong was interrupting, shaking her head, accusing him of ‘desperate politics’ and saying it wasn’t in the national interest to be using foreign policy for political advantage. Her eyebrows were in overdrive.

  When the debate wrapped up, she pointedly refused to shake his hand, but did shake the hands of all other senators on stage. Birmingham offered his hand, started when she refused it, and then shrugged. Whatever point Wong was trying to make was overshadowed by what looked like petulance. Her evident lack of good grace was prominent in the news cycle for the day.

  Probably it would have dominated the campaign week, were it not for Bill Shorten on the same day making a tearful speech about his mother after Sydney’s Daily Telegraph falsely suggested he had distorted an account of her career.

  After the election defeat, right-wing magazine The Spectator likened Wong’s failure to shake Birmingham’s hand to Mark Latham’s infamous aggressive handshake with John Howard in the 2004 election campaign, which cemented doubts about his character in the public mind.34 The Spectator, never Labor’s friend, was surely over-egging the incident – but there was a grain of truth. Had it not been for Shorten and his mum, Wong’s lack of good grace could have been a campaign-damaging moment: a rare public display of a less electorally appealing Penny Wong.

  In our final interview, Wong was unapologetic about the incident, and seemingly oblivious to its impact. She said she was ‘furious’ with Birmingham for politicising the relationship with China. There had been conversations between them about how to handle the hold-up of coal exports to China. Together, they’d talked to business and other stakeholders. ‘We’d been incredibly non-partisan about it because there was a national interest there. And in the debate that day I got a question on the China relationship and I gave a bipartisan answer and he went the low road – and he was the trade minister. He should have known better.’

  Her decision to shun his proferred hand was not calculated, she says, but taken in the moment.

  Would she do it again?

  She shrugged. ‘Who knows?’

  I told her it looked terrible.

  She shrugged again. ‘That’s your view.’

  Birmingham and Wong both live in Adelaide. They have known each other for years – at least since 2004, when he was contesting the seat of Hindmarsh and she was managing Georganas’s campaign. There is no getting away from each other in such small circles. They ran into each other in an airport lounge and discussed the incident, and again, ironically, when they were both dropping their children off at the same Mandarin language class. Wong says they shook hands and made up.

  Looking forward, she hopes to be able to talk to Birmingham and the rest of the government on how to have a frank conversation with the Australian people about foreign policy without resorting to accusations of being too close to China, or too cosy with the United States – tired political tropes not suited to the times. This would include acquainting the Australian people with what the costs of preserving our sovereignty might be as China rises.

  Does she think such a conversation will be possible? She shrugs.
‘I don’t know. We’ll see how we go.’

  *

  The question everyone asks when they know you are writing a book about Penny Wong is whether she will ever be prime minister, and if not, why not.

  The simple answer is that she is in the wrong house – the Senate – when prime ministers must sit in the House of Representatives. But couldn’t she change house?

  The better answer is that she has never aspired to the job. Many people have urged her to consider it over the years, including some of her closest allies and friends. She has been entirely consistent, rejecting the idea in private as in public. Partly this is due to her fear of the impact of prejudice: she judges the nation not ready for a gay Asian woman as prime minister. There are two sides to this concern. On the one hand she fears the electoral impact – the percentage of Australians who would change their vote because of her. On the other side, she fears what it would mean for her personally. As she puts it, ‘Why would I do it to myself and my family?’

  But it is also a keen assessment of her own talents, limitations and abilities. She has learned to campaign, and to perform for the media and the public, but it will never be her natural or preferred game. It drains her. As prime minister, selling the government message and performing in public would be an unavoidable and dominant responsibility.

  Nevertheless, some wonder whether she will reconsider if the party’s success seems to depend on it, and when her children are older. Comments John Faulkner, phlegmatically, ‘How long are you going to condemn her to sit in parliament?’