Perhaps because she is different from other politicians, Penny Wong tends to be what one of her staffers described as ‘a floating signifier’ – a symbol with no agreed meaning. She absorbs meaning as well as projecting it. In these populist times, people tend to see her as what they wish her to be, rather than what she is. Thus, she is popular – at least with lefties – without being populist. There is a cult of Penny Wong. There is a Twitter account devoted to her eyebrows. She is assumed to be more conventionally left-wing than she really is, and somehow above or outside the dirty business of politics when one of the central points of this book is that she is decidedly in the room, inside and of politics. One of the first things she published as an adult was the On Dit article in which she argued that professional political representation was the most important service. That remains her vocation.
Yet the cult of Penny Wong has enduring power because it is not built on fiction. Intellectually, Penny Wong is clearly head and shoulders above most of her colleagues. She is one of the most significant political talents of our times – or, as she might put it, ‘of our generation’. She is both principled and pragmatic. In all of Labor’s troubles since she entered the Australian parliament, Penny Wong has emerged from each stage with her reputation enhanced and her influence increased. Her political judgement has usually been acute.
We tend to idealise politicians who appear different from the pack, and then tear them down when they inevitably disappoint. Despite her talents, it is easy to imagine this happening to Penny Wong if she were in the top job. Racism, misogyny and homophobia aside, the aspects of her character that constitute her chief weakness – the sometimes ill-judged aggression – would likely be more apparent. She is charming, but also cutting. She is fiercely intellectual, yet also emotional. Her Senate colleagues talk ruefully about her temper. One told me that ‘repair work’ had to be done after a Wong display of temper against her own.
Whether or not Wong has a clear-eyed view of her weaknesses, she certainly understands her strengths. Her natural strength is policy and strategy. In other words, she is well suited to the leadership of the party in the Senate.
So Penny Wong will almost certainly never be prime minister. Yet she will lead. The opposition is now dominated by her allies. Albanese is leader largely because of her support. Asked why she backs him, she says she believes he has the capacity for a strong relationship with the Australian people. His principles are visible in his support of gay rights, long before it was popular. As well, she credits him with ‘holding the government together’ during the years of minority government under Gillard. ‘I think that’s sometimes taken for granted. We would not have stayed in government without Albo. Gillard certainly cut the deal with the independents, but he retained the majority in the house. That was by dint of his capacity, his procedural understanding, his rhetorical capacity and his personal relationships.’ In caucus, she says, Albanese is ‘consultative and strategic’. She thinks his leadership will evolve into an election winner.
And, around Albanese, Penny Wong’s allies and collaborators are grouping. Her alliance with Mark Butler is enduring, and important to the party. In addition to Jay Weatherill heading up the election review, Tim Gartrell, the man who ran the same-sex marriage campaign, is now Albanese’s chief of staff.
Against this, some in the parliamentary party speculate that Kristina Keneally’s ascent to the position of deputy leader of the Opposition in the Senate is not necessarily good for Penny. Keneally replaced Don Farrell in that position. Despite all their differences over same-sex marriage, Penny Wong never had to fear that Farrell aspired to her job as Senate leader. Keneally, on the other hand, is an ambitious contemporary of Wong’s, just a few weeks younger, a former premier of New South Wales and a good media performer. Despite being from the Right, Keneally backed Albanese to be leader, and he insisted on her promotion to the frontbench, making a colleague from the Right, Ed Husic, stand aside to give way. Keneally is now shadow minister for home affairs, up against Peter Dutton. Farrell also had to make way, despite earlier making it clear he wanted to keep the deputy’s job, and thinking he had the numbers to do so. Largely, this was about gender balance, with Albanese and Richard Marles as leader and deputy leader in the lower house. The two women in the Senate were to maintain balance in the leadership team, as Plibersek and Shorten had epitomised before the election.
Wong rejects any view of herself and Keneally as rivals. They are allies, she says, and Keneally has earned her place. ‘She is a very good performer. I think she knows how to throw a political punch. She’s got political courage … I think it was important for the Labor Party to have another woman in the leadership.’ Others, perhaps falling into the misogynistic trope that senior women must necessarily be adversaries, suggest that for the next three years Wong may have to look over her shoulder. The stability of the arrangement is one of the questions surrounding Labor’s immediate political future.
What happens if Labor doesn’t win the next election, expected in 2022? By then Wong, at fifty-three, will have been in the Senate for twenty years – a long and exhausting run. Will she quit politics if Labor fails next time around?
She doesn’t answer the question.
She says her father was the member of the family who used to construct long-term plans. ‘I remember always thinking that he had five-year plans and seven-year plans, and I just did the next thing, and then the next. You can have all these plans, and then life does something different and you have spent all this mental energy on complex plans that are entirely in your head … That sounds a bit fatalistic, but it’s also a sort of weariness, I think, that comes with being fifty.’
*
In our final interview, Penny Wong reflected on this book and her initial opposition to it.
‘I know I was pretty hard on you,’ she said. ‘And in a perfect world I would prefer that this wasn’t being done. But I hope there is something about whatever story you write that has some benefits.’
I asked her what she thought those benefits might be.
She responded there was the obvious thing – a high-profile gay person as a role model for others and ‘that meaning something to vulnerable people – but you don’t have to do a book for that’.
I said that as the book had proceeded I had come to think of it as being about politics itself: how hard it is, the price that is paid in the struggle to make change, and both the necessity and inevitability of compromise, even when – as with climate change – such compromise may do us in. I was thinking that perhaps, as with a tragic play, the audience might leave with a greater understanding of the human affairs it depicted. Perhaps they might also grasp the humanity behind the headlines – and what it meant for a person of talent, passion and principle to devote herself to delivering the service of political representation.
She agreed. ‘There are pretty fundamental questions about democracy right now, and maybe my career is just a small way in which we can have that discussion about what we hope and expect of political representatives and the polity, and what we can do better. Not just me and my colleagues, but the media and the broader community.’
Did she still believe that it was possible to meet the needs of the nation through democratic political processes?
‘I have to,’ she said. ‘What is the other path? We see the rise of authoritarianism and nationalism. These are bad things. History should remind us of that. So what’s the alternative? We have only this path.’ She quoted Churchill’s famous saw about democracy being the worst form of government, except for all the others.
Penny Wong had come to our interview without having had breakfast. She had been up late because of her Q&A appearance, woken, done a work-out in her hotel and gone straight to a meeting. While we spoke she consumed a honey sandwich out of a brown paper bag.
Now she was late for her next meeting. The following week she was going on holiday with her kids.
And then there would be the next thing, and the next
.
She swigged the dregs of a coffee, balled up her brown paper bag and swept the table clear of crumbs.
PICTURE SECTION
Penny Wong was born in the Malaysian city of Kota Kinabalu. Here she is as a child, several years before moving to Coromandel Valley in the Adelaide Hills at age eight.
Francis Wong and Jane Chapman, Penny’s parents, with Penny and her brother, Toby, circa 1972.
At Coromandel Valley Primary, Penny was the only Asian student in her class and was bullied regularly. She learned to guard her internal life fiercely and to show a tough face to the world.
Penny was school captain at the elite Scotch College in Adelaide in 1985. She is pictured here with co-captain Peter Ker.
Family has always been important to Penny, shown here as a teen with Francis (second from the left); his wife, Loris (far right); and other children of the family.
Penny Wong was Australia’s first Asian female senator. In her maiden speech on 21 August 2002, she delivered a rousing condemnation of John Howard’s use of race as a political issue, marking her out as a politician with leadership potential.
Governor-General Quentin Bryce congratulated Penny Wong during a ministerial swearing-in ceremony at Canberra’s Government House.
Penny Wong’s elevation to climate change minister meant she was suddenly big news. Just a week later, the media described her as the star of the 2007 UN Climate Change Conference in Bali.
As water minister, Penny Wong joined Prime Minister Kevin Rudd at Casuarina Sands on 28 May 2008 to announce the purchase of almost 240 gigalitres of water rights: the single largest purchase of water for the environment in Australia’s history.
Baby Alexandra was born on 11 December 2011 to new parents Penny Wong and her partner, Sophie Allouache.
In their home city of Adelaide, Julia Gillard holds Alexandra before the Labor state convention on 27 October 2012. Sophie Allouache stands on Penny’s left, while Jay Weatherill, South Australian premier, stands behind Gillard.
Penny Wong is known as a formidable questioner in Senate Estimates hearings. Public servants and advisers have reported being daunted by the prospect of appearing in front of her on such occasions.
As Leader of the Opposition in the Senate, Penny can be a fiery interlocutor. Speaking in December 2018 on the Sex Discrimination Bill to protect LGBTIQA students, she excoriated finance minister Mathias Cormann across the chamber.
For years, Penny Wong campaigned for marriage equality, at first within the Labor Party, and then in public during the marriage equality postal survey. She is speaking here on the steps of Parliament House in Adelaide at a rally in September 2017.
When the result of the postal survey was released on 15 November 2017,
Penny Wong could not hold back tears. This moment became one of the most widely published images of the historic day. Senators Pat Dodson (left) and Sam Dastyari (behind Wong) and others comforted her and draped her in the rainbow flag.
Penny Wong celebrates the survey result with her second daughter, Hannah, on 15 November 2017.
A long-time supporter and friend of Anthony Albanese (middle), Penny Wong was one of the first to congratulate him when he was elected leader during a Labor caucus meeting on 30 May 2019, replacing Bill Shorten (right).
As the shadow minister for foreign affairs, Penny Wong is a key player in the Labor cabinet and a vital voice as Australia negotiates the Asian Century. She may yet be foreign minister.
Acknowledgements
A book like this incurs many debts of gratitude for its author. First, I would like to thank Senator Penny Wong for her cooperation, despite her antipathy to the idea of the book and the near certainty that she will not be entirely happy with the result. I would also like to thank – or perhaps apologise to – her family, who have had to put up with the slipstream from a project they did not welcome.
Also to be thanked are Senator Wong’s staff, both for practical assistance and for their forbearance and wisdom.
I am indebted to those who agreed to be interviewed, as acknowledged in the list of interview subjects, and to those who gave of their time and perspectives but asked not to be identified.
Ken Haley compiled fearsome books of clippings for me at the beginning of this project, and assisted with fact-checking and chasing down elusive bits and pieces towards the end. Gary Dickson was, as always, assiduous in tracking down information and sorting my references. Natasha Sim visited the archives for me in Sabah, Malaysia.
Thanks are due to the staff of the State Library of South Australia, the University of Adelaide archives, Mr Ramlin Alim at the Sabah State Archives, the researchers at Genealogy SA and Mr Alex Pouwbray, archivist at Scotch College, Adelaide. Thanks, as well, to the staff of Coromandel Valley Primary School and Scotch College for the tours and insights they gave me.
I am indebted to Judith Ajani, Maryanne Slattery and Allan Behm for commenting on drafts of relevant chapters. Ramona Koval and Denis Muller helped by reading proofs.
My colleagues in the School of Media, Film and Journalism at Monash University were consistently understanding and supportive. My family are now experienced in putting up with book projects. They are very good at it, and I thank them.
My agent, Lyn Tranter, looked after my interests with characteristic skill and judgement. Finally, thanks to Aviva Tuffield, who pestered me to do this book in the first place, and to the team at Black Inc.: as always, Chris Feik, and particularly Julia Carlomagno, who saw the project through to completion with care and patience.
Any errors or misjudgements are, of course, entirely my responsibility.
Notes
1: KINDRED OFFSPRING
1Rhiannon Elston, ‘First day: Penny Wong’s journey from shy student to senator’, SBS News, 27 January 2017.
2Fiona Scott-Norman, ‘Penny Wong’, Bully for Them: Outstanding Australians on Hard Lessons Learned at School, Affirm Press, Melbourne, 2014, pp. 217–27.
3ibid., p. 223.
4Jane Cadzow, ‘The pair who have cleaned every prime minister’s office since Bob Hawke’, Good Weekend, 26 January 2019.
5Peter Scriver and Amit Srivastava, ‘Institutionalising the profession in post-colonial Malaysia: the role of Australian-trained architects in the establishment of PAM (Pertubuhan Akitek Malaysia)’, Proceedings of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand: 32, Architecture, Institutions and Change, SAHANZ, 2015, pp. 582–91.
6Mary Penelope Mayo, The Life and Letters of Colonel William Light, F.W. Preece and Sons, Adelaide, 1937, pp. 108–10, and Robert Gouger, ‘Some rough notes of a voyage from Gravesend to South Australia in the Africaine’, entry for 19 November 1836, State Library of South Australia, PRG 1012/1.
7The records are inconsistent on Samuel Chapman’s age, with his obituary suggesting he was born in 1802. However, his wife’s obituary suggests that he was born in 1815, which is also confirmed by records sourced through Ancestry.com.
8South Australian Colonization Commission, ‘Appendix 1’, Annual report of the Colonization Commissioners of South Australia to His Majesty’s Principal Secretary of State for the Colonies, London, House of Commons, 1837.
9Boyle Travers Finniss, ‘Sunday 15 May 1936’, Borrow Collection, Special Collections, Flinders University Library.
10Mary Penelope Mayo, The Life and Letters of Colonel William Light, p. 100.
11Miles Fairburn, ‘Wakefield, Edward Gibbon’, Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, Te Ara – the Encyclopedia of New Zealand, 2014.
12R.M. Gibbs, A History of South Australia (third edition), Peacock Publications for Southern Heritage, Mitcham, 1999, pp. 24–25.
13South Australian Register, Robert Thomas and Co., Adelaide, 11 September 1839, p. 10.
14ibid., 28 November 1849, p. 3.
15ibid., 27 October 1849, p. 3.
16ibid., 15 December 1849, p. 1.
17ibid., 15 April 1882, p. 2.
18The Observer, John Stevens, Adelaide, 2 March 1912,
p. 41.
19Samuel William Chapman Papers, State Library of South Australia, PRG 698.
20ibid.
21Danny Wong Tze-Ken, ‘The Chinese in Sabah: an overview’, in Lee Kam Hing and Tan Chee-Beng (eds), The Chinese in Malaysia, Oxford University Press, Kuala Lumpur, 2000, pp. 381–403.
22Sharon Carstens, ‘Form and content in Hakka Malaysian culture’, in Nicole Constable (ed.), Guest People: Hakka Identity in China and Abroad, University of Washington Press, Seattle, 1996.
23Richard W. Braithwaite and Yun-Lok Lee, Dark Tourism, Hate and Reconciliation: The Sandakan Experience, Global Educators’ Network of the International Institute for Peace through Tourism, IIPT Occasional Paper No. 8, March 2006.
24Danny Wong Tze-Ken, ‘Chinese migration to Sabah before the Second World War’, Archipel, vol. 58, no. 3, 1999, p. 144.
25ibid., pp. 131–58.
26Francis Yit Shing Wong Papers, Sabah State Archives, ANS/KSP/FWYS/C/99/1.
27Australian War Memorial, ‘Stolen years: Australian prisoners of war’, 2017.
28K.G. Tregonning, A History of Modern Sabah 1881–1963, University of Malaya Press, Kuala Lumpur, 1965; also cited in Richard Braithwaite and Yun-Lok Lee, Dark Tourism, Hate and Reconciliation.
29Danny Wong Tze-Ken, ‘Kinabalu guerrillas: the Inanam-Menggatal- Telipok Basel Church connections’, in Chong Tet Loi (ed.), The Hakka Experiment in Sabah, Sabah Theological Seminary, Kota Kinabalu, 2007, pp. 166–88.
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