by Anne Summers
It was like those times in Canberra when a cabinet minister would ‘drop a story’ on me. I’d be sitting across the desk, doing my usual routine: ‘What happened in cabinet today? Did you make a decision on the national wage case?’ (or the airline strike, or whatever was the big issue of the moment).
‘Anne, you know I can’t discuss confidential cabinet matters,’ he’d usually say. ‘I thought you just wanted some background.’
But sometimes there’d be that magic moment when he would answer my question, sometimes obliquely, sometimes without reference to an actual cabinet decision, but he’d be talking, he’d be singing, and I’d be trying to gauge whether it would be safe to take notes, whether the magic would dissolve if I lost my lock on his eyes. Afterwards, I’d rush outside, perch myself on one of the leather couches that were positioned along the corridors in the Old Parliament House, and furiously write down everything I could remember.
(It wasn’t always a ‘he’. There was one woman cabinet minister, Senator Margaret Guilfoyle, who was initially Minister for Social Security and later, the first woman to be Minister for Finance. She sometimes saw it as a sisterly gesture to drop a story on a women journalist. The men would always complain that she was ‘a tight-arsed bitch who never told you anything’. I would smile to myself. That’s what you think, buster.)
As I listened to the Pakistani Foreign Minister I felt the same rising excitement, the familiar anticipation of the glory that would cover me. This was no grubby little Canberra story; this was a genuine international scoop. I felt I was in the big league. Okay. This was a small country and a little war. It wasn’t as if the US Secretary of Defence was telling me a state secret (although that would happen a few years later) but I allowed myself to feel, just for a moment, as if I were Oriana Fallaci. Then I checked myself. Fallaci would not be sitting here passively receiving the minister’s version of events. She’d be interrogating the little man, demanding he accept responsibility for the crimes of the Zia regime. Or probing his hypocrisy: asking if he drank liquor or otherwise breached the Islamic code. Instead I was sitting there meekly, my shirt stiffening as it started to dry, wondering how I could check what he was telling me.
All journalism is risky. Sources can lie. They can betray you, say they never said what they told you, leaving the reporter stranded and obliged by the code of ethics not to disclose, in order to denounce, the source. We used to debate this in the gallery. What if your source lies? What if he misleads you? Do you still protect him? Yes, the consensus seemed to be, because there will always be a next time when you’ll need him. You can’t ‘burn’ a source unless you are planning a very short career in journalism. And even then, did you really want to be known as a dobber?
Back at the hotel I phoned the Australian Ambassador.3 The diplomatic circle in Islamabad, a political capital like Canberra and Brasilia, that had no reason for existence outside government, was as bored and isolated as if they were confined to a compound the way diplomats in some other countries are. They thrived on rumour and speculation, hungry for any tid-bit they could report back home to help their careers along. Subsisting on such a diet, they are unusually alert to changes in nuance or phraseology that signals a new policy direction. Like fashion experts, they sense things before they become evident to the eye.
‘Does this sound plausible?’ I asked, trying out the story on him.
‘He had heard a whisper,’ he said.
I decided to go with it. Over a scratchy telephone line I dictated to a copytaker in Sydney the details of the peace initiative that was to be launched under Pakistan’s sponsorship in the coming days. The next morning I got a herogram from Max Walsh.
‘Great story,’ he cabled. ‘Reuters picked it up and it’s running worldwide.’
I was ecstatic but there was no one to share the glory with. No admiring or envious peers, no angry Prime Minister on the phone, not even the satisfaction of having the paper and seeing my byline over an international scoop. Instead I called Zia’s office, and once again I was assured that everything would be okay. The President was going to Baluchistan next week. I could go with him. There would be plenty of time to talk on the plane. I did not believe them. I decided to go to Karachi where, I’d been told, there was a chance I could meet the Bhutto women. An interview with them would in so many ways be better.
I was woken at around 2 a.m. by someone battering on my door.
‘Miss, Miss,’ a man was calling. It was the desk clerk from downstairs. ‘You have a telephone call from Australia.’
I followed him down the eight flights of stairs as, of course, the lift wasn’t working, and picked up the phone.
‘Doctor!’ It was Max Walsh. ‘Fraser’s called an election. You’ve got to come home.’
I left the next morning and, as planned, travelled via Karachi but discovered it could take weeks to arrange to meet the Bhutto women. That was out of the question, but then I got a summons from the Thai Consul-General. Could I get myself to Bangkok? Immediately. Since it was on my way, I figured Why not!
I got there too late. The Thai government had invited a select number of journalists to a very special interview that involved travelling to the Cambodian border. They had left an hour before I arrived. I would never get another opportunity to interview Pol Pot, whose murderous Khmer Rouge regime had been toppled in December the previous year, when Vietnam invaded Cambodia. Pol Pot was now hiding out in the jungle near the border. He had, with the support of the Thai government, resumed guerilla activities against the Vietnamese-imposed regime, and it seemed the Thais wanted to showcase this to the international media. It was important because Pol Pot’s was still the internationally recognised government of Cambodia. Back home Malcolm Fraser was locked in a ferocious battle with his Foreign Minister Andrew Peacock about whether to de-recognise Pol Pot. At the meeting they had just attended in New Delhi, Singapore’s Prime Minister Lee Kwan Yew had made clear that Pol Pot’s regime was to be preferred over the Vietnamese puppets, and the Americans had a similar view. Peacock said he was willing to resign over the issue. On 12 September Fraser had called a federal election, and thus deferred the showdown with Peacock over Pol Pot until after the poll. I met with Gordon Jockel, Australia’s Ambassador to Thailand, that afternoon in Bangkok to try to understand this messy diplomatic situation.
That night at the airport, while I waited to fly back to Sydney, I went over in my mind what a disaster the trip had been. I had not managed to interview General Zia; I had not met Benazir Bhutto; and now, I had missed out on a once-in-a-lifetime interview with one of the great mass murderers of our time. At least, I consoled myself, the wires had picked up my story on the four-way peace plan. Then I learned that, just hours after my little story had whizzed around the world, Iraq had invaded Iran. A much bigger story. A real, headline-grabbing war. My little scoop evaporated into the ether.
The federal election of 19 October 1980 swept away the commanding majority Malcolm Fraser had enjoyed since 1975. Labor obtained 49.6 per cent of the vote and won 51 seats, a gain of thirteen. Among the new Labor members was Bob Hawke, former president of the ACTU and a man who was impatient to be Prime Minister. The only question was how long it would take him to dislodge Bill Hayden and then defeat Fraser. Politics was suddenly getting a lot more interesting than it had been for my first two years. The first ructions came from the Liberal Party, however, on 28 April 1981, when Andrew Peacock resigned from cabinet in protest at Fraser’s style of government. He had already declined to be reappointed Minister for Foreign Affairs after the 1980 election and had become Minister for Industrial Relations. At a leadership ballot called by the Prime Minister that April evening in 1981, Peacock was defeated. He retired to the backbench. For a time, he and Hawke had nearby offices and the crowds of journalists, lobbyists, politicians and others who trod the constant path to their doors gave the corridor the appearance of housing a government-in-exile.
I was fortunate to be able to cover two leadership challenges,
one change of leader and a change of government during my time in the Press Gallery. There had not been such political upheaval since the days of the Whitlam government. We journalists became accustomed to hanging around in Kings Hall waiting to hear the outcome of leadership challenges, something that had not happened since 1971 when, for the first time in Australian political history, a sitting Prime Minister was deposed. John Gorton had instigated a ‘spill’ to test the numbers for his leadership—and lost. Today, such challenges are more frequent and journalists often learn the outcome, via text from inside the party room, as soon as the counting is completed but we had to wait, often for a very long time, until the party tellers came and gave us the formal results. Bob Hawke had failed in his first challenge to Hayden on 16 July 1982, but seven months later the party installed him as leader at a shadow cabinet meeting in Brisbane just as, in faraway Canberra, Malcolm Fraser was driving to Government House to seek a double-dissolution. Fraser believed he had outwitted Labor which, he calculated, would not change leaders once an election had been called. But, as the press described it at the time, Fraser was caught with his pants down. Labor had already made the switch and it was too late for the election to be called off. Labor went on to win a 25-seat majority in the House of Representatives on 5 March 1983, in a victory that would see Labor remain in power first under Hawke then, from late-1991, under former Treasurer Paul Keating, until 1996.
Hawke had promised reconciliation and consultation after the divisive Fraser years and one of his earliest initiatives was the National Economic Summit, held in April 1983. It was unprecedented for the leaders of business, the trade unions, and state and federal government to come together to agree on a national economic strategy. Many of the business leaders had never met a trade unionist before, and none of the participants—apart from the state premiers—had ever been in the House of Representatives chamber where the summit was held. Hawke knew how to impress. There was a dinner at The Lodge—most of them had never been there before either—and more hospitality at Government House. At the end of the three days, the summit had agreed to Hawke’s economic proposal for a Prices and Incomes Accord, designed to return to centralised wage fixing and to control both unemployment and inflation, using tools such as government-provided services and social policies (including the reintroduction of Medicare) that became known as a social wage, and which alleviated the need for wage increases. It was a new and conciliatory way of working, and it became something of a signature approach of the Hawke government. As did policies to benefit women. One of the earliest acts of the government was to upgrade women’s policy by moving the Office of Women’s Affairs into the Prime Minister’s department, and in September it introduced sweeping sex discrimination legislation. Both had been promised during the election and were seen as important in attracting women’s votes which, for the first time, were decisive in delivering victory. Not that the Press Gallery was especially interested in either the politics or the policies affecting women. They preferred to focus on what they saw as the main game.
I had taken six weeks off straight after the election to write Gamble for Power4 and I was pleased at how well it was received, especially as it was one of several books written about the election. Perhaps I could become a chronicler of Australian politics in addition to my daily journalism. Like the rest of the Press Gallery, I was caught up in the palpable excitement of the new government, its energy and reformist spirit, and I was relishing reporting this sea change in Australian politics. I could see myself writing more books on politics. Then a phone call changed everything. Susan Ryan, who had become Labor’s first-ever woman cabinet minister and was Minister Assisting the Prime Minister on the Status of Women as well as Minister for Education, rang to say she thought I should apply for the newly advertised job of running the upgraded and renamed Office of the Status of Women.
I had not planned on leaving. I liked the rush of daily journalism, the urgency of getting, and confirming, a story, trying to scoop my colleagues from other news outlets. I liked the travel, even if arriving on a Prime Ministerial RAAF plane, and staying in only the best hotels did not really give you an idea of what a place was like. I liked the easy access to power that went with being a journalist, especially with the nation’s only daily financial newspaper. I could get virtually anyone in business or politics on the phone, including senior public servants who, I soon learned, were best called at home on Sunday afternoons when they were relaxed and comparatively unguarded. Public servants were not gagged the way they are now. They actually saw it as a duty to help ensure that newspaper reports were accurate and relevant.
I had also just been elected President of the Parliamentary Press Gallery, the first woman to hold the position. I’d been urged to run by colleagues who felt the long-term incumbent, Peter Costigan, bureau chief for the Melbourne Herald, was treating it as a sinecure. He did not like being challenged and while the contest might have seemed light-hearted on the surface, underneath it was deadly serious. Costigan ran with what he thought was the hilarious slogan, ‘May the best man win’. I countered with ‘Go for the Doctor’, thinking I might as well capitalise on my newly conferred title with a racing term that meant to try really hard but which, I was informed by Gary O’Neill, had another far racier meaning that had nothing to do with the track. I’d had to campaign, which included asking Gallery gods like Alan Reid, Wally Brown, Rob Chalmers and Ian Fitchett, who had been there for decades, to vote for me, a neophyte, and a woman. And I’d won—by a large margin. How could I walk away—just a few weeks later?
I asked Max Walsh what he thought. He was now with the Packer organisation, working with the Bulletin and Channel 9’s Sunday program. As he was no longer my boss, I thought he might offer an objective opinion; he would certainly grasp the allure of the offer. The Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet (PM&C), where women’s policy was now located, was the epicentre of political and bureaucratic power. It would be fascinating to see how it all worked. But it would be a drastic shift to move from reporting to government, from observing to being a player.
‘Would look great on your CV,’ was all he said.
There were a lot of things to consider. Even though the job was a public service appointment and I would have to go through all the proper processes, I would be seen as Hawke’s person. That was unlikely to be an advantage within PM&C. And I would be turning my back on journalism, which had been my life for eight years now. Would I ever be able to return to it? For my generation of journalists, apart from the intrinsic rewards of covering society with your reporting, the job offered us worlds that would not otherwise have been open to us; already my passport had many more stamps than I could ever have imagined. Only my job as the international board chair of Greenpeace, in the early 2000s, enabled me to travel to more countries. As a journalist, I was able to not just meet a very wide range of political, business and other leaders but to engage with and, in some cases, befriend them. I was able to move easily into entertainment circles, to become on first-name terms with actors and film directors and those in their worlds. It was easy to forget that there was a bargain entailed in this intimacy. As I would discover several times in my future when I again moved from the media, the terms of your entry into this glamorous world are very stark. You learn quickly once you are no longer in the job that you are no longer of any use. The friends quickly disappear and the invitations stop overnight.
Leaving the Press Gallery had its risks but the opportunity, in the end, was irresistible. I was being offered a chance to help advance women’s equality in Australia in a unique and unprecedented way. My previous efforts had been through activism or writing. Now I had the prospect of learning how to use the power of the bureaucracy to actually deliver the policies we activists had long argued and campaigned for. The newly elected government had promised to make these policies a priority and had already started to do so. I would be irresponsible, I told myself, if I did not step up to the challenge.
CHAPTER FIVE<
br />
MANDARINS VERSUS MISSIONARIES
Were it not for Canberra’s ever-present trees, I would have almost been able to see Parliament House from my new office in the Edmund Barton Building on Kings Avenue. But I might as well have been a million miles away from my old workplace, so different was my new world. It was quiet and spacious, for one thing, and very low-key. None of the crowding or the rowdiness of the Press Gallery, or the constant hurried movement of politics. Here, in the centre of bureaucratic power, the colour was beige, the pace was slow and relations were extremely formal. My PhD was now an advantage: I was Dr Summers, First Assistant Secretary, Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, or as the mandatory acronyms had it: FAS PM&C.
It was my very first day in the new job and I was being shown where I fitted in.
‘There you are,’ said the man who was guiding me through the organisation chart of the department, Status of Women.
Or, as the acronym on the chart described us, SOW.
I looked sharply at the man. Was he sniggering behind that po-face?
‘I don’t think so,’ I said.
This one I had to win. Every division in PM&C was known by its acronym. They included ESP (Economic and Social Policy), INT (International), CAB (Cabinet Office) and P&G (Parliamentary & Government). We had been the Office for Women’s Affairs—OWA—before being given a new name to announce our promotion to divisional status with all the power and prestige that went with that, but we would never be taken seriously if our official name was a female pig. I made my case to Alan Rose, the Deputy-Secretary to whom I reported. Maybe he spoke to Sir Geoffrey Yeend, the Secretary, but it was soon official: the acronym for the Office of the Status of Women was changed to OSW.
My path to PM&C had been neither smooth nor inevitable. I had taken a few discreet soundings and been encouraged to go for the advertised job of running women’s policy for the Hawke government but I had to be careful. What if I applied and didn’t get it? In the end, I told myself, how could I not go for it? My five years with the Financial Review had taught me to appreciate the power of PM&C. Imagine, I fantasised, bringing that bureaucratic clout to ensuring that women’s interests were taken into account in government decision-making. I wrote the application, got myself up-to-date on what I hoped were the relevant policy issues, lined up referees and soon found myself in front of the selection panel headed by Ed Visbord, the charming but tough-minded Deputy Secretary of PM&C responsible for the economic areas, and someone I used to speak to quite often in my job at the Financial Review. Now he would decide whether a poacher could become a gamekeeper.
