Unfettered and Alive

by Anne Summers

  Although Steinem and Morgan remained on the masthead of the new Ms., they did not appear to have day-to-day influence, judging by the generous article the magazine’s online news service published upon Betty Friedan’s death in 2006. Nor was there any antipathy to me; even today, back copies of ‘my’ Ms. are offered for sale on their website. I was visiting New York at the time of the City Hall morning tea and Letty Pogrebin got me invited. She and I had stayed in touch over the more than three decades. The gathering was small and characteristically laden with symbolism, comprising a bunch of much older women, the founders, and a group of girls representing the future. A large square Wonder Woman cake formed the centerpiece around which everyone gathered. Gloria Steinem was there, of course, but she studiously avoided any eye or other contact with me while she posed for the cameras, signed autographs and talked to fawning fans. Should I confront her? I debated with myself but then I decided: what was the point? This magazine was nothing to do with me anymore. I felt no nostalgia, or regrets. I was unfettered. I walked away.

  CHAPTER NINE

  PAUL KEATING AND THE LAMINAR FLOW

  In May 1992, I returned to Canberra to take up a short-term job as a political adviser to Paul Keating, who in December the year before had become Prime Minister. A few months earlier I had received a late-night phone call from Don Watson, the writer and former academic; he, along with Hilary McPhee, his wife at the time, were friends of mine and he had recently joined Keating’s office as The Speechwriter. ‘Paul’s got a bit of a problem with women,’ Don told me. ‘We want you to come and help out.’

  It had been Hilary’s idea to ask me to come back and advise on how to improve the gender gap in Keating’s support, he said, and while I was tantalised, I took a fair bit of persuading. Not that I did not think I could do it, despite having been away from Australia for seven years, but I just didn’t see how Paul Keating would want me anywhere near his office. I was too closely identified with his mortal enemy, my previous Prime Ministerial boss, Bob Hawke, whom I’d publicly supported during the leadership stoush. I’d even written, in a cover story for Max Suich’s the Independent Monthly a year earlier, that Keating was ‘despised by about a third of the population’ and had quoted trade union sources describing him as ‘unfocused and undisciplined’. I’d described how Keating punished journalists who displeased him by denying them access. In my Press Gallery days, I had myself been on the receiving end of a couple of Keating telephone ‘sprays’, and he had once handwritten a vitriolic letter denouncing one of my articles, so I presumed he would be unforgiving for my criticisms the previous year.

  ‘If he wants me to work for him, he is going to have to ask me himself,’ I told Don.

  Leaving New York could be risky for me. I was finally starting to find a niche for myself post Ms. magazine. I had a Green Card which meant I could stay in the US and I could work, and I had three Rolodexes full of great contacts, not all of whom had dropped me when I lost the editorship of Ms. I had a literary agent, Gloria Loomis, who was helping me develop a book proposal and I was getting newspaper op-eds published. I hadn’t yet cracked the New York Times, my measure of ‘making it’, but I was getting encouraging notes from editors in response to my submissions, so I hoped it would not be long now. Leaving, even for just three months, might mean I’d never recover the momentum. I had a year left on my Matilda contract, which Dale Lang had picked up, so I could pay my mortgage and other expenses. My prospects were good, I liked to think. Would I be throwing it all away? But my strongest tie to New York was Chip. We had been together for almost three years now, and both of us felt that we’d found our life’s partner. I was not willing to jeopardise that. But what if Chip agreed to come too?

  Keating eventually called me and we agreed I would come for three months. Most of my New York friends were mightily impressed that I had received a phone call from my country’s leader, and I was influenced by the American view that it was a public duty to agree if a political leader asks you to serve. Although it would temporarily throw me off my chosen course, I saw it as a chance to put into practice some of my ideas about how to integrate women’s issues into the mainstream political agenda. ‘To put my mouth where my money was,’ as I said to friends. How could I not do it? Especially as Chip had agreed to accompany me.

  Although I fully expected to return to New York, I took the opportunity of this break from my usual patterns to give up smoking. I had tried many times but could never break a habit I’d had since I was fourteen, and which I associated so closely with writing. I feared I would never produce another sentence without a cigarette burning in the ashtray beside my computer. It was not just the physical addiction; it was who I was. I was a smoker. I lit up when I picked up the phone, or when I sat down to my desk, at parties where I knew no one, after a satisfying meal, whenever I had a drink, or after sex. But I knew that it would undermine my credibility in Canberra if I was one of those people who had to leave not just their desk, but the very building, to huddle outside in the frigid weather to drag on their cigarettes. If I expected to command respect in this job, I had to get rid of the awful habit. I was recommended a hypnotherapist who, I was told, had helped Linda Ronstadt quit. I took a train to Connecticut and spent an hour with a man who got me to tell him why I wanted to stop smoking. He then put me into some kind of hypnotic state, recited these reasons back to me, and sent me on my way. I never smoked again.

  I’d known Paul Keating and got on well with him when I ran the Canberra bureau of the Financial Review and he was Labor’s Minerals and Energy spokesman. He was a frequent visitor to the only bureau in the Press Gallery that properly covered mining and related issues. He was always elegantly dressed himself and he noticed what other people wore. One day, as I walked with him and Max Walsh over to the Lobby Restaurant for lunch, Paul had commented on my new Weiss suit:

  ‘You always were a snappy dresser, Annie.’

  He was the only parliamentarian—probably the only man—I knew who could say something like that without it sounding like a come-on.

  It was apparent then that Paul Keating was an unusual Labor man. He was an independent thinker and even though he was from the notoriously muscular New South Wales Labor right faction, he maintained a close friendship with Tom Uren, the much older leader of the left. He was open to ideas, and to people, from outside his formative experiences. He was married to a beautiful Dutch woman, who had piercing brown eyes and a tangle of long, dark-blonde curly hair. She had been an air hostess (as they were called then) on KLM and they had met on one of her flights. His marriage to Annita was another thing that distinguished Paul Keating from his Labor colleagues, who mostly married girls they had grown up with. And, unlike many of his parliamentary colleagues, he did not have a wandering eye. It was an article of faith in Canberra when I worked in the Press Gallery that Paul Keating was a one-woman man, and that woman was his wife Annita. They had four children and, as I was to learn when I worked for him, Paul was intensely devoted to his kids.

  On my first day in Parliament House, I was taken into the Prime Minister’s office, through the front door, to meet him. The last time I’d seen Paul Keating had been in New York in 1988 at a function for the visiting Treasurer. We’d posed for a photograph, both of us grinning toothily, me holding the latest issue of Ms. with Oprah Winfrey on the cover. Four years later and he had changed. The weight of office and the hard years of getting there showed in the tired lines on his face. His tall, lean frame was encased in the trademark dark Zegna suit, the shirt was white and spotless. His hooded eyes gave him a look of great solemnity. Those eyes would appear expressionless or even cold as he surveyed the room while he talked. It was as if he was scoping for possible pitfalls but then he could, in a second, break into an impish grin that showed too much gum, but which gave him an irresistible and instant charisma. The man who had said he could, if necessary, ‘throw the switch to vaudeville’ once he became Prime Minister, was in fact something of a performer. He could ham it
up for the office or crack a joke (which he often found funnier than his audience) or display a lighter side that would have astonished those who knew him only from his combative Question Time performances. My expected three-months in Canberra would turn into eleven months, and I would be part of the team that delivered Keating his unexpected election victory in March 1993. I got caught up in what became a thrilling and rewarding political journey, one where I developed a deeper appreciation for Paul Keating, and where I gained new insights into what is needed for women to achieve the supposedly simple goal of equality within a democracy. But there were some unanticipated high personal costs and my life would change far more radically than I’d expected when I agreed to do that short-term stint.

  Perhaps unsurprisingly, not everyone welcomed me back as Keating and most of his team in the PMO, as the Prime Minister’s Office was called, did. Some of my new colleagues were worried that I was too much in the limelight, committing the cardinal crime of a staffer taking attention away from her boss. I gave no interviews but that did not diminish the non-stop media interest, at times verging on obsession, in my presence on Keating’s staff. There were constant stories, including a lengthy profile in Good Weekend, that described me as responding to ‘a Prime Ministerial SOS’. It was accompanied by a lurid illustration that depicted Keating and me on a small boat using a fish hook to catch women.1 None of this helped me, or the job I had been asked to do. The national ALP, which already had a poor relationship with the PMO, was affronted. The team at OSW was nervous about what it meant for them to have a former head of the Office at the centre of power. I soon learned that relations were severely fractured after OSW had made disparaging comments about a PMO-drafted, and very poorly received, speech Keating had delivered on International Women’s Day in Brisbane. Peter Walsh, who had been Minister for Finance in the Hawke government, and an old foe from my days at OSW, later wrote that Keating had ‘recycled Anne Summers … [who] quickly set about inflicting policy damage on the government.’2

  As I understood it, my job was to help improve Paul Keating’s standing with women, but I was given no specific brief or guidance about how to do that. That was fine with me as it meant I was not curbed by a rulebook or precedents, but first I needed to understand why women did not like the Prime Minister. Perhaps then we could set about persuading them to look at him differently, maybe even vote for him. ALP National Secretary Bob Hogg had briefed the advisers that there was a 3 to 4 per cent gender gap against the government. In the 1980 election, Labor had closed what had been big gender gaps in the previous two elections—setting them up for victory in 1983—he said, and in 1983 and 1984 more women than men had voted Labor. In the previous three elections—1984, 1987 and 1990—women had started out being anti-Labor but that gap had closed during the campaign. Now, Hogg told us, the polls were suggesting an entrenched resistance. The ALP’s private polls were more encouraging than the published polls that had a gender gap of 7 per cent in women’s approval, which was better than the 10 per cent it had been earlier in the year, but still not enough to put Keating in a winning position. I had come to the job thinking that it would not be any kind of gimmickry, but rather sound policy, that would be most likely to persuade women to rethink their views on Keating. But I was keen to know what my new colleagues thought.

  The PMO was a large, busy set of offices located on the ground floor at the rear of what I could not stop myself calling the ‘new’ Parliament House. (It was four years now since the Parliament and the several thousand people who worked in it had decamped from the ‘old’, and supposedly temporary, building it had occupied further down the hill towards Lake Burley Griffin since 1927, and where I had worked ten years earlier in the Press Gallery.) The PMO was remarkably quiet for a place where 30 or more people worked, usually on deadlines, always with urgency and often with a fair amount of friction among us. And that was before you took into account the disputes and, at times, outright brawls, that walked through the door in the form of the Prime Minister’s cabinet colleagues. The PMO was the centre of gravity of the government, where the power resided, the deals were done, and the future course of the nation decided. But being there did not feel as exciting as I’d imagined. Everyone was calm, and supercool. Unless, as sometimes happened, tempers broke through, shouts replaced the usual murmurs and, once or twice, someone even threw something. But there was laughter. Lots of it. That, more than tension, was our lubricant.

  Each of the advisers had their own office. Even me, the latecomer for whom there was initially no space. In a surprisingly generous gesture, the drivers gave up their sitting room. They decamped to an area just outside, where there were couches and a television and where those staff who did not go into the House with Paul would gather on sitting days to watch Question Time. My room was large and windowless, but I found that I could rent paintings from Art Bank and soon my walls were covered with large dramatic works, all of them by women. Might as well advertise what I’m here for, I thought.

  I already knew several of the advisers. Apart from Don Watson, whose office was close to mine so that we were constantly running in to each other; there was John Edwards, now an economics adviser but whom I’d known for many years through his several incarnations as a journalist in Sydney and Washington, ministerial adviser to Clyde Cameron in the Whitlam government and author of a book on the MX missile; and Simon Balderstone, the amiable environmental adviser who had previously worked for Graham Richardson and my old friend Mary Ann O’Loughlin who, I was surprised and delighted to discover, was social policy adviser. I soon got to know the others. Anne de Salis, who had been the first woman to be appointed to the senior executive service in Treasury and was now in charge of administering the PMO as well as advising on immigration; Ric Simes, another economist; and political advisers Stephen Smith, a former ALP State Secretary from WA, and Mark Ryan, who’d moved from running media for Premier John Cain in Victoria initially to become Keating’s press secretary. Smith would leave soon to become a candidate for a federal seat back in his home state. Ashton Calvert was the foreign policy adviser, a calm and quintessential bureaucrat on the surface, but when a few months later Keating decided to overturn the ban on allowing gays to serve in the military and he and I were the unlikely duo given carriage of the issue, I saw his steely core and his deft strategic mind. He left the PMO to become Ambassador to Japan and, later, served for seven years as Secretary of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. I had less to do with the Press Office, where there were five or six people in a separate suite of rooms that were connected to the PMO, but not accessible to the journalists, although Greg Turnbull, the press secretary, was always around.

  The secretaries and assistants were a tireless and talented lot, without exception all women, whose job was to answer non-stop ringing phones, take dictation and produce letters, speeches, memos or whatever other documents the Prime Minister or his advisers needed, and to generally ensure the place ran efficiently. Gina Bozinovski was assigned to me; she already had two other advisers to look after but she took on the extra burden without complaining, and was always cheerfully competent in the midst of the chaos that invariably accompanied the producing of a major speech or policy announcement. She later went to law school and is now a successful corporate counsel in Queensland. There were other staffers: the person in charge of the diary, and someone who tried to coordinate all movements, and Guy Nelligan who was officially called a butler and whose job was to ensure Paul had his constant cup of tea or whatever other sustenance he required. Deborah Hope, who I’d known from her days as a Fairfax journalist, was an adviser to Annita Keating. She and husband John Edwards used to arrive in the office each morning with hair still wet from their morning swim and were known—behind their backs—as ‘John and Ilsa’, after the champion teenage swimmers Jon and Ilsa Konrads, who during the 1950s and 60s had broken virtually every world swimming record. Presiding over all of us was Don Russell, the former Treasury official who had been with Paul since hi
s days as Treasurer and was now Chief of Staff. His tall, sinewy frame, topped by a totally bald pate, was a calm and unifying presence seemingly able to absorb any amount of bad news without appearing ruffled.

  Although I kept my head down while I surveyed the scene, assessing how I would do the job, I was soon receiving a never-ending stream of visitors, most of them women. They were lobbying, putting their case for or against measures the government was, or was rumoured to be, about to implement. And there was the massive volume of phone calls, letters and faxes. There was tremendous excitement about my presence in Canberra, and a lot of gratitude that there was now access in the PMO of a kind that had not existed since Elizabeth Reid had been women’s adviser to Gough Whitlam in the early 1970s. I saw, or talked to, as many people as possible. I wanted to reconnect. I wanted to hear what was on women’s minds. I felt humbled to receive a visit from Edna Ryan, the lifelong fighter for women’s rights who was then aged 89 and who was upset about the government’s proposed changes to superannuation that, she argued, would disadvantage women. My visitors also included backbenchers and even ministers, who calculated that mine was yet another voice that could get to the Prime Minister and help them with whatever their case was.

  It was an article of faith in the PMO that women were antagonised by Keating’s aggressive behaviour in Parliament, principally during Question Time, but I was not convinced that it was such a problem. I knew plenty of women who admired Keating for precisely this reason. They, along with the rest of the country, roared when Keating responded to Opposition Leader John Hewson asking during Question Time on 15 September 1992, why he would not call an early election: ‘The answer is, mate, because I want to do you slowly.’ There was a similar reaction on 2 November, when he referred to the Senate as ‘unrepresentative swill’.