by Anne Summers
Keating was a superb parliamentary performer, able to home in on his opponents’ weaknesses, always finding the right phrase, with perfectly timed delivery. It was essential to who he was and I thought people liked this about him. There was, I discovered, widespread admiration of Keating among some lesbians, mainly academics, for his style and wit. There were other women who’d despised Hawke and who felt Keating was a man who, despite his old-fashioned attitudes towards women, had passions and a vision that the country sorely needed. But my friends were hardly a representative sample; we needed to know what the wider population of women thought.
I was surprised to find that there was no qualitative research. Karen Luscombe, the ALP’s Perth-based researcher, did only quantitative, telephone polling, intended to track voting intentions. I felt we needed research that probed what was influencing women’s views on the government. We needed someone like Barbara Riley, the expert facilitator of focus groups whose report on what we needed to do to fix Ms. had been so devastatingly accurate. Barbara had since married and was now Riley-Smith; she did a lot of work for the NSW ALP, so her credentials were acceptable to the PMO. The only problem was we did not have any money and the ALP was not prepared to pay for it. In the end, Mike Keating, the head of PM&C, said that so long as the research was not party-political it could come from the OSW budget. This would not be a problem. I firmly believed we needed policy solutions, not political gimmicks, to address whatever the research revealed, so it was perfectly legitimate to use taxpayer funds. Even the Opposition, when it found out about the research, was not able to mount a credible case against it. The project had to go to tender and fortunately Barbara’s proposal won. When she had completed the research, we had a report that contained the most thorough exploration of the views of Australian women that had ever been conducted for non-commercial purposes. And it was the first time an Australian government had ever asked women what they wanted.
The twenty focus groups were conducted in every capital city and two regional centres, Geelong and Mackay. In each place there were two groups that were, on Barbara’s recommendation, divided according to age, either under or over 40. Participants were selected on the basis of income; they had to be eligible for some form of government assistance, which in those days was all income-tested, and which cut out at a combined family income of $55,000. There was a mixture of employed and stay-at-home mothers but there were no professionals, no so-called yuppies, and no one who was not struggling financially. Every woman who was in receipt of family allowances (the money for each child paid directly to mothers) knew down to the last cent exactly what her payment was, and most of them said they needed that money for food and other essentials.
The overarching question asked of these women was: what do you think about your own lives and about what the government is doing for women? We were attempting to probe their knowledge of, and satisfaction with, existing policies and services, but we also wanted to tap into how they felt about their lives. Maybe not the government’s business, perhaps, but to me it was impossible to separate the two because, in Australia at least, government programs such as childcare (and, back then, the lack of a government-paid maternity leave scheme) were such big factors in determining whether women could participate in the economy after they had had children.
Mary Ann O’Loughlin and I observed each of the groups, sitting behind the two-way mirror (so that we could not be seen), and listened to these women speaking with remarkable frankness about their lives. In the smaller centres, where there were no professional research rooms, we listened on a loudspeaker strung under the door of an adjoining motel room. It meant we could not see them but their voices came through clearly enough. We listened as Barbara asked the women to describe their lives, to talk about the things that mattered and the things that worried them. They needed little encouragement. It was obvious that many of them rarely got to talk about themselves. The focus groups gave them a chance, especially as they could open up in front of people they knew they would never see again. It turned out to be a great lubricant for honesty and some startling findings.
Inevitably, although Barbara was scrupulous about not asking, many of the women volunteered opinions of the Prime Minister and his wife. We were surprised at how big an issue it was that he wore Italian suits. Some of the women blamed Annita, saying she must have insisted that he wear European, not Australian, clothes. One woman in Brisbane said,
‘Remember when he was Treasurer, he told us to buy Australian but he doesn’t himself.’
The women tended to think that Keating was ‘arrogant’ and ‘cold’ and ‘not interested in ordinary people’. Several expressed distaste for the way he had come to power (by ‘stabbing Bob Hawke in the back’—a sentiment that would also haunt Julia Gillard almost twenty years later). Others liked the way that Keating was so clearly devoted to his family, but they wanted him to engage them more.
‘Smile!’ was the advice many of them gratuitously offered. ‘Lighten up.’
Some time later, I was travelling with the Prime Minister in suburban Perth. We pulled up at traffic lights, and people in the car beside us noticed him. They started pointing and gesticulating, and not in a friendly way. Paul ignored them.
‘Smile!’ I urged him. I was sitting directly behind Paul and had a clear view of the people in the next car.
‘Why?’ he said. He was impatient with such trite political gestures.
‘Please,’ I begged him. ‘Just do it.’
He turned his face, gave them a wave, and one of his big, beautiful and infectious grins. The transformation was remarkable. The people in the car broke into huge smiles, and their hands, which a moment earlier had been giving him the finger, returned the wave. Then the lights changed. We zoomed off and Paul went back to muttering into his mobile. Persuading Paul that he needed to engage with the public was a frustrating and mostly futile job. It wasn’t who he was. Which, of course, was what made him special. But there was an election to be won.
The focus group findings were utterly unambiguous and remarkably uniform across the entire country; there were no discernible state or regional differences. Australian women valued the independence and choices their lives provided, even when those choices were accompanied by the stress of the double load of housework and raising children with outside employment. They did, however, feel their work was undervalued and that men did not do enough to share the load. When asked what issues were important to the country, they nominated employment (including unemployment), and education and training. But when asked what was important to them as women, the answers were unanimous. They had three overwhelming concerns: childcare, women’s health and violence against women. Stark and simple and, for a federal government, extremely challenging.
Childcare was of course a federal responsibility, but as I knew from my time in OSW a decade earlier, one that was contentious—and expensive. But clearly we had to do something. Barbara interpreted the ‘women’s health’ response in two ways. It was women caring for their family’s well-being—and thus wanting to preserve Medicare, which was under threat from the Coalition—but it was also a way of expressing their need for ‘me’ time, some respite from always having to be on duty as mothers or wives or employees. They wanted to be seen as individuals, as the women and girls they once were, before all these responsibilities enveloped their lives. Not a lot we could do about that except by having the Prime Minister respectfully acknowledge the contribution women were making to the country. To let them know they were appreciated. But we needed to look at health and see what we might do—apart from assuring Australians that Medicare would be safe under a Keating government.
But it was the response on violence that staggered us. Almost every woman mentioned it. In order to get rankings of what the women viewed as the most important issues, Barbara asked them to imagine they had a budget of $100 and to allocate the money according to their priorities. In Mackay, Queensland only one of the nine women in the group did not inclu
de violence on her list, and two of them allocated 40 per cent of their entire budget to dealing with violence. I found this outcome extremely confronting. I had no idea violence against women was so extensive, and I did not have a clue how to respond to it. Domestic and sexual violence were state responsibilities, covered by state laws. The federal government had no role—but perhaps it needed to find one. Mary Ann and I briefed the two Dons on the findings and said we would come back with recommendations on what we could do in response to these issues that so clearly troubled Australian women. We had uncovered some very serious problems, issues that had previously not been paid sufficient attention by government. That would have to change, and not just because there was an election looming. Campaign and policy material coming from the state and federal Liberal and National parties was highlighting the same three issues. The budget of the NSW Liberal Fahey government, delivered in early September 1993, emphasised women’s health, childcare and violence against women. All the political parties were uncovering the same discontent and, I was pleasantly surprised to discover, they all felt the need to respond. Maybe, finally, women were about to get the political attention they deserved. What they wanted was clear enough. We just had to work out how to deliver.
Figuring that out, and then doing my best to get it delivered, would occupy most of the time I spent in the PMO. I spent a lot of time consulting widely with women’s groups and key individuals, and I worked closely with Mary Ann on policy ideas. But while we worked on the big policy items—‘kicking goals’ as it was referred to in the office—we also had day-to-day decisions, crises and the occasional opportunity to deal with. For instance, in mid-1992 a vacancy loomed on the board of the Reserve Bank, Australia’s central bank, and arguably the most important board in the country. It had never had a woman member, so I suggested to Keating that he could make history. He was amenable and asked his Treasurer, John Dawkins, to recommend someone. I remember a meeting with a Dawkins staffer who explained that he’d asked Treasury for the names of some suitable women but ‘they couldn’t find any’. They still ‘couldn’t find any’ after several prompts, so Mary Ann and I realised we’d have to find someone ourselves. We consulted OSW’s Register of Women. I was not optimistic, remembering from my days at OSW that this list of women who were nominally suitable for board appointments was not very comprehensive. But, I hoped, maybe it had been upgraded. In fact, almost the very first name the coordinates produced was ideal. We ran it past the Prime Minister and then went back to Dawkins’ office. We’ve ‘found one’, we said, trying not to smirk. They couldn’t argue with Janet Holmes à Court, who was one of Australia’s leading businesswomen, head of the largest construction company as well as helming a number of other companies that had been part of the empire of her late husband, Robert. In fact, they should have been able to find her themselves. The government appointed her to the Reserve Bank Board in August 1992 and she served for five years. Sadly, when her term expired in 1997, Prime Minister John Howard defied usual practice and did not reappoint her, despite her meeting with him and saying she’d like to stay on.3 Instead, a few months later, he appointed Jillian Broadbent, a banker. This helped cement the tradition we had created of appointing women. Fortunately, it has continued and expanded. In 2017, three of the nine Reserve Bank Board members are women. It seems they are no longer so hard to find.
I’d arrived in the office one morning to discover workmen crawling all over my desk.
‘Someone must like you, love,’ I was told when I asked what they were doing.
They were hooking me up to the PM’s communications system, I learned. This meant that Keating could ‘buzz’ me as he could the other advisers. It meant I was no longer just a transient blow-in, but part of the team. Shortly afterwards, I was asked to stay on until the election—whenever that would be. Chip decided to return to New York. He’d spent the three months of our expected stay in Canberra and was bored out of his brain. I was in the office for long hours, he did not have a job, and there were only so many times he could run around Lake Burley Griffin to increase his already peak fitness. More than anything, though, he needed to return to deal with the financial catastrophe that was unfolding back in New York.
Dale Lang had peremptorily cancelled my employment contract, meaning we had no money to pay the mortgage on my apartment. There were no grounds for the cancellation; my contract allowed me to return to Australia for short-term work assignments, and I had done this in the past, but Lang apparently calculated that I would not have the resources to sue for restitution of the payments. And he was right. I learned from the Australian Consulate in New York that someone from the Ms. offices had called, wanting to know how long I would be in Canberra. They made no attempt to ask me. I presumed the $200,000 Lang saved went straight to the Ms. editorial budget. Great for them, if true, but a very nasty problem for me. We could rent out the apartment, although that income would not cover the mortgage and Chip would need to find somewhere cheap to live. My PMO salary was $86,882 per year, pro-rated to my tenure. Starting in July, when Chip returned to New York, I began to send him almost the entire amount each pay period to meet our mortgage payments. With an exchange rate hovering around 50 cents, it was a brutal experience. I moved out of our Yarralumla rental and began to rely on the hospitality of friends.
I was under no illusions that I was an office insider. I was not, and did not expect to be, party to the big political decisions. I could not contribute to discussions about economic settings or foreign policy—although I was gratified when Paul asked me to be the note-taker for his meeting with Irish President Mary Robinson. He spent the first ten minutes or so trying to get her to comprehend the size and complexity of Indonesia. Unlike her tiny island homeland, which you could drive across in a day, Paul demonstrated—with lots of hand gestures—that it took seven hours to fly from one end of the Indonesian archipelago to the other.
I was thrilled that I could now be buzzed, but I also knew that it would never happen. If Paul wanted you, he’d come to you. I’d heard from a former staffer that Malcolm Fraser, when he was impatient, would angrily sweep his hand across the entire console, buzzing every single person in the PMO, to ensure he got the attention of whoever it was he needed to talk to. Paul was not at all like that. I’d be on the phone and look up and see the familiar figure in my doorway.
‘When you’ve got a moment, love,’ he’d say and sit himself down in front of my desk.
‘I have to go,’ I’d say into the phone. No hurry, the Prime Minister would gesture.
Those who saw only the brutality of Keating against his political enemies in Question Time would be amazed at how kind and considerate he could be with people. He knew all the personal stories of his staff and was always ready with advice or practical help. When a staff member had a miscarriage, Keating wanted her to try some of the Chinese remedies that he and Annita used to maintain their health. Whenever you went to The Lodge, the pungent smell of whatever concoction of roots and powders was boiling away on the stove would waft through the rooms. On election night, in March 1993, amid the euphoria and exultation of his unexpected win, and before he had made his victory speech, Keating had taken me aside and said, ‘On Monday, get yourself a ticket to New York and see Chip for a couple of weeks, and then come back and we’ll talk.’
Some in the office thought Keating was too much of a softie. He would take someone into his private office to give them the bad news that they had to be let go. The longer the meeting went, we’d learned from previous experience, the less likely it was to achieve its mission. Yes, there they were emerging from Paul’s office, laughing and shaking hands. Not only not sacked, but now the best of buddies. Very few people ever left the office and almost everyone who has ever worked for Paul Keating is still in touch with him. No other Prime Minister has an annual get-together with his staff as Keating and his PMO still do, more than two decades after he left office. To celebrate the twentieth anniversary of his becoming Prime Minister, in December
2012, there was a really big party at the Bellevue Hotel in Sydney that brought together almost everyone who had ever worked for Paul Keating, including all the federal police and the drivers. The loyalty and affection former staffers have for him is a remarkable commentary on the man, although it is not easy to explain. Perhaps we want to be part of his aura because we all admire his continuing boldness and creativity. He is never short of a killer aphorism to capture the essence of a problem, or a person. (‘All tip and no ice-berg’, to describe former federal Treasurer Peter Costello, showed he has turned this aptitude into an art form.) But more than all that, I think we are dazzled by the breadth and depth of this boy from Bankstown. He had shaped himself into a person who understood in profound detail how the world worked, from economics to geopolitics to aesthetics and beyond, and he was constantly seeking to make it work better. And although he had made it to the very top of the political tree, first as Treasurer and then Prime Minister, he had never left anyone behind. If you were part of any of his story, you remained there. Unless you chose to leave or behaved in such a way that earned his enmity. Once that happened, it was hard to come back.
The first time I flew on the VIP aircraft with Keating was to Perth. As soon as we’d boarded, Paul delved into his battered leather attaché case and, grabbing a handful of CDs, handed them to the steward.
‘He’ll put them on as soon as we’re up,’ he told me, indicating I should sit next to him.
I assumed this was a privilege accorded to first-time flyers. As we taxied to takeoff, Paul retrieved a blue clothbound volume from the attaché case that, he soon revealed to me, was a set of maps of Georgian Sydney. As the music—I think it was Mahler—filled the cabin, he leafed through the book, jabbing with his forefinger to show me the few buildings that still remained. If your only knowledge of Keating’s aesthetic was from the media you would know about his love for French clocks, but you would scarcely be aware of how broadly his taste ranged, and the extent of his expertise. I later learned about an official trip to the UK during which the Prime Minister took a late-night detour to a county somewhere, to the impressive Georgian residence of an Englishman who wanted Keating’s advice on some of the finer points of the restoration he was undertaking.
