No Job for a Woman

by Sallyanne Atkinson

  In hindsight it is easy to see there had been signs that things were not going well. When I passed by the City Hall pre-polling booth where people lined up to vote the day before the election, there was an air of sullenness in the queue. The media had lost its enthusiasm for me; I could pinpoint the moment. When I announced that I was not going to run for a federal seat I could almost hear the collective sigh of disappointment: the media had lost their ‘Sallyanne goes to Canberra’ story. Almost immediately I became ‘Atkinson’ instead of ‘Sallyanne’, and unflattering photos became the norm. I did feel cross at the lack of attention to what I felt were serious matters. For example, a few weeks before the election I opened the city’s, and probably Australia’s, first asphalt recycling plant where we would re-use bitumen, but this got no coverage.

  But these were signs, not reasons. Like most grand disasters and failures these were many and complex. Even at school when we learned, for example, the reasons for the French Revolution or the outbreak of World War I, I always felt there was a lot more behind them than we were told. There were people who said that voters had wanted to slap me down, given this widespread assumption that I was going to win – a sort of ‘We don’t want her to get too big for her boots’ reaction. Academic Doug Tucker was later to talk of the ‘phenomenon of pluralistic ignorance’ where many voters who, thanks to the media, believing me to be invincible, cast a protest vote without actually wishing to see me lose. They didn’t realise that if enough people did that I would be out of office, and so I was.

  The campaign certainly managed to portray me as someone who was arrogant and out of touch. I suppose that, as I knew I wasn’t, I didn’t take as much notice of it as I should have done. There were ads showing me drinking a cup of tea while I looked over King George Square or gliding graciously down the marble stairs of City Hall – those were the Liberal Party television ads. The Labor Party ran an ad showing me, laughing, with a frangipani in my hair, implying that my life was nothing but parties. The original photo had Prime Minister Bob Hawke beside me at an official Gold Coast function, but he had been cut out of it for the propaganda exercise. Labor successfully painted me as being above the people, and the Liberal ads just fed them.

  Much was made of my salary, and my name lent itself to the nickname ‘Salaryanne’. The Labor campaign promoted the lie that my salary was bigger than the prime minister’s; it wasn’t. Mine was $110,000 and his was $164,000. There was the question of the allowance, which before my time had been paid directly to the Lord Mayor. I introduced a system where money from the allowance was allocated only on production of expense receipts. It had been an urban myth that Labor’s Clem Jones, a wealthy businessman, had worked for nothing, having forgone his salary and taken only the allowance. What was not mentioned was that the allowance then had been tax-free.

  There were two further facts that were ignored or not properly debated. One was that aldermanic salaries were tied by some formula to those of state members, and Alderman Bob Ward who handled the salary review had looked at this. The irony was that I had never been particularly interested in money and hadn’t paid enough attention. The other fact was that in a previous salary review I had recommended to the team that they should forgo any increase and the electorate would thank them. They did, but the electorate hadn’t noticed and the media hadn’t reported it. The team weren’t going to make the same mistake again, and it made the recent salary increases look high in percentage terms.

  There was also a lot of propaganda about my overseas travel. The word ‘trips’, which has a certain superficial ring to it, was used a lot. It’s interesting to look back now when politicians at all levels do travel a lot and I always considered it part of the job, about learning my craft and marketing Brisbane. Most of my travel was in fact paid for by someone other than the Brisbane City Council. I went to Britain as the guest of the UK government and to Israel as part of a conference of mayors from all over the world, an annual event organised and paid for by the City of Jerusalem and the US League of Cities. It was designed to give the rest of the world a better understanding of Israel and for me at least a deeper understanding of our Christian heritage. Ironically, Jim Soorley was to go to the same conference some years later.

  There were other issues. A statewide referendum was being held on the same day as the council election, for four-year terms and daylight saving. Labor Premier Wayne Goss had campaigned hard for the ‘yes’ vote. He had been premier for a little over a year and as the media pointed out, ‘the Goss gloss’ was still there.

  There were persistent headlines that I was aiming for Canberra. Because the story was not true I didn’t pay it enough heed. But I can see now that people might have thought that I wasn’t interested enough in local government.

  I had another problem, too. In all political campaigns, which are adversarial contests, it is natural to feel animosity towards the Opposition. I had been thrown off balance by my opponent who until a few years before had been a Catholic priest. The normal goings-on of a political campaign somehow just didn’t seem right. In a television debate the camera showed me tapping my foot in irritation under the desk. It was not a good look.

  Following the electoral loss, after my initial distress and dismay, with flowers and phone calls pouring in, I went into a euphoric phase. I started to get my life back. I could make my own decisions without a daily timetable. In the previous year a friend from the bush had called me to say she was coming to Brisbane and to ask whether we could have lunch. I had had to say I couldn’t for the next six months. Now I could catch up with friends and do nice things, like going to the movies. And there were reminders of public acknowledgement, which was balm for the soul – when I went to the local movie theatre at Indooroopilly Shoppingtown, the lady at the ticket counter said she had been told that if I ever came in I was to be given a free ticket.

  There were a few problems dealing with life’s practicalities. It had been many years since I had had to go to a post office to buy stamps or post a letter. Sir William Knox, former Liberal leader and state government minister, had once remarked to me that one of the hardest things he found with losing office was having to drive a car after a dozen years of being chauffeured.

  One of the positive results of my defeat, was rediscovering true friends and finding out who were not. People who had been ardent supporters suddenly didn’t really want to know me and there was a real sense of ‘out with the old and in with the new’. But real friends were still there, even some I had probably neglected in the busyness of City Hall. I learned some salutary lessons about human nature.

  I had been given very good advice about not rushing into future commitments, but that was not quite my nature. I took up a couple of things fairly quickly. One was to be an Australian-based consultant to the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives, the UN-based body whose inaugural meeting in New York I had chaired the year before and on whose board I had sat. And I was approached to be a co-chair with Sir Gustav Nossal of a new organisation called Sustainable Development Australia (SDA).

  That first meeting of what is now called ICLEI-Local Governments for Sustainability had about 200 local governments from 43 countries coming together for a conference called ‘World Congress of Local Governments for a Sustainable Future’ at the United Nations in September 1990. It now has more than 1200 members from 84 countries and its basic premise is that local initiatives are the best way to achieve global sustainability. My role was to assess projects in Australia and Asia.

  SDA was really ahead of its time. The brainchild of Geoff Allen in Melbourne, it sought to bring together environmentalists and the business sector, but I found the mutual suspicion was too big a hurdle to overcome. This was despite the eminence of Sir Gus, a world-renowned science researcher, and our enthusiasm. We tried to raise funds from the business establishment, but at this time there was not the recognition of the economic importance of the environment that there is today.

  Losing the election meant
that now I was able to travel as a tourist. I went with Leigh to a neurosurgeons conference in Moscow, and wrote a piece for the Courier-Mail about it. My strongest memories of that trip are of the ballet in Moscow and St Petersburg, but I was also struck by the sight of the Russian neurosurgeons stuffing their briefcases with leftover food at conference meals. One day we broke from the conference and went to a local art gallery where one of the other visitors was Raisa Gorbachev, wife of the president. Surprisingly, she had only a few security people with her and I was able to sidle up close. Leigh and I had a few days in France together and then I went on to London and to Cambridge where Damien was to graduate from Pembroke College as a Master of Laws with first-class honours.

  Back home, I had a rather short-lived career on local radio station 4BC. I hosted a one-hour Brisbane-focused weekly show, playing music and interviewing people. I chose the people I wanted to interview, such as a woman who was a prolific writer of newspaper letters to the editor, and asked them the sort of questions I had always wanted to ask. Among the high-profile interviewees was Shirley Conran, who wrote the how-to book Superwoman in which she declared, ‘Life’s too short to stuff a mushroom.’ It was supposed to be a talkback show as well, but I don’t think anyone ever phoned in. I had actually made my radio debut at nine, when a friend of my mother’s said I had a good voice on the phone and should audition for Radio Ceylon. I got the part of Puck in Midsummer Night’s Dream. Like most people I was appalled when I heard my voice on the wireless, even at that early age. In the 1970s I had also stood in for ABC’s Blair Edmonds when he was on holiday, and then again during my City Hall years when I co-hosted a show with Bill J. Smith.

  But a few months after I started with 4BC, trying to be appropriately hyper, the station was bought by someone who wanted it to broadcast country music. With relief on both sides, my radio career came to an end.

  During this period I was launched into my non-executive director life, which was to last on and off for many years, in fact to this day. I have sat on a whole clutch of commercial boards, public and private companies, as well as not-for-profit organisations. The boards covered a variety of enterprises, including construction companies like Abigroup and Barclay Mowlem, the media group APN, and companies that provided services such as TriCare which owned and ran aged care facilities, and ABC Learning, which ran childcare centres.

  In the 1990s there were almost no women in senior executive roles, unlike today. Chief executives of companies make a natural choice as non-executive board members, for they understand how businesses run. As the numbers of women on boards began to increase, it seemed mainly lawyers and accountants were chosen. These women were always very strong in their knowledge and experience, but I think it’s a mistake to suggest that only women with a technical background should participate on boards, and it may lead to a false view among some female lawyers and accountants that they are automatically right for board positions. I’ve always felt that directors on a company’s board should bring something of a world view to the company, an outside perspective; it’s always possible to buy technical expertise.

  The very first board I had ever been on was that of the Australian Elizabethan Theatre Trust back in 1980, and it gave me the first of many experiences of being the only woman and the only Queenslander. The Trust had been set up in 1954, the year Queen Elizabeth made her first visit to Australia, and its aim was to encourage ‘high culture’ by establishing national opera, ballet and theatre companies. It was co-founded by Sir Charles Moses, general manager of the ABC, and John Douglas Pringle, editor of the Sydney Morning Herald, its first chairman had been H.C. ‘Nugget’ Coombs, inaugural governor of the Reserve Bank.

  I was the only person under 60 and almost the only non-knight. Board members included Sir Charles Moses, Sir David Griffin, formerly Lord Mayor of Sydney, and Sir James Darling, a former headmaster of Geelong Grammar School. It was a stimulating experience, not just for the quality of the men on the board but for their old-fashioned courtliness, much despised nowadays, and for the subjects of our discussions. One meeting, when the discussion continued past the appointed hour for our very good lunch, Chairman Sir Ian Potter stopped and asked, ‘Mrs Atkinson, do you feel strong enough to continue?’ I was able to say I did.

  My first public company board was Caltex, the Australian arm of the international petroleum company, a joint venture between America’s Texaco and Chevron, which was the largest oil company retail network in Australia at the time. In a variation of the Old Boy network, chairman and CEO Barry Murphy had been at university with me in Brisbane. I was the first woman on the board, an historic breakthrough. I was also the only Queenslander, which prompted someone to say, in those pre-PC days, ‘It’s a pity you’re not black.’

  I was under no illusions in those early years that I was being invited to sit on boards because I was a woman, and one with a high profile, but I hoped a factor was also my role as what had amounted to executive chairman in a very large company – the Brisbane City Council – with experience in budgets and human resources and much besides. I thought it was important that I could bring a view from outside the business.

  For many of my new colleagues, having a woman on the board was unsettling. After my first board meeting and before the lunch that followed, I met a company solicitor in the bathroom who told me she had been invited to the lunch to keep me company. We had actually been discussing at the meeting the great savings this particular young woman had made for the business, and I had assumed that was the reason she was being asked to lunch. Some time later, one of my board colleagues confided to me that they enjoyed having me there: ‘We were worried, you know. We thought you’d be very strident.’

  I had determined early on in my non-executive director career that I would only accept invitations to sit on boards of companies whose business I understood and in whose management I had confidence. One appointment was to the Australian advisory board of a major international IT equipment and services company chaired by a very distinguished businessman. I discovered I didn’t really understand what they did and at the first meeting I asked about a hugely complicated on-screen diagram. Afterwards, one of my fellow directors (male, of course) said, ‘I’m so glad you asked the question, I’ve never understood that. I didn’t ask because I didn’t want to look stupid. It’s all right for you!’

  I also joined the board of a financial advisory company whose purpose I could never really understand, and so I resigned. If I didn’t quite understand the technicalities of petroleum I did know where it came from, what you did with it and the variables in the marketplace.

  Young women frequently seek my advice about getting onto boards, and I always ask why they want to and to be clear in their reasoning. They usually see board membership as the peak of power and as the ultimate status symbol in a business career. The board of a company, either listed or unlisted (not-for-profits), has a clearly defined role and the power of individual board members is limited by that role. A board does not run the company but it is responsible for its management, for strategy and direction and ensuring that management puts them in place. The board is there for its shareholders, to look after their investment and to make decisions on their behalf.

  I took a break in my career as a board member when I decided to throw my hat into the ring, as they say, for the 1993 federal election. I ran for the seat of Rankin on the southern outskirts of Brisbane. My candidature was announced by the party with a great deal of fanfare, and caused quite a stir, not least because the previous year I had publicly announced that I was finished with politics.

  What had not been made public was that soon after I ceased to be Lord Mayor the Liberal Party president Paul Everingham had tried to persuade me to run for the Senate. I had turned down his offer. Leigh was fiercely against my having anything further to do with politics after his years as a political spouse, and restoring my marriage was the priority. I was keen to please.

  And indeed things were happening in the family. I
n February 1992 I went to the Winter Olympics in Albertville as part of the Sydney bid team. I also met my eldest daughter Nicola in Paris. She had been studying for her Master of Environmental Laws at the London School of Economics and announced that she and her boyfriend, Ted Ringrose, were engaged. We had our first family wedding in July that year, in Brisbane. The ceremony was at St Patrick’s in Fortitude Valley and the lunchtime reception in the grounds of Old Government House in George Street, then a National Trust property. Nicola’s three sisters were bridesmaids and her father made a witty speech in which he said he’d told them to lower their necklines and raise their hemlines and hoped it was a sellers’ market. Ted had his brother Bill as best man and Damien as groomsman, which meant his sister Kate might have been left out, so she was a groomslady in a tailored jacket and suit. It was an ideal mother-of-the-bride wedding, because the bridal couple lived in London so planning was simple and straightforward. They arrived home a week before it, Nicola bringing her wedding dress which was in a very pale green.

  When I was approached to run for Rankin, I considered the question carefully. My announcement that I was finished with politics had been made with the hope of improving my marriage. But I was starting to realise that I could not deny who I actually was. I had a real yearning for the political life, where I could make a contribution. The suddenness of the Council election loss meant that the political blood had not quite drained from my veins. As well as missing the interaction with people that was part of political life, I was starting to have a slow-burning anger about what was happening in the country, with increasing levels of unemployment, for instance. Politics was the only way I knew to make a contribution, to do my bit.