No Job for a Woman

by Sallyanne Atkinson

  I only went to one ARM meeting, upstairs in a hall in Paddington. Halfway through I muttered out loud, ‘God, this is boring. It’s just like a Liberal Party branch meeting.’ The man sitting next to me turned to me with a surprised look and said: ‘Yes, and it’s just like a Labor Party branch meeting!’

  At the Canberra convention we were joined by members from Australians for Constitutional Monarchy and other groups, including one led by Clem Jones who wanted a president elected by the people at large. We felt this was impractical and in the months before the convention, former NSW Premier Neville Wran came to Brisbane and we met Clem in the office of Glyn Davis, then head of the premier’s office and later to be Vice-Chancellor of Griffith and Melbourne universities. Despite Neville’s charm and impeccable ALP credentials, Clem was intransigent.

  Also at the convention were a group of people from around the country chosen by the government, and I must say that it was the people gathered in Old Parliament House that made the meetings memorable. The state premiers were there, as well as media personality Steve Vizard, trucking magnate Lindsay Fox, the first Indigenous member of Parliament Neville Bonner and local government folk including the Mayor of Longreach Joan Moloney and Councillor Paul Tully from Ipswich. Archbishops Pell and Hollingworth and academic Greg Craven, now Vice-Chancellor of the Australian Catholic University, all attended: 154 people in all. The speeches waxed on over two weeks, some fiery and passionate, all thoughtful. Towards the end I had dinner one night with former Labor minister Barry Jones whom I had got to know in Paris. During the meal Barry was lamenting the fact that no one had yet made some point he considered terribly important. I said, ‘Well, I can get a speaking spot before we finish, so if you write me a speech I’ll give it.’ I had the lovely experience of delivering a speech to the chamber with the chairman in the Speaker’s chair nodding in agreement with his own words. No one, of course, was any the wiser.

  The Constitutional Convention came up with its final recommendation, and the Australian people cast their vote on a referendum almost two years later in November 1999. Referenda have historically failed, and this one did too. The final vote was 54 to 45. If the question put had been a simple one – ‘Should Australia be a republic?’ – the outcome may have been different. But the questions were not simple and as even republicans couldn’t agree on the best way of choosing a president, it was not surprising that the electorate felt it shouldn’t have to.

  FINDING SOMETHING USEFUL TO DO

  For many people, the year 2000 brought the excitement of the new century, with fireworks in every major city and Australia being among the first countries on earth to see the sun rise on the new millennium. For me it was to be a decade of diversity – the Sydney Olympics, representing Queensland in South East Asia and the most challenging time in my business career.

  It was also the time I became a bit of a property tycoon. I had discovered and fallen in love with Port Douglas in Far North Queensland in the 1970s when it was a raffish Somerset Maugham kind of place where people dropped out from Sydney and Melbourne. Since then it had become decidedly upmarket. I invested in a villa on the golf course, which didn’t quite have the raffish charm I liked but did have wonderful views to the hills. A few years later I also bought a house in Buderim, a village on the hill behind Mooloolaba on the Sunshine Coast. This was to be my principal place of residence and my plan was to live there and pop down to Brisbane two hours away for various meetings and activities. Over time the Brisbane activities got busier and Buderim became the place the family would gather for holidays, although I did enjoy having a house and garden to potter in.

  I had a couple of relationships during this time with very nice men, but sadly they were not to last. One was Bruce Green, Mayor of Warwick, whose 2000 election loss resonated with my own. Relationships in later life are tricky because there is all the baggage of the lives that have been lived. I do know of very happy couples who have met in what are called ‘the twilight years’, yet few of us older singles are properly single because we have existing relationships with family that need to be considered. I’m ever-optimistic, although I do have gentlemen friends who tell me I can be scary and a little bit bossy. It’s hard to believe!

  The 2000 Sydney Olympic Games became the culmination of my Olympic involvement. John Coates, Australian Olympic chief, had asked me if I would be Deputy Mayor of the Athletes’ Village for the 2000 Games. My instant retort was, ‘Why deputy? I’ve been a real mayor!’ Graham Richardson was appointed as mayor and it was indeed a great choice. I don’t think I or anyone else could have dealt with the demands and complaints at the daily team managers’ meetings with Graham’s firm humour.

  Living in an apartment within the Athletes’ Village was a rather different kind of Olympic experience. The village itself was part of an estate of very nice houses that had been developed by the private sector and were sold off after the Games. I lived next door to the team from the Central African Republic, which included four athletes and twelve officials. There was a huge communal dining room for the village where every kind of food was served by young Australians of every origin. I loved the fact that behind the counter would be young people who looked Asian, Arab or African yet they all spoke in broad Australian accents. It seemed to me the best thing about Australia.

  As Deputy Mayor I had a golf buggy to get about in and a smart navy uniform to wear, which made me look like a camp commandant from a war movie. I was overseeing protocol and every day in the lead-up to the opening we had a ceremony where we raised the flag of each country in front of its team and various dignitaries. A local Sydney school would sing the anthem of that nation. These were usually very moving ceremonies, none more so than that of new nation East Timor. I had been told that because they didn’t yet have a flag that a ceremony wouldn’t be possible. I insisted because of the hopeful young athletes, and the fact that Nobel Peace prize winner José Ramos-Horta, who would become President, had visited the village. A ceremony took place. Later, at the official opening ceremony the East Timor team marched under the Olympic flag to resounding cheers.

  A flag was to cause another protocol problem. An athlete from one of the African nations was killed in a road accident and his teammates wanted to fly their flag at half-mast. I was told this would have to be cleared with the International Olympic Committee in Lausanne, but we allowed it without permission.

  Perhaps the most exciting guest to the village was Nelson Mandela, who came in a tracksuit to visit his team. As he arrived he said to me, ‘Can I put my arm around you, so I can lean on you without looking as though I am?’ Wherever Mandela went young people pressed close to touch him, though the adulation was strongest in the South African camp.

  The new decade brought changes back home in Brisbane as well. Whenever I saw Premier Peter Beattie around town, as you tended to do in Brisbane, he would say, ‘We should find you something useful to do.’ Peter and I went back a few years, to his days as secretary of the ALP in the early 1980s and then member for Brisbane Central. In spite of our political differences, we had always got on well. At the funeral for former Labor Prime Minister Frank Forde, whose daughter was a friend of mine, I found myself seated in front of Peter in the church. At the point in the mass where you say to your neighbours, ‘Peace be with you,’ I turned to the pew behind me and there was Peter Beattie and ALP president Denis Murphy. As I said, ‘Peace be with you,’ one or the other replied, ‘I’ll have that in writing!’

  Even so, it did come as a surprise when one day in early 2000 I had a phone call out of the blue from Beattie’s deputy, Jim Elder, asking me if I would be a trade commissioner for Queensland in South East Asia. The role, for which I would be paid for two-and-a-half days a week, was essentially to help Queensland companies do business in South East Asia by making contacts and opening doors for them. I would report back to the government on regional conditions and economic potential in the countries there. The state government was planning a trade presence in the United State
s, the Middle East and Asia.

  Labor Minister for Tourism, Bob Gibbs, was to leave parliament and go to Los Angeles as the full-time Queensland government representative, while former National Party Premier Mike Ahern and myself were to work part-time, based in Brisbane. I certainly didn’t want to move overseas again. My countries of focus were Indonesia, Thailand, the Philippines, Singapore, Malaysia and Brunei. Mike looked after India, Africa and the Middle East. Former Labor Deputy Premier Tom Burns was our man for China, where he had been part of Australia’s first-ever delegation with Gough Whitlam in the 1970s.

  After my appointment there was a lot of media controversy, outrage from our side of politics, and great cynicism that it was all a plot to get rid of Bob Gibbs. The criticism included a rather vitriolic editorial in Brisbane’s Courier-Mail in which the writer accused the premier of ‘subsidising’ and ‘showing generosity’ to Mike and me in our paid positions.

  The paper published my spirited 15-paragraph defence in which I wrote:

  … the premier knows that there are some societies more hierarchical and less informal than our own, where age and experience and a position in public life make a great difference to building business relationships … in economic development terms the government has recognised that there are some trade areas of great potential which are sensitive and difficult and is despatching them on a part-time fixed-term basis to experienced people with demonstrated skills in business and diplomacy.

  I had always held the view that Australia’s practical trade connections were with South East Asia and Queensland’s most of all. As Lord Mayor I had often talked about Brisbane being the fastest-growing city in the Asia Pacific, which was the fastest-growing region of the world. One of my selling points to the French was that Australia should be France’s gateway into Asia.

  In my role as ‘Special Representative’ we took trade missions in mining and agriculture to Indonesia and the Philippines, and signed trade agreements in Thailand and Singapore. One of my most interesting and unnerving experiences was just after the tsunami in March 2005, representing Queensland at the Medan Summit on Reconstruction in Indonesia. I spoke at the conference to offer Queensland’s support and outline our capabilities and then visited refugee camps in Aceh. I witnessed the very real devastation and human tragedy which had ensued. I observed the way this played out differently in men’s and women’s lives – the women were occupied, albeit with difficulty, in caring for children, cooking and washing. The men had nothing to do but hang about all day.

  I got to travel extensively throughout South East Asia and it brought back childhood memories of Ceylon. Experiences were varied, from visiting Indonesian presidents in great luxury to watching cattle being slaughtered at 2 am in ‘wet’ markets, where there was no refrigeration and meat was sold straight from the kill. With other trade issues there were difficulties mainly as a result of Australia’s very firm health and quarantine regulations. With the Philippines we had the problem of our banning their bananas for fear of importing disease. No matter how much we protested it was a quarantine issue, the Filipinos saw it as a trade restriction. In Thailand it was the same with cooked chicken.

  The mutual tropicality of Queensland and South East Asia offered all kinds of synergies for research in plants and tropical medicine. Our experience in a hot climate was also useful. Fresh milk was much in demand in our South East Asian markets, and we were encouraged to export dairy cattle to provide it. But our customers wanted picture-book cows, the black-and-whites they knew from Europe. We had great trouble explaining that these breeds were not at all keen to travel to tropical climes, and the more appropriate breeds like Zebu and Brahman, while not so milk-giving, would do better.

  In late 2000 I also took on the chairmanship of a company that was soon to be listed, and it would play a major role in my life for many years. ABC Learning was a company that owned and operated childcare centres and as a mother and grandmother I felt I was experienced in that, and understood the demand for it in this age of working mothers. I spent time in discussion with the management and its advisors. I could not then foresee the consequences that would reverberate through the next decade.

  This was the first time I had been chairman of a listed company and this was a very different kind of business from the other companies I had known, with a very different kind of chief executive. ABC Learning, at one stage the world’s largest provider of early childhood education, the darling of the financial world and the media, will always be a case study in the uncertain world of corporate boards and companies and a parable for our time.

  It would turn out to be a tragedy on many levels. It was a tragedy because a lot of people, parents who had invested in it and creditors who had done business with it, lost their money when it collapsed. I lost a lot too: the shares I had bought because I believe the chairman of the board should have the confidence to invest in the company they represent, and my home at Buderim when I had to find the money to pay off the margin call when the share price plummeted. Port Douglas had to go, too. I was lucky in a sense because money was not especially important to me and I just felt grateful that I was able to borrow from the bank so that I could keep the shares. This proved to be a good moral decision but a poor financial one – the shares ultimately disappeared but the loan didn’t.

  More important than the money was the very real concern for the people directly affected – thousands of children without childcare and staff without jobs. Fortunately, the federal government put up $22 million to make sure that didn’t happen in the short term and subsequently many of the ABC centres were bought by other childcare operators, some who formed companies not dissimilar to ABC.

  It was also sad because ABC was originally a very good company, founded on proper ideals with good management. Because the idea of a listed company running childcare for profit was new it caught the imagination and attention of the media – as did its founder Eddy Groves, whose life was not only a great rags-to-riches story but who was charismatic as well. He was the original seller of ice-creams to Eskimos. I never had a problem with the concept of private childcare. We had private schools and private hospitals and they certainly didn’t plan to run at a loss. And governments, while understanding the need for childcare and being prepared to subsidise it, have not wanted to run childcare centres.

  The ABC story had been a fascinating one. In 1988 Eddy and Le Neve Groves, a young couple in their twenties – he an entrepreneurial milkman, she a trained teacher – had opened a childcare centre in Ashgrove, Brisbane. By early 2001, with 44 centres, ABC Learning was floated as a public company. Early childhood education had changed since my children were small. In the late 1970s when my youngest was in kindergarten I was one of only two working mothers. Now, stay-at-home mothers were the exception rather than the rule. The Groveses recognised that professional parents wanted to ensure their children had high-quality childcare and that first centre at Ashgrove had people travelling from all over Brisbane to take their children there. Standards were high, not only in the quality of the care and education but in the buildings, their fitout and maintenance.

  ABC began to expand and by the end of the 2002 financial year there were 94 centres, and childcare places had increased from 3956 to 7626. By 2003 the number of centres had risen to 187 and by 2004 there were 327. Much of this expansion was through other centre owners approaching ABC to take them over. Such was its reputation that developers were asking ABC to put centres in new areas. The company went into the business of corporate childcare with companies such as Westpac, the Commonwealth Bank, Optus and Chisholm TAFE, providing childcare for their employees. As a working mother I used to think how wonderful it would have been to have work and childcare synchronised so that you had just one daily destination and could pop in to see your child during the day. The company provided for the Department of Defence with 35 centres over their areas of operations. To provide the proper staff for all these centres two training colleges were set up, one in Brisbane and one
in Cairns.

  All through these early years there was rampant euphoria in the financial markets. Brokers were constantly recommending ABC as a buy. Banks were continually wanting to lend the company money. At its height ABC Learning had more than 2000 centres in Australia, New Zealand, Britain and the US. The move to the US did make the financial sector nervous, given the history of Australian companies in America, but I still think it was right, because women there were also becoming mothers later and continuing their careers, and governments there also provided financial support.

  Through these years ABC had the backing of major financial institutions, such as the Commonwealth Bank, Morgan Stanley and the Singapore government’s investment arm, Temasek, which had invested $400 million as late as 2007. But this greater spread was a management challenge, in spite of reassurances from management to the board and even though we had great executives in the US. I don’t believe problems were caused by the move overseas, but by the resultant complexity of the operations and the opportunities for extra layers of involvement. By the time things started to go wrong towards the end of 2007, ABC was a web of intertwined companies and relationships. It was becoming impossible to get a very clear picture of internal operations.

  When the subprime mortgage crisis in the US began closing in and led to the tightening of global credit markets, ABC Learning owed more than $1 billion to the banks. Our revenues were falling, partly affected by the rising Australian dollar. Everything fell in a heap at the end of February 2008 – the share price had slipped from around $8 to about $4 in January and then crashed to a little over $1. In the early years it had been as high as $14. I stood down as chairman in May and the company went into voluntary administration later that year.